Joe's Odyssey

Sometimes I wish I had been a little more diligent in formally documenting my odyssey of performing my Odyssey.

I have the journal in which I wrote the piece... here's the first ink I committed to the idea on October…

"Do you ever regret not going on to study Classics in graduate school?"

Students, man: they can bring it.

And the Waverly High School students who filled the intimate Robin Theatre in Lansing, Michigan, on a May Thursday morning sure…

At the Orality and Literacy Conference in Austin a couple of weeks ago, a professor asked me if I remember my performances.

I've been thinking about this question since that show and as I flew from Chicago to Missoula…

Recently I finally read in its entirety The Singer of Tales by Albert Lord.

Published in 1960, the Singer of Tales changed the discussion around the Homeric epics and its thesis about the oral roots of the Iliad and Odyssey…

I wrote last year about the third line of Homer’s Odyssey:

πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω

He saw the cities and knew the mind of many men

So much intrigue packed into just one line of dactylic…

I’m sitting outside a UT-Austin conference room listening to the end of a lecture that’s part of the 13th Biennial Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World Conference. I’m waiting to go in and perform my Odyssey for a roomful…

On a cold but sunny February Friday I returned to Northern Illinois University in DeKalb to perform the Odyssey for a myth class.  

I wrote about a previous performance at NIU almost two years ago and it holds up as…

No shows for 10 weeks and then 4 shows in 4 days: This was the busy dawning of my 2019 Odyssey schedule.

This is also the third year of keeping this blog, which so far has amounted to 55 dispatches…

Odysseus himself would have likely had a lot to say about the sentiment "absence makes the heart grow fonder."

I wrote last year about my first public performance of 2018 and how I continue to find "wonder" in the story…

Here's a simple truth I've learned about performing: everything is the show.

Everything.

Everything about the performance space, everything about the performer, everything about the audience.  

It all impacts the meaning of the work that's being performed in ways overt…

What's the relationship between "home" and "identity?"

The Odyssey is undoubtedly curious about where these two ideas intersect, philosophically and practically.  

It's clear that Odysseus feels he won't be wholly himself until he not only reaches his home in a…

I've remarked here (and on stage in discussion and to anyone who will listen and even to a lot people who aren't listen- hey, where are you going???!) over and over that I find the Odyssey's capacity to reveal human…