The Workshops
The events that have shaped Penelope’s Web so far
Embodiment and the sonic worlds of Penelope’s underworld
This workshop will experiment with how acoustics and physical movements animate Penelope’s story.
How can a performance space become an underworld that allows singers to explore their embodiment of a character? How do they demonstrate the physicality of their life lived – their dancing and singing as well as their labours and assaults? What does it sound like when these disembodied ghosts adopt the voices of those they remember from life, including their abusers? How can the lost sound worlds of ancient Greek epic or drama be translated into a twenty-first century afterlife? What is the impact of introducing lower or higher register voices, or fluidly gendered vocal presences? What is the place for ‘authentic’ ancient instrumentation, or electronic instrumentation?
‘I am Penelope!’ The other side of myth
This workshop will explore the women’s hidden stories, conversations, songs, and dreams.
How does one voice a character whose motivations are obscure in the Odyssey, and suspect in The Penelopiad? How does the relationship between Penelope and the enslaved and abused girls in her palace explore female status, solidarity, violence, betrayal, and independence of mind and body? Why are the girls called ‘enslaved women’ (dmōiai) by Homer, but ‘maidservants’ by Atwood? How do all the women resist oppression for years, even after death? What form should their ancient modes of storytelling – weaving, personal memories, public prophecies – take in modern opera? Can they find new voices in the era of #metoo?
Writing Home: Myth, Letters and Refugee Well-Being
In November the Penelope’s Web team participated in the 2023 Being Human Festival of the Humanities. In our event, ‘Writing Home: Myth, Letters and Refugee Well-Being’, migrants in the UK asylum system in Folkstone were introduced to the myth of Penelope and Odysseus, including Penelope’s fictionalised letter composed by the Roman poet Ovid, and the music that Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Jeanne Pansard-Besson have created. Participants shared their own stories, journeys, and music.
‘Making Music out of Myth’ and ‘Letters of Refuge’
In the spring of 2023 King’s College London saw the installation of a new exhibition in its public Arcade Space, in Bush House. The exhibition was called Letters of Refuge, and it was organised by Dr James Corke-Webster, Reader in Classics, History and Liberal Arts at King’s. The exhibition displayed fragments of ancient letters preserving the voices of people who lived under the Roman empire, alongside contemporary letters composed at Art Refuge’s ‘Community Table’ on either side of the English Channel in Folkestone (southern England) and Calais (northern France)…
‘The Alternative Queen’s Speech’
The next stage of Penelope’s Web involved its development through a three-day residency held at the University of Oxford, where Cheryl Frances-Hoad was a Visiting Research Fellow in Creative Arts at Merton College. The residency explored the pressures exerted by the patriarchy on all the women of Penelope’s household, and the tensions between Penelope and the twelve enslaved women, in whose execution Penelope may be implicated.
‘Asphodel’
In the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, when training schemes in performing arts were grappling with a new world of illness and lockdown, the National Opera Studio commissioned the online composition of 12 new works, called 12:42. A documentary made to explore the commissions made under these unusual circumstances, explains that ‘12:42 is a testament to collaboration, trust, a meeting of minds and making the very best creative choices at a time of crisis for all performing artists. Many of the new works reflect the mood of the moment’.