'In Ithaka' - Penelope's Web

'In Ithaka' is a performance of an operatic work-in-progress, co-developed and sponsored by the Penelope's Web creative research project. The performance will include a Q&A with creative artists, performers, and academics. 

Penelope's Web is a new opera project that stems from Homer's ancient Greek epic, the Odyssey. It explores the motivations of Odysseus’ wife Penelope, the great exemplar of feminine endurance and cunning, and the other characters left behind in Odysseus' palace on the island of Ithaka. Cheryl Frances-Hoad (composer) and Jeanne Pansard-Besson (librettist and director) are creating a work that questions how Penelope's story has been told in the past, and reflects on new ways in which contemporary music can give voice to the minor characters of the Odyssey.

Inspired by the setting of Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, 'In Ithaka' takes place in a Greek Underworld where shape-shifting characters recall and retell their past lives. Three mezzo-sopranos will sing the role of Penelope, and the Choir of King's College London will play her suitors and the enslaved palace workers. This première of 'In Ithaka' in the Greenwood Theatre shows how the collaborative work of Penelope's Web is giving a twenty-first century afterlife to the lost soundworlds of ancient Greek epic.