DEREK WALCOTT |
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THE ODYSSEY
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"Poetry, which is perfection's sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery." The major West Indian poet and dramatist writing in English today. Derek Walcott has lived most of his life in Trinidad. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992. Walcott has studied the conflict between the heritage of European and West Indian culture, the long way from slavery to independence, and his own role as a nomad between cultures. His poems are characterized by allusions to the English poetic tradition and a symbolic imagination that is at once personal and Caribbean. From his early youth, Walcott had a great interest in both the sea and the Homeric world. He wrote the The Odyssey in 1993, three years after publishing his epic poem Omeros.
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Commissioned by two Festival that center and focus their activities on revisiting the classic world, The Odyssey is a music theatre production directed by Derek Walcott himself. It portrays the story of Odysseus' protracted wanderings from fallen Troy to his island home of Ithaca. The episodes are pungently interspersed with a commentary by the blind singer Billy Blue, Walcott’s version of Homer, who sings accompanied by the Caribbean steel band. The production is conceived for an international cast of performers selected amongst Italians, Spanish, Caribbean. The text is spoken in multiple languages. The company is formed of 20 performers, musicians and singers. Deeply-rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements, Walcott delivers the Mediterranean myth with a richly figurative language, a unique blend of dramatic verve, visuals images and sound that create an inspired counter-pointing of Homeric and Caribbean themes. |
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