Which Direction Home? Reworking the Odyssey Across Cultures

What Which Direction Home? was

Which Direction Home? was a festival of new work inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, announced by the company The Internationalists for July 2010. In the company’s own programme listing, eight directors from six countries used the epic “as a base to create wholly original theatrical material” around themes including home, mystery, choice, identity and myth. The same listing sets out the shape of the event: two alternating programmes, each performed three times at 7pm, a marathon performance on 24 July, and a closing night on 29 July [1].

A rehearsal report published in The Brooklyn Rail in July/August 2010 records the company working in a Bushwick studio in June, with the director Jake Witlen and performers playing Athena, Poseidon and Zeus [2]. Those two documents — the company’s programme announcement and a journalistic rehearsal report — are the sources on which this account rests. This article is independent editorial material; the production’s own archive remains the authoritative record of the festival.

The programme: eight directors, two bills

The announcement divides the work into two programmes. The credit lines below follow the listing as printed, including its country labels [1].

Programme A played on Wednesday 21, Friday 23 and Tuesday 27 July; Programme B on Thursday 22, Monday 26 and Wednesday 28 July. The marathon on Saturday 24 July ran the two programmes back to back. On Thursday 29 July, Ana Margineanu’s The Blind Trip was followed by a “Mash-Up Performance of ‘Best of Fest’ highlights” [1]. The seven directors billed across the two programmes, plus the director of the closing piece, make up the eight named in the announcement.

Das Fremde Essen is the only piece billed in both programmes; its German title can be rendered as “the foreign food” or “the strange meal”. Apart from that title, the listing gives no indication of the languages in which the pieces were performed. The country labels describe directors’ working contexts; they are not evidence of the language of performance, the nationality of the cast, or a shared aesthetic across the evening.

Why the Odyssey works as a shared source

The Odyssey is unusually well suited to an event of this kind, for reasons that are both cultural and structural. Culturally, it is one of the most widely translated and reworked texts in the canon: as Christopher Schliephake puts it, Homer and Odysseus have “travelled far and wide”, and the poem “formed the benchmark of the ‘Western’ imagination” while entering the transnational canon of world literature [3]. That double status — canonical and mobile — is exactly what allows a festival to claim that a Greek epic can host German, Dutch, Romanian, Australian, French and American perspectives without any of them being merely decorative.

Structurally, the epic offers a devising ensemble something a single authored play does not: a sequence of separable episodes (the Cyclops, the Sirens, Calypso, the descent, the return) held together by one strong through-line, the homecoming. A producer can therefore assign different episodes, or different points of view on the same episode, to different directors without the evening collapsing into incoherence. This is an editorial reading of the form rather than a documented account of how the 2010 programme was divided; the sources do not record which episode any given piece drew on.

Making the work: what the rehearsal record shows

Ashley Kelly-Tata’s report for The Brooklyn Rail describes a June rehearsal in an overheated Bushwick studio “peppered with sawdust”, where Athena, Poseidon and Zeus sit “with a MacBook on their desk, calling the shots for the now immortal mortals” while Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus are reworked as contemporary figures. The company breaks into a chorus of “ring, ring, ring, ring” as a telephone cue; lines are forgotten and remembered; a song is sung “with sparing accompaniment”, followed by a conversation about further scoring [2].

Read as evidence of method rather than of finished performance, the description points to three features that matter for cross-cultural devising. First, a contemporary frame — a desk, a laptop, telephones — is laid over the epic frame rather than replacing it. Second, authorship is collaborative: material is generated in the room and shaped by the director, which is why the credit “directed by” sits alongside no playwright in the programme listing. Third, music is developed in rehearsal and revised as the piece takes shape, which requires the schedule to allow for it. The report describes one rehearsal of one piece; it should not be generalised into a description of all eight.

“Eight directors from six countries”: what the label does and does not mean

The six country contexts named in the programme are Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, France, Australia and Romania. This is a credit convention. It distinguishes the festival as international in its staffing — artists working across several national contexts — but it does not by itself make any piece intercultural (a deliberate exchange between performance traditions), transnational in its circulation, or multilingual in performance. Those terms are often used interchangeably in publicity, and the confusion has practical consequences when a producer is writing a funding application, briefing a translator, or deciding whether surtitles are needed.

For readers building comparable projects, the useful discipline is to state separately: where each artist is based and trained; which languages are spoken and sung on stage; which tradition or training each piece draws on; and which audience the event is intended to reach. On the retrieved record, only the first of these is documented for Which Direction Home?

The short-form festival as a production model

Two repertory bills, three performances each, one marathon, one closing event: this structure lets a producer present many perspectives without asking any single director to sustain a full evening, and it gives short pieces enough repetitions to find an audience. It also imposes shared infrastructure — a common venue, a repertory lighting and sound plot, shared stage management, a clear running order and changeover plan. The retrieved sources do not describe the technical arrangements of the 2010 festival, so the following are general points of practice for this format rather than findings about that production:

• Group pieces by technical demand as well as by theme, so a simple piece can share a bill with an ambitious one without the changeover absorbing the evening.
• Fix a maximum running time and a standard kit of furniture and practicals before rehearsals begin; short-form festivals fail on logistics more often than on content.
• Rehearse the changeovers as their own event, with the stage manager empowered to cut.
• Schedule repeat performances with the devising calendar in mind: a piece playing three times across ten days can keep changing between shows, which is both an opportunity and a risk to the company’s ability to freeze a version.

The Odyssey beyond Europe and North America

Any festival claiming to rework the Odyssey “across cultures” has to reckon with the poem’s double life. Justine McConnell’s Black Odysseys (2013) examines twentieth- and twenty-first-century works by artists of African descent that respond to the Homeric epic, including Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Derek Walcott’s Omeros and The Odyssey: A Stage Version, and Wilson Harris’s cross-cultural nostoi, considering what the epic has signified for those emerging from the shadow of Western imperialism and how it has inspired anti-colonial poets, novelists, playwrights and directors [4].

The 2010 programme’s six country contexts form a Euro-American grouping. The credit lines do not record heritage, so this is an observation about the labels rather than about the artists; but a producer assembling a similar bill today would need to decide consciously whether a “six countries” model is broad enough for the claim the festival title makes.

A practical checklist for cross-cultural Odyssey projects

1. Name the source and the version. Homer’s poems are ancient, but a particular translation is a separate literary work and may be protected by copyright. If the ensemble works from a published translation, clear the use with the publisher and credit the translator; requirements differ by jurisdiction, so verify rather than assume.
2. Agree authorship and credit before rehearsals. Decide who is named as writer, deviser or dramaturg, and how country or national context will appear in the programme. In a devising room, credit is negotiated twice: when the work is made and when it is printed.
3. Write the language plan down. Name the rehearsal language, the performance language or languages, and the access provision (interpretation in the room, surtitles, a published text).
4. Start the documentation at the first meeting. Keep the programme text, the final running order, rehearsal notes, a video record and written consent from performers, and agree who may publish what.
5. Plan for repetition. A piece that plays three times needs a maintenance plan — a deputy, a recorded score, a fixed cue script — that a single showing does not.
6. Be precise in publicity. Use “international”, “intercultural”, “transnational” and “multilingual” only for what the production actually is.

What the record does not tell us

The retrieved sources do not give the performance venue, ticket prices, audience figures, the languages of performance, the length of the rehearsal period, whether any script was published, or the contents of the closing “mash-up”. To establish those details, consult the original printed programme, the company’s own archive, and the Brooklyn Rail report — bearing in mind that the last describes a June rehearsal, not the finished evening.

Note on naming: this page is published by The Internationalists as an independent reference and practical resource on international theatre. It is not an official history of the 2010 company of the same name, and nothing here should be read as an institutional statement on that production.