Finding Homer

FINDING HOMER is a contemporary music-theater work. It is inspired by real and imagined stories of Balkan women who live as men after taking vows of chastity and celibacy. The project raises questions about choice and sexual identity in modern society by bringing to light a disappearing practice of women transforming themselves into men as a means of upholding their family honor and surviving in an isolated, dangerous, impoverished, and intensely patriarchal part of the world. Finding Homer is hybrid work that breaks down boundaries between the disciplines and in turn became a metaphor for the opening up of thought, perception, experience. It uses an old concept of Homeric storytelling and new technologies (innovative software which acts as an instrument – GranuRise) through references such as sworn virgins, oral epic tradition, Balkan re-discovered, fictional ethnicity, sacred and profane, urban and rural, folk and high. The fusion of all this gives various semantic directions. The treatment of music, movement, light, words, image, sound, gesture and other elements is mostly based on musical principles and compositional techniques, and so musical thinking applies to the performance as a whole. The idea of the project is music, which refers to other fields, or music which reacts to other fields. Conceiving and composing this project means working on all its parameters simultaneously (concept, text, music, dramaturgy, visuals, movement, etc.), that involve a lot of research in gender studies, philosophy, anthropology, ethnology, history, visual arts, contemporary music, drama and more.