Odyssey on the Airwaves
This was a community radio engagement project which facilitated a performed reading of Homer’s The Odyssey in a local prison during the continuous 23-hour COVID-19 lockdown (2020-21). Anderson and Malone, facilitators and researchers theorised their work using ‘affective encounters’ (after Gilles Deleuze, Rosi Braidotti and Brian Massumi) and James Thompson’s work on ‘the end of effect’. The main concern was co-inventing a workable curriculum with prisoners while playing with the classed paradox of delivering ‘high’ culture to the incarcerated. The project was committed to retaining a sharp focus on the ethics of encounters within the power structures of the prison system. The project also included undergraduate BA Drama and Theatre students from Liverpool Hope University who recorded readings from the Odyssey that were combined with the prisoners readings to create a varied and colourful audio recording.
Dr Gary Anderson and Dr Niamh Malone’s Odyssey on the Airwaves: A Journey From HMP to Hope is ‘The story of a man whose grand adventure is simply to go back to his home… For this hero, mere survival is the most amazing feat of all’ (Wilson, 2018: 2). This audio project quickly revealed that incarcerated men find Odysseus’s return journey home to Ithaca, in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey (circa 800 BCE), something that resonates powerfully with their lived and living experiences.
Anderson and Malone’s essay Odyssey on the Airwaves: A Journey From HMP to Hope is published in Sonic Engagement The Ethics and Aesthetics of Community Engaged Audio Practice (eds Woodland & Vachon), Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies, 2023.