Young Love, Suicide and Greek Myth are pretty standard. You've got your Pyramus and Thisbe, Narcissus and himself, Narcissus and Echo (Narcissus and a whole bunch of other people), Dido and Aeneas (straying into Roman but its a good one), Ariadne in some versions, Phaedra, Byblis,... (N.B. it is almost always the girl that has to kill herself.)
So, for my 'Greek Myth' class, we were put in groups of 6 or so and given a scrap of papyrus which had a tiny piece of a myth written on it and instructed to create a 15 minute presentation to persuade the class that our myth was the most relevant to now.
(I'm afraid that I have made this sound far cooler than it was. We were not actually given the ancient, valuable papyrus, just a link to find a picture of it on the internet, but since most of it is missing and most of us don't read Ancient Greek, it was wouldn't have helped us much anway)
My group had the myth of Hero and Leander. In case you don't know it already; boy meets girl at a festival, they live on opposite sides of Hellespont and her parents make her live alone in a tower. Everynight she lights a lamp in her window to guide him as he swims 3km across dangerous waters to have a lovely, apparently chaste, evening with her. Suuuureee....
 |
| Theodor von Holst 1810-1844 |
Then theres a storm, the lamp is blown out and he drowns so she throws herself from the tower. Or, as this painting seems to show, maybe she just did cartwheels over his body.
 |
| Jean-Joseph Taillason 1798 |
And so I thought the most succinct way of demonstrating how relevant this myth is today is with a little animation. I forgot how long these things take to make. In my version Hero and Leander are a young couple, possibly at uni, having a long distance relationship. They could well have met at a festival but I didn't include that bit. They text each other planning to meet up and he drives down to see her. Hero's lamp is replaced by the more current Sat-Nav. Then we have the storm which causes Leander to not see the danger ahead as his Sat-Nav guides him onto a broken bridge. (This really happens, a guy drove into a reservoir just a couple of weeks ago). Hero flings herself off a high up thing into some water. The End. We still have the basic themes of Eros/Thanatos (Love and Death), Light and Dark (with a modern twist), the power of Nature over Man and Gender issues, though it is only a minute long so this is hardly a deep exploration. The main thing is that it is a modern retelling of the myth and fairly believable in a My Chemical Romance (Cemetery Drive) sort of way.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
(make sure you have sound on and perhaps at the credits just turn the volume down slowly because I don't know how to do a fade out on GarageBand)
(my presentation partners were Alban, Alex, Anna, Ben and Yerv who did all the theory and literary work while I obsessively pushed bits of paper around my desk and took photos. Hopefully I haven't annoyed anyone with copyright issues, the soundtrack is credited in the video apart from a bit of Nick Cave at the end.)
More to come!
xxx
No comments:
Post a Comment