Phone Homer’s Classic(al) Power Relations for the Internet Age
πάθει μάθος
páthei máthos[1]
Michelle Ellsworth’s 2012 “On the Boards” Seattle production of her solo performance piece, Phone Homer, traces a contemporary Clytemnestra’s increasingly tragic response to the Trojan War’s horrors - as mediated through her online browsing, web shopping, and video chats - in order to ask questions about the relationship between canonical textual narrative (including the power relations it encodes) and contemporary consumer-driven online consciousness. The production, viewed here as a video recording of a live “On the Boards” production, is marked by larger than life computer screens and video calls with other characters such as: Agamemnon, Aegisthus, and Helen. The online web browsing and video calls mark time and space in this world of increasing despair where verbal language vacillates between contemporary conversation and more archaic translation-speak including the occasional humorous mispronunciation.
The video calls are temporarily interrupted by deliveries of increasingly larger online purchases, such as an absurdly enormous beach ball-sized eye called “male gaze simulator.” As the package arrives the object is ritually removed from its box and its shape is spherical. It appears to be a large white beach ball. When turned around, facing the audience, the pupil and eye shape become clear – it is a large disembodied eyeball. Clytemnestra places it on a tall pedestal upstage center where it sits, gazing, for the rest of the show. It watches Clytemnestra, her computer, and the audience. The performance’s language and rhythm vacillate between Clytemnestra’s intimate monologic sections, delivered as direct address, and the video calls’ more extroverted performative syntax. For example, Agamemnon’s calls often invoke a Homeric lexicon and cadence, including a hyperbolically long epic catalogue as he describes his battle prowess.
The performance’s most indelible moments take place when Clytemnestra desperately engages her whole body with the computer’s websites in an attempt to assuage her increasingly manic episodes. She gravitates toward consumer websites, especially those selling burgers of various types, as well as TED talks, Spotify, Facebook, cat videos, Martha Graham inspired dance videos (an allusive reference to Graham’s 1958 piece Clytemnestra, part of her Greek Cycle) and a constant barrage of online words and images which mediate/adapt/transmute her ancient tragedy for our modern world. The performance’s references to Martha Graham’s choreography read backward to Homer’s Iliad, and forward to the internet age, including a few twentieth century aesthetic allusions to: the incantatory feminism of Anne Waldman’s Omeros, Gertrude Stein’s estrangement of male identity as master signifier, and the free play of absurdist physicality. Likewise, this solo woman’s performance, including a commitment to technological integration, speaks to Laurie Anderson’s multiple digitized characters acted by the same performer. Phone Homer’s digitized drag performances recall Anderson’s early work, epitomized here by the auto-eroticism of Ellsworth’s courtship of Ellsworth in the form of video calls between Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. This new telling of the canonical tragedy helps contemporary audiences to ask difficult questions about identity - gendered, technologically mediated or otherwise - rather than seek easy answers.
[1] “learning through suffering” Aeschylus, Agamemnon