Performing Epic began life in 2012 as a 3-year, Leverhulme-funded, research project exploring the vital life of the classical epics in the performance arts. The scope of the project is broad, encompassing the reception of epic poetry from multiple traditions in any performance medium (including theatre, opera, dance, film, and radio), in any language and country, and any era since antiquity.

Verse narratives of quest, adventure, and destiny – the Greek and Roman Iliad, Odyssey, Argonautica, Aeneid, Metamorphoses alongside Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, the Inuit Atanarjuat and the West African Sundiata – have been inspiring new theatrical, danced, and sung productions in every continent of the world in recent years.

Numerous productions, such as the Franco-Indian collaborative version of The Odyssey by Footsbarn Travelling Theatre and the Kerala-based Abhinaya Theatre Group (1995), and the Ramayan Odyssey (2001) by Tara Arts in London, have been discovering new resonances in the fusion of eastern and western epics in intercultural performance spaces.

Epic poetry was the staple of the early operatic repertoire (Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689), and Handel’s Acis and Galatea (1739) take their inspiration from the Aeneid and Metamorphoses respectively). It continues to provide a rich storehouse of themes for contemporary creative artists working in divergent traditions. Epic poetry in performance has a long tradition, which seems no less potent and resonant for contemporary audiences than it was for those in the early modern period.

The project has produced two main publications, Performing Epic or Telling Tales by Fiona Macintosh and Justine McConnell (Oxford University Press, 2020), and a collected volume Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, edited by Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Stephen Harrison and Claire Kenward (Oxford University Press, 2018).

The edited volume represents the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions, while 'Performing Epic or Telling Tales' takes the new millennium as a starting point for an exploration of the turn to narrative in twenty-first-century theatre.

Graeme Bird's chapter for the edited volume, 'Homer as Improviser?' (pp. 228-49), is accompanied by a recording of the author's own improvisations which can be listened to here:

The project also explored research questions through numerous public lectures, in-conversation events, artists-in-residence programmes, and performance workshops, as well as two international conferences from which the edited volume arose. 

For details, see all events related to the Performing Epic project

As well as its associated publications, the Performing Epic project has expanded the remit of the APGRD's Modern Productions database, which now actively captures details of performances inspired by the ancient epics alongside the Greco-Roman tragedies and comedies.

• Fiona Macintosh
• Justine McConnell
• Claire Kenward
• Rachel Bryant Davies
• Stephe Harrop
• Zoë Jennings