City Rationale
Most of this episode takes place in a cabman’s shelter, where Bloom and Stephen meet a number of night-life characters. Throughout there are a series of misunderstandings and deceptions, both deliberate and accidental. Though only sixteen years separate them, Bloom and Stephen are of different generations and in this episode they are often on different wavelengths. The intergenerational theme is more pronounced in the Homer chapter with the three generations of Telemachus, Odysseus and Eumeaus gathered in Eumeaus’s hut. That intergenerational theme is particularly pertinent in Portugal where socio-demographic ageing is, if anything, greater than in most countries in Europe and indeed in the world. What does this mean for relationships between the generations in one of Europe’s oldest cities, for the imparting of knowledge from one generation to the next?
Ulysses Episode
Bloom and Stephen go to the cabman’s shelter to restore the latter to his senses. At the cabman’s shelter, they encounter a drunken sailor named D. B. Murphy (W. B. Murphy in the 1922 text). The episode is dominated by the motif of confusion and mistaken identity, with Bloom, Stephen and Murphy’s identities being repeatedly called into question. The rambling and laboured style of the narrative in this episode reflects the nervous exhaustion and confusion of the two protagonists.
Homer Odyssey Chapter
Book 14: Odysseus finds Eumaeus outside his hut. Although Eumaeus doesn’t recognize the withered traveler as his master, he invites him inside. Odysseus predicts that Eumaeus will see his master again quite soon, but Eumaeus will hear none of it—he has encountered too many vagabonds looking for a handout from Penelope in return for fabricated news of Odysseus. Still, Eumaeus takes a liking to his guest. He puts him up for the night and even lets him borrow a cloak to keep out the cold. When Eumaeus asks Odysseus about his origins, Odysseus lies that he is from Crete. He fought with Odysseus at Troy and made it home safely, he claims, but a trip that he made later to Egypt went awry, and he was reduced to poverty. It was during this trip, he says, that he heard that Odysseus was still alive.
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This project strand offered short residency opportunities in partner cities for 30 emerging artists as part of the legacy of this pan-European project.
Each city partner sent two artists on a residency to another partner’s city of a different art form, thereby seeking to enrich their professional practice through inter-disciplinary residencies. Artists were chosen on the basis of having demonstrated an interest in the hosting city’s Arts & Society contemporary European theme. They had to also practice a different art form from that of the hosting city’s public event. The project offered the emerging artists the opportunity to travel without the pressure to produce work and ideally to experience UEO’s public events.
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Partner description
Arena Ensemble is a platform for the development of artistic projects that has been growing since its foundation in 2007, always revealing an awareness for risk and experimentation in the search for new theatrical and performative practices, anchored in the intersection of different artistic genres.
The work of Marco Martins, Arena’s artistic director, increasingly emerges from the encounter with specific and peripheral communities with whom he develops long creative processes that challenge an economy of production and in which the lives and stories of their performers (non-actors) are the dramaturgical basis of the shows.
The name Arena means a space for combat, confrontation and action that resists specific techniques or predominant languages. The work developed implies the investment in a laboratory practice that mixes references and crosses theatre, dance, visual arts and performance through collaboration with several artists, fundamental in this dynamic.
