Hymns (Visual Album)

to dionysus (born of semele)

Pregnant Semele, mother of the god of ritual and transformation, dares to look directly upon god's true form.

to gaia

We sing to the earth itself

to demeter

Demeter, goddess of the harvest, mourns her daughter Persephone and wanders through a wasteland of her own grief.

to helios

the sun rides a chariot across the sky

to dionysus (the liberator)

Dionysus is kidnapped by pirates, transforms into a glowing giant, and turns the sea to wine

to dionysus (the transubstantiator)

into waves

to selene

follow the signal in the night sky

to xenoi

sing a song to someone you have no name for yet

Music from the film is now available to stream and purchase on bandcamp and spotify.

ABOUT: The Homeric Hymns, among the oldest extant poems from the ancient mediterranean, include the first stories of Demeter & Persephone, of Semele, of Dionysus & the wine-dark sea, and the cycles of the sun and moon. Our adaptations, sounded through a prism of devotional music traditions, draw inspiration from these ancient texts to navigate our collective responsibility to the earth and one another, to dream of what we can do together, and to cope with being apart. We recorded and edited the music alone in our bedrooms and then filmed the accompanying visuals in distanced groups over five days in an empty Getty Villa; creating a lasting testament to the pause on live performance during the pandemic. In this multimedia experiment we seek new modes of congregation and resound these primordial praise songs to the gods as we need them today. 

LEARN MORE:
About the Homeric Hymns & this Adaptation

This project was supported in part by the Getty Villa Theater Lab
With additional support and / or resources from:
University of La Verne: Theatre Arts Department 
The UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture 
Network of Ensemble Theaters NET/TEN Summer Virtual Exploration Grant
and The Bogliasco Foundation Study Center