PersAphone

PersAphone is a short film, funded by the Society for Classical Studies Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities initiative, and created by Olga Faccani and Heena Yoon. The project re-tells in the form of music and dance the myth of Demeter and Persephone, the daughter violently separated from her mother and natal family, and the myth of Orpheus, the hero whose music could comfort all living beings.

"The ancient Greek myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone narrates of a mother losing her daughter, snatched away by the God of Death, and taken to a parallel world underground. Down there, the mythical singer Orpheus keeps her company with his beautiful, soothing music.

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With so many of us displaced or away from our loved ones due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we believe in the power of art and music to create a collective space for empathy and give us strength - much like Orpheus does with his soothing music for lonely Persephone, as she waits for the time to join her mother out of the underworld."

The project brought together scholars, musicians, dancers, photographers, and videographers to explore Classical myths in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The Trojan Women Project

The Trojan Women Project is a collaborative program between female incarcerated youth and UC undergraduates, created by UC Santa Barbara Professor Michael Morgan during the COVID-19 pandemic. I participated for the first time in Summer 2020, when I helped Professor Morgan launch this new initiative on Zoom, in partnership with UC Davis. The project centers on Euripides' Trojan Women, an ancient Greek play that follows the fates of the women of Troy after their city has been sacked, their husbands killed, and their families are being taken away as slaves. As part of the program, the students, free and incarcerated, reimagine the tragic destinies of the women in the play, and look for solutions in our contemporary public and social life to trace a course of action.

Personal stories provide a lens to destabilize assumptions based on stereotypes while establishing a network of communal strength, and participants leverage the voices of the women in the play to envision new futures from the ashes of Troy. Using digital storytelling, free and incarcerated youths are guided in creating a short video that retells the play from their point of view

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The Trojan Women Project aims to leverage the tragic heroines’ stories of violence and abuse as starting points for strategizing through art ways of building solutions after social conflict and trauma. In this way, the project does not represent a deconstruction of Trojan Women in terms of modernity, but is rather a reconstruction of the lives of the characters as an empowered talk-back to the oppressors and slave masters in the play

These quotes are from the students' response to Euripides' Trojan Women as part of the Trojan Women Project.

(background of pic 1: Ellen McLaughlin's The Trojan Women, directed by Anne Cecelia Haney)

The project brought together UC scholars, facilitators, formerly incarcerated artists, and Story Center master facilitators. This initiative was offered to UC students and incarcerated students at the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility.