Homer's wave machine. "Odyssey di Simon Armitage per la regia di Robert Wilson

The essay starts analyzing Robert Wilson’s show, Odyssey, the Italian – Greek co-production, performed in Milan, at Piccolo Teatro, after five months of encores in Athens. The analisys’ path, usually from text to performance, here is going backwards, from performance to text. In the first part the essay analyzes the splendid direction elements, the light, the music, the mise-en-scéne peculiarities. In the second part it tries to justify the director’s choice to use Simon Armitage’s translation, the latest advance of a long line of Odyssey retelling attempts. Derek Walcott, with his Odyssey. A stage version, created a theatrical adaptation anyway true to Homer’s text. The biting novella of Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad, maintains anyway dramatic and elegiac possibilities, even updated. Armitage’s version, not so authentic neither so epic, and sometimes anachronistic, has revealed itself the one selected by Wilson, not in spite of its limits, but just for them, making possible this ‘new creation’ that the direction in XXI century proposes as aim, and founding the perfect basis for Wilson’s brilliant mise en scene. Leaving many vacant places, it could be a perfect container for words, music and bodies – so word becomes a vision’s support, and the director another creator.