WARRIOR CATHARSIS PROJECT

THE ODYSSEY: AN EPIC TALE OF A WARRIOR’S JOURNEY HOME

Ancient stories can show us that we are not alone in our experiences and that our struggles are often timeless. These remnants from our ancestors offer wisdom and sometimes a pathway to recovering who we are as individuals within a collective. Ancient cultures, like the Greeks, used performance as a powerful mechanism to heal the body, mind, and spirit which they saw as interconnected and inseparable.

For over a decade, Aquila Theatre has been using ancient Greek texts with the veteran community to create meaningful and transformative dialogue and now we would like to dive deeper into the ancient practices of catharsis with these texts with its new Catharsis Project. We will engage research and practice to deepen our understanding of how performance can create true change and growth and potentially lead to enlightenment.

The ancient Greek epics and plays that have remained with us have a unique relevance to those touched by war, as well as beyond the veteran community. They help us realize how the destructiveness of war is long lasting and the ripple effects can be felt far from the battlefields.

With support from NYC Department of Veterans’ Services and its Joseph P. Dwyer Peer Support Project and New York State Council on the Arts , Aquila will run two 12-week workshops at the Bronx VA and at New York University with two performance events to take place in the Spring and Fall of 2025. The events will feature Homer’s 2500-year-old epic, The Odyssey. It is a tale of a warrior’s 10-year journey home after the war to the family he left behind.

For more information on these workshops and if you would like to be included on future workshops please email aquila@aquilatheatre.com.

EVENTS

PAST PROGRAMS

Warrior Chorus: American Democracy

The Warrior Chorus was one of many national initiatives Aquila Theatre created in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from 2008 - 2023. (See below for more history on these programs). It is an award winning national initiative that trained over 100 veterans nationwide to present their own innovative public programs inspired by ancient literature and the power of performance and story telling. Programming was conceived and performed in partnership with veterans and focused on critical social issues including war, conflict, comradeship, home, and family. It included veteran-led readings, dialogue groups, and post-performance audience talk backs and created training centers in New York City, Los Angeles, CA, Austin, TX, and Miami, FL with programming nationwide,  and ran from 2016 through 2023. The last program of the Warrior Chorus that was supported by the NEH, American Democracy, ran from 2021-2023 and created a national discussion around democracy. Staged readings of Sophocles' Antigone, workshops and a series of discussions around the meaning and future of democracy toured in tandem with Aquila’s main stage touring productions of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Macbeth, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Veteran and Civilian Public Programming

Aquila is known for its innovative public humanities programming, beginning with its Page and Stage Program in 2008, which then developed into the National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman's Special Award-winning program, Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives (AGML). These national public programs have placed live theatrical events, reading groups, and lectures in often underserved cultural institutions, with a particular emphasis on the veteran community and their families. The You/Stories program, which ran through the fall of 2015, was built on the work of AGML while incorporating a mobile application.  The app made the programming content accessible with online programmatic elements and encouraged people to engage with program content and create and submit their own stories. The premier of Aquila's A Female Philoctetes, featuring veterans, presented at New York City's Brooklyn Academy of Music Fisher's Hillman Studio in April of 2014, was part of the You/Stories program and was featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" (www.npr.org). National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman, William "Bro" Adams, can be heard discussing Aquila's work in his interview on "The Diane Rehm Show" (thedianerehmshow.org). Warrior Chorus, Aquila's applied theatre program, received a generous $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and provided a new model for veteran engagement in public programming.  Warrior Chorus trained over 100 veterans in three regional centers to present scholar-led public programming based on classical literature. Programming performed by veterans focused on critical social issues, including war, conflict, comradeship, home, and family, and includes veteran-led readings and discussions. A blog was created to share a more intimate account of how the program worked and its impact. http://www.warriorchorus.org/blog