Amor Mundi- an operatic project on refugee experience and the classical world

Описание: In June 2024, the Faculty of Classics secured an AHRC Impact grant for a project inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt.

The Amor Mundi project brought together an academic from Classics (Frisbee Sheffield, who has a long-standing interest in Arendt's engagement with the ancient Greeks), a writer/artist, composer, and a director to encourage practices of engaged citizenship through development of an opera inspired by Arendt’s journey across Europe as a refugee fleeing the Nazis.

Inspired by Classical Greek thinking on the interplay of politics and performance, Arendt’s understanding of politics was itself theatrical. Arendt called theatre, “the political art par excellence”, which narrates action luminously and can elevate the flux of human experience through collective memory. The project took Arendt’s engagement with the Greeks seriously, by exemplifying points of inspiration from ancient Greek drama, in combination with her preferred deliberative mode of Socratic dialogue. The use of music enables a visceral and direct encounter which, akin to a choral ode, can elevate and transform emotional engagement. The central agon of Greek drama is captured in a deliberative section which aims to initiate debate and start a spirited public conversation.

How is dialogue transformed when we meet others within the space of performance?

There were two performance of opera at the heart of project, one of which was performed in the Fitzwilliam Museum and the other was performed in the Alison Richards Building as part of Cambridge Refugee Week.