Medea
Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the
future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
Primary Investigator
Fiona Macintosh | Faculty of Classics
Partner Organisations:
Shivaike Shah, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, Dr Rosa Andujar (KCL), Dr Avery Willis-Hoffman
A new adaption of Euripides' Medea
At Khameleon, we understand that creativity is best when it is diverse. The Arts are about living, about people, and about sharing through creativity. This is our founding principle at Khameleon. Celebrating diverse cultures is at the heart of everything we do. We want to explore new narratives, platform untold stories, and discover fresh outlooks through interdisciplinary forms.
Background
Khameleon was founded in 2020, based on a production company built at Oxford University. Drawing on theatre, music and film, the company develops innovative productions that celebrate the creative power of diverse voices.
Our work
Khameleon are now developing our first production, a retelling of Euripides’s Medea that builds on our 2018 production at Oxford University. We have assembled a team of creatives, academics and pioneers from across the globe to develop a show that embodies all we want to achieve at Khameleon.
We are also soon to embark on our Uprooting Medea tour, co-sponsored by the Brown Arts Institute (BAI). The four-month tour, curated and produced by BAI Visiting Artist Shivaike Shah, will commence at Brown University and will continue across 12 states, visiting 30 of the USA’s leading colleges and universities. We will visit classes, work with students in script workshops, and participate in roundtable conversations with students and staff around multiple topics related to the Medea project. At the conclusion of the tour, Khameleon will return to Brown to host a virtual gathering for participating institutions, which will make space for an intercollegiate exchange of experiences around the project, including appearances by special guests who will lead discussions interrogating the performance history and legacy of Medea and the Classics more broadly.
Platforming Artists Project
We are lucky enough to be working with some incredible artists at Khameleon. In the Platforming Artists podcast series, we find out more about what our pioneering creatives are doing outside of Medea.
Khameleon Classics podcast:
For two thousand years, study of the Greek and Roman worlds has been at the centre of Western education. Khameleon Classics is the podcast that asks why. What is our fixation with Classics, and why does the classical world only encompass Greece and Rome? How can ancient history shed light on the fight for a fairer society today? And what responsibility does it bear for the complicated legacy of colonialism that we struggle to face up to even now?
In each episode of the Khameleon Classics podcast, producer Shivaike Shah speaks with an expert in the field about some of the most urgent questions facing the study of Classics today.
Macintosh
Supported by the Humanities Cultural Programme and the Arts Council England
