“Ithaca”

It’s easy to imagine a kinship between the Greek poet and protean artist Taylor Mac, whose work never fails to challenge, delight, and provoke. For Visual Cavafy, this riveting performer delivers two of Cavafy’s immortal poems, “Ithaca” (1911) and “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1904), filmed at ClearLight Performance Space in New York City. “Getting this book of poems by Cavafy was like getting a Pushkin or Whitman for the first time,” said Mac. “It's like when somebody shows up with somebody who should have been hanging out in your life from childhood, and they're new to you, it both feels tragic and like the greatest wonder – like discovering the ocean or a whole new country with a whole new language.” Mac initially thought of "Ithaca" as a poem for "young" people to teach them how to be in the world. Then I thought of being in the dressing room during A 24-Decade History, when I was about to do this big, long, twenty-four hour performance. And I thought, ‘Oh, I wish I had this poem at that time to just say, ‘you're good, slow down, that getting to the end is not the thing. The actual hours and the hours and the hours of this takes, that's the thing.’” As he prepared to film “Barbarians,” contemporary resonances grew over time: “When I first started, I wasn't really thinking of the barbarians as the January 6th insurrectionists. I was thinking of it more as that thing that we tell people to be afraid of, like immigrants or something – we've got to change all of our laws, we've got to protect ourselves. I was interpreting it kind of cynically, but then as I kept doing it, I was like, ‘oh, no, this is actually about the insurrectionists as well. It's very expansive - it's a metaphor for all of the ways in which we fool ourselves.”

Duration: 6 minutes