The Nine Muses

Twenty-five years after the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus still has not returned home. So his son, Telemachus, sets off on a journey in search of his lost father. So begins Homer's revered epic poem, The Odyssey, the primary narrative reference point for The Nine Muses, John Akomfrah's remarkable meditation about chance, fate and redemption. Structured as an allegorical fable set between 1949 and 1970, The Nine Muses is comprised of nine overlapping musical chapters that mix archival material with original scenes. Together, they form a stylized, idiosyncratic retelling of the history of mass migration to post-war Britain through the suggestive lens of the Homeric epic. In addition to its resonance with Homer's epic, The Nine Muses was devised and scripted from the writings of a wide range of authors including Dante Alighieri, Samuel Beckett, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Dylan Thomas, Matsuo Basho, TS Elliot, Li Po, and Rabindranth Tagore. The Nine Muses is an journey through myth, folklore, history, and a museum of intangible things. It is a "sorrow song" or "song cycle" on journeys and migration, memory and elegy, knowledge and identity.