Saturday, 13 February 2016

The Underworld and Olympus (Shanay Neusum-James)

We have decided to include the theme of heaven and hell to show class in our piece. This is to exaggerate the different social classes, for example, the richer people will be residents in Heaven (known in Greek Mythology as Elysian Fields) and the poorer classes will reside in Hell (known in Greek Mythology as The Underworld).

Here I have done some research on the two very different places:

Elysian Fields/Olympus:

For the purposes of our piece we will be calling Olympus Heaven just because it is a catchier name that the audience will be more familiar with. The real Greek Heaven was called the Elysian Fields), in Greek mythology, the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous. The souls that dwelled there had an easy afterlife and had no labours. Normal people who lived righteous and virtuous lives could also gain entrance such as Socrates who proved his worth sufficiently through philosophy. This goes with the theme of having the richer people at the higher class areas of the site in Olympus because rich people are viewed as being more heroic even if they haven’t really achieved anything. The Elysian Fields were thought to of been ruled over by the God Cronus.

The Underworld:

The Greek underworld, in mythology, is another world where souls go after death, and is the original Greek idea of afterlife. At the moment of death the soul is separated from the corpse, taking on the shape of the former person, and is transported to the entrance of the Underworld. The Underworld itself is described as being either at the outer bounds of the ocean or beneath the depths or ends of the earth. It is considered the dark counterpart to the brightness of Mount Olympus, and is the kingdom of the dead that corresponds to the kingdom of the gods. Hades the ruler of The Underworld is a realm invisible to the living, made solely for the dead. This goes with the idea that poor people in our piece are having to sell their souls in order to find a place to live in hell (the Underworld).
The audience in our performance will be potential property buyers who will be unknowingly on the journey to the underworld to buy or be given a house there due to the lack of houses elsewhere. This journey has a name in Greek Mythology which is called the Journey on the River Styx or the Descent to The Underworld.

In Greek mythology, Styx is a deity and a river that forms the boundary between Earth and The Underworld (the domain often called Hades, which also is the name of its ruler).

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