The artwork that I decided to make my STEAM festival project on is Hadestown. While writing it, I was interested in how Anais Mitchell reworked and updated the old myth, and made a story that honestly has no place being this relevant to our current times so powerful and timeless. I was interested in her updating of the myth and how a lot of the story beats mirror the industrialist, capitalist society in which we live and how it drains its people of life. There’s also a lot to be said about how “working” and labor are represented in the story in the context of the underworld and how they’re worked to their deaths in this industrialist society and still forced to work after dying. I also think a lot of the songs are extremely self-aware and critique the anti-immigrant propaganda that our country indulges in and how the system in which we live prioritizes work above all else and sees it as the means to happiness and freedom, despite the time it takes away from living. I also think the theme of Orpheus as a starving artist ties well into a lot of the themes of this seminar.