Happy New Year!
2021 is around the corner!
Storyteller Odds Bodkin is presenting two Zoom events in January to kick off the New Year. First, on January 10th, ODIN AND THOR BATTLE THE FROST GIANTS, an adult storytelling. Then, on Jan. 24th, MYTH MAKERS, his first adult how-to-tell-stories workshop on Zoom.
Check out the links and sign up!
On Sunday Jan. 10, 2020 at 5 pm EST, Storyteller Odds Bodkin returns to Zoom with his beloved adult show, ODIN AND THOR BATTLE THE FROST GIANTS.
Mark your calendar and enjoy two Norse myths presented with giant voices and music on 12-string guitars. Wit and humor combine with mythic adventure in these riveting works of performance art. An evening’s entertainment.
After the show, chat with the artist. He’ll stay online.
“A consummate storyteller”–The New York Times
Sponsored by Grendel’s Den in Cambridge MA.
Eurystheus, King of Mycenae, Hercules’ weak cousin, has been granted control over him by Zeus and the Fates. Hercules must perform labors–anything his cousin asks. Slavery was common in ancient Greece where Greek slaves from conquered towns worked the fields and mines, and cleaned up animal dung. And so when Eurystheus tells Hercules to go clean the filthy stables of King Augeas of Elis, the hero is enraged, but he has no choice.
Upon seeing the years of cow dung piled up to the rafters beneath acres of stables, Hercules’ heart sinks. He must do it in one day. He calculates it will take the shoulders of ten thousand men to do the job. He’s fast, but not that fast. It seems impossible.
And yet he does it.
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Join Master Storyteller Odds Bodkin as he tells this episode and learn how Hercules triumphs in his sixth labor using his wit and strength.
Sunday, Oct. 18th at 5 pm EST on Zoom. The app is free to download if you don’t already have it. With HD sound and video, HERCULES IN HELL is a tour de force of storytelling, scored with powerful, exciting music on 12-string guitar throughout.
An utterly different, magical way to spend a Sunday evening.
This is an adult storytelling. Children 12 and up are welcome.
This performance is sponsored by Grendel’s Den of Cambridge, MA. A legendary watering hole. Visit them for great food and atmosphere.
In Odds Bodkin’s upcoming adult telling of HERCULES IN HELL on Zoom, Hercules makes a fateful error that haunts him for years, and in the end, is the tragic cause of his death.
During his second labor, Blood of the Hydra, the King of Mycenae sends Hercules to slay the Hydra, a dragon with nine heads. It has taken up residence in the swamps of Lake Lerna and has killed everything for miles around it. Birds. Fish. Insects. Everything.
“Wasn’t one of its heads immortal?” asks Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, fascinated by Hercules’ story.
“Yes,” he replies, “but worse than that, its blood was pure poison. One drop, the slightest spatter on your skin, and you die.”
With his young nephew Iolus’ help, Hercules succeeds in slaying the Hydra, but afterwards dips his arrows in the pools of its blood. From then on, just a scratch from one of his arrowheads means instant death.
“And you came to regret that?” asks Hades.
Hercules sighs. “I thought it was wise at the time.”
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Join Odds Bodkin via ZOOM on Sunday, Oct 18 at 5 pm EST for his epic telling of the life story of Hercules. The camera is up close and the sound and video are HD, so you can watch the instrumental work on 12-string guitar as a master storyteller enacts his characters.
A solid and entertaining lesson in epic Greek mythology, one you’ll never forget, this is an adult storytelling not recommended for children under 12.
ZOOM downloads are free.
This virtual event is sponsored by Grendel’s Den in Cambridge, MA.
Some say Homer was a sightless genius like John Milton. Milton dictated his three massive poems—The Divine Comedy—to an amanuensis who wrote them down. Homer, however, performed his poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, aloud and before live audiences. Scholars guess that Homer used character voices and lyre music during his shows to bring his tales to life. He lived in Ancient Greece circa 700 B.C.
While The Iliad is filled with horrifyingly vivid descriptions of battlefield carnage and details about what swords and spears can do to a human body, The Odyssey is more of a fantastical adventure. It features monsters, cannibals, enchantresses, drugged out Lotus Eaters and many-headed dragons. Much of it takes place out on the open sea as Odysseus wanders from island to island across the Mediterranean. Here, as his fleet is slowly destroyed and all his friends are killed, he becomes the last man standing after ten years of woe. Only he returns to his island of Ithaca alive.
Even then, things aren’t easy. He’s been gone twenty years and the sons of Ithaca have grown into rowdy, fatherless men.
It must have taken Homer many nights to recite his monumental works in their entirety. At some point scribes set down his famous words and what was until that point oral literature held in one man’s mind became written literature for the ages. The two epics have been translated into English, and I used Robert Fitzgerald’s version to map out the best of Odysseus’s adventures for modern listeners.
I’ll be performing my intro to the tale, THE ODYSSEY: BELLY OF THE BEAST in about a month, on ZOOM. The 70-minute show is sponsored by Grendel’s Den in Cambridge, MA. Tickets are $15. The date is Sunday, Sept. 20th at 7 pm EST.
Years ago, when I performed it at Dartmouth College, a professor wrote that my version is the closest thing we have to a Homeric performance.
This is the second in my three-part Greek myths for adults series on ZOOM. If you want to see what a Greek myth like this looks and sounds like, you’re welcome to listen to FALL OF THE TITANS, here on YouTube. I told this tale a couple of weeks ago.
With all the uncertainly surrounding school openings, Loyola University Maryland has decided to go completely remote. Students won’t be on campus, but to preserve a twelve-year Odds Bodkin September tradition, the Department of Classics has chosen to invite Odds once again, only this time via ZOOM. The performance: THE ILIAD: BOOK I.
Grendel’s Den on Harvard Square, a location in Boston where Odds has regaled adult ticketed audiences for years, wants to preserve the magic. The two shows coming up on ZOOM sponsored by Grendel’s? THE ODYSSEY: BELLY OF THE BEAST on September 20th and HERCULES IN HELL on October 18th.
Simonds School in Warner, New Hampshire had to postpone a 2-day GOLDEN RULE: WORLD STORIES ABOUT EMPATHY residency for K-2 and 3-5 last spring with Odds. But with an HD video and sound ZOOM studio, he’ll be visiting the school anyway. Two performances on full-screen, followed by interactive workshops with the students will take place on September 21st and 22nd.
Yes, there’s a pandemic. Crowds of listeners crammed into big rooms, especially crowds of kids, are problematic these days.
But Odds’ brand of performing arts—always a complete one–man show—doesn’t require a troop of actors onstage, sets or backup musicians. Odds provides all that in his musical storytelling shows. Even Classics and Honors students and their professors at Loyola know that.
If your kids or grandkids go to a school, give them live Odds Bodkin stories by suggesting programs to teachers and principals. Every seat is a front row experience.
To find out more, go here.
Up until this point in FALL OF THE TITANS, Gaia the Earth has brought forth perfect human-like children with Ouranos, her husband, Titan of the Sky. She’s given birth to twelve Titan babies in all, each soon in charge of creating an ecosystem.
But this new infant is different. This newborn is a Cyclops, already gigantic as babies go. Even Titan babies.
“I love all my children equally, Ouranos,” Gaia says to horrified Ouranos as she cuddles the one-eyed infant. “And not everything I make is perfect.” She gently pokes the baby’s chest. “Hello, little Arges.” The infant glares at her and then screams like a thousand stabbed goats, even though he’s just been nursed. His Cyclops tummy is full, but still he makes this unnerving sound. It certainly unnerves Ouranos. He has no idea what this means, but it does not bode well.
In a nutshell, here is Gaia, the Earth Mother, the first being of all beings in Greek mythology, or as Ouranos calls her, “Queen of Us All.” Just as with our modern earth, in this fanciful mythological tale, life pours forth from Gaia all across her surface.
Her job is to make life, and in FALL OF THE TITANS, she does so, at times to a fault. She cannot control her fecundity, and she doesn’t really want to because it’s just too important to keep on creating. After all, one of her very first creations is Eros, the attraction between things, which binds the Universe together, and she’s still just as endlessly driven by the lust and love Eros brings as anybody else.
The only difference is, Gaia can create any living thing she likes.
Of any size.
In any form.
She can do it all by herself if she wants to. Ouranos secretly hopes that’s what she just did to create this baby Cyclops.
Maybe he’s not the father, Ouranos thinks. It would be nice if that were true. Maybe she used parthenogenesis, and created this little beast the same way she created Ouranos himself, long ago, from the flesh of her flesh.
He has no idea of the monsters to come.
The name “Gaia” entered the popular lexicon along with the “Gaia Hypothesis”, a theory proposed by scientist James Lovelock that views the Earth as a vast, self-regulating organism. Gaia hails from the mythology of the ancient Greeks, who viewed her as the originator of life on Earth, and as the Earth itself. This is all pre-scientific thinking, of course, but nevertheless, Gaia’s story is a creation myth worth knowing.
With Nature in revolt in many formerly livable lands across the planet due to an excess of human activity, the consequences of which are drought, flooding, see-sawing periods of hot and cold, crop losses, human migration, pandemics and social stress, among others, renewed interest in the original Gaia story isn’t surprising.
Upon reading the Greek poet Hesiod’s most famous work, The Theogony, or “Birth of the Gods”, as a storyteller I decided to create a version of this old Greek creation myth from Gaia’s point of view. The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, takes a similar tack only with the Arthurian legends: the author views the events of Arthur and Lancelot from the POVs of the women of Camelot and the Lady of the Lake.
In Babylonian mythology’s creation myth, the Enuma Elis, the primordial Gaia goddess is called Tiamat. In one benign version of the story she is the feminine salt water who mixes with male fresh water to produce early life. In another version, Tiamat is a monster, a vengeful bringer of storms and chaos.
In my FALL OF THE TITANS tale, Gaia is a little bit of both.
I’ll be performing it Sunday, July 19th at 7 pm EST on Zoom. A $15 ticket will buy you the URL and a password to join the event. It’s sponsored by Grendel’s Den, where I’ve told FALL OF THE TITANS to adult audiences before. I also performed it at the Boulder Climate Conference a few years ago. It’s a fun evening, filled with characters and music on 12-string guitar.
It is not for children, however, since there is treachery and sexual violence in the tale.
To read more backstory on FALL OF THE TITANS, scroll through my recent blog posts. You’ll find more articles about the characters and situations in the epic.
School systems across America are facing a back-to-school dilemma. Should students stay home for everyone’s safety or attend real classes this fall? And even if students return, are school assemblies where hundreds gather in a gym or auditorium for arts presentations a step too far?
If you are a parent, teacher or administrator, explore storyteller Odds Bodkin’s ZOOM assemblies. As a solo performer, his presentations are the same music-filled adventures as always, and with ZOOM, every seat is a front row seat. From his Rivertree Productions studio in New Hampshire, he comes to your students live on full screen. Each assembly is password protected and we administer the tech. All you need to do is log on, at school or at home. Live Q&As and follow-up workshops are available as well.
To learn more about elementary school ZOOM assemblies and Odds Bodkin author visits, click on the links or go to Show Requests.
As a one-man show, Master Storyteller Odds Bodkin has never needed fancy costumes and backup dancers, since they’d only get in the way of audience imagination. Because he’s a character actor, he doesn’t need fellow thespians to bring a story to life. Backup musicians aren’t necessary either; he plays his own music live. And since he doesn’t wear makeup, he looks the same as always. Dressed in black. Beard. Bushy eyebrows.
That’s why in his live Zoom concerts, the only difference is that everyone has a front row seat.
Got a group of bored adults from your company working from home? Book an evening performance of BEOWULF: THE ONLY ONE or ODIN AND THOR BATTLE THE FROST GIANTS.
Got school kids scattered to their homes? Book a GOLDEN RULE: WORLD STORIES ABOUT EMPATHY or FAIRY FOLKS AND OLD OAKS performance for up to 1, 000 of them. It will be live, just for them, some time in the morning or afternoon.
Recently DigBoston wrote about Odds’ “preternatural ability to create characters with an array of simply inspired voices.”
He also offers HEARTPOUNDERS: DARK TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL shows, as if these times weren’t dark enough.