John M. "Odds" Bodkin '76
On a barren stage, with his guitar and sometimes
a Celtic harp, John M. "Odds" Bodkin greets an audience
of children and parents for the final performance of his four-week
fall season at Manhattan's Lincoln Center. "You have to see
the story in your mind's eye," he tells the children. "Look
inside and unleash the power of your imagination."
It has been a successful run for Bodkin, one of the nation's leading
storytellers, whose shows mix music, song, and centuries-old tales
into spellbinding theater. Dressed all in black, with his hair
slicked back and goatee neatly trimmed, he makes an imposing presence
on stage. He takes the audience on a ninety-minute journey to a
witch's lair in Italy, to the South African veld with a famished
herd of animals, and finally to the familiar fantasy world inhabited
by the Three Little Pigs and a ravenous wolf. Bodkin plays his
rock 'n' roll interpretation of the classic tale, with children
in the audience singing the rousing chorus.
The Lincoln Center season, which took three years to plan, included
performances of stories based on Homer's Odyssey, love stories,
and tales for Halloween, Christmas, and Chanukah.
"
It's about making it in New York," says Bodkin backstage one
evening in his dressing room. "There's a wonderfully literate
market here, and I wanted to be here long enough for some of them
to find me."
He didn't plan to become a storyteller while studying marine zoology
at Duke, but he did discover the magic of the twelve-string guitar,
which he played for hours in the stairwell at Brown House. "The
echoes would run up and down the stairwell, and with those acoustics,
I imagined I was in a great concert hall," he recalls.
After graduating, he became a teacher in New York, a freelance
environmental educator who used Central Park as his classroom.
He later took troubled youths on character-building wilderness
trips, where he found that he was adept at telling stories around
the campfire.
By 1982, he'd written his first musical, Earth Song, which was
produced by National Public Radio for Earth Day eight years later.
Since then, he has developed about 150 stories drawn from Greek
mythology, folk legends, and fairy tales from around the world.
He has also produced eighteen recordings of stories and has written
four children's books, which are available through his website.
It is his live performances, filled with sound effects, multiple
voices, and a positive message, that are the core of his work.
Bodkin knows the beginning and end of every story, but he doesn't
work from a script, so his stories always change as he improvises
on stage. "That keeps it fresh," he says. "The characters
can change, their dialogue will change, and the musical accompaniments
are always breathing around them."
Bodkin, who lives in Bradford, New Hampshire, with his wife, Mil,
and three teenage boys, no longer teaches in the classroom, but
says that he has never given up connecting with children. He says
his stories provide the kind of stimulation that nourishes young
minds. Listening to a story, he says, lights up a child's brain
far more than watching television.
"
You see the children's eyes get a little glossy, their mouths drop
open slightly, and they become absolutely still, active listeners.
They are entertaining themselves with their own creativity."
Over the last year, Bodkin worked with educator Nefretete Rasheed,
a New Jersey arts group, and several New Jersey schools to create
a curriculum that uses the mythic story of Hercules to explore
the issue of rage in teens. The five-day unit encourages teens
to reflect inward to identify the nature of rage in their lives.
Bodkin says too many teens are brimming with bogus rage churned
up by harsh popular music, violent movies, and some video games.
"
Media can produce a false rage that comes from all this pounding
on an inexperienced mind," he says. "Kids need to know
it's there, and they need to guard against it. The curriculum teaches
them to name what makes them experience rage and shows them strategies
to deal with it."
www.oddsbodkin.com
--David McKay Wilson
Wilson is a New York-based freelance writer.
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