Total silence for an hour is what I require to perform The Iliad: Book I. I was hoping for this particular hour of silence from students in Kentucky. The high school had no auditorium, which is typical for many American high schools. Therefore, this rare arts assembly was held in their gym, and I was the assembly. Not much to look at. A middle aged dude with a whitish beard and a 12-string guitar. Dressed in black.
Standing hidden beneath the bleachers just prior to heading out onto that no man's land in the middle of the gym floor, I listened to the bleachers creak and boom as the seats filled.
Five hundred ninth through twelth graders, all talking, create a goodly roar, and this crew was no exception. I asked myself, as I occasionally do prior to stalking a high school audience's undivided attention, how I ever got myself into this situation. Today's youth are unforgiving when it comes to finding themselves bored. Remaining a "well-trained, polite audience", especially if they are bored, is a group activity today's youth find challenging indeed. What can happen to live performers, which is why so few dare to work for kids this age, is that the roar resumes during the performance itself. Conversations are picked up where they left off. Text messages are sent. Kids drum their feet. The roar builds until no one is listening, and the event collapses into total irrelevance. Woe to the hapless theater artist who finds himself in this particular circle of hell. I do my utmost to avoid it. Still, this particular day, I did ask myself, at least rhetorically, what on earth I was doing there.
I got the usual answer from my inner monologuist: "Hey, this is The Iliad, Bodkin. This is utterly intense. You will totally control them. Don't worry about it. Just remember to deliver the intro with the hypnotic music and it will work yet again."
This was the tenth and final show of my week of shows for Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, a Tony-award winning theater. Either Odyssey introductions or Iliad: Book I performances, each show had taken place in gyms or theaters, and I'd soldiered my way through. So I began:
"The Iliad. Named after the battle plain of Ilion, in the land of Ilium, formerly Asia Minor, now modern-day Turkey." I try to deliver this information in a tonality utterly devoid of emotion or apparent interest in the topic. This tonality seems to strike a chord with my utterly disinterested young listeners. I suppose that's not really true, though. By then I've delivered at least two bars of my hypnosis music, slow, elemental, and foreboding in some undefinable way. There are also odd, quirky sparks of harmonics scatting strangely above the moody low tones, which I know will fascinate the guitar players in the crowd, and most of the guitar listeners, which is probably every single one of them. They've been listening to John Mayer, Dave Mathews, countless fine musicians, so they know what guitar playing should sound like. So whatever complete disinterest they assumed they'd be forced to feel as they've watched me walk across the gym floor and sit before my mics has been ever so slightly dislodged by the music. Then, verbally, I insert the blade and begin to crank the can opener:
"Sexual Slavery."
I let that term float there a moment. Let them consider what that may mean. The girls look at each other. The boys take interest.
"Supernatural Politics."
Still spoken in the same, flat-affect tonality.
"And the Glory of a Bronze Age Death," I go on, "Are the three great streams of ancient Greek life that run through Homer's The Iliad. Without appreciating these three notions, you'll never be able to understand Homer's epic story."
This particular day, as I continued to boom with the hypnosis music, I looked out over my audience. I was thirty seconds into the show. The story, of course, with all the voices--Agamemnon, Achilles, blind Kalkhas the Diviner, wily Odysseus (a bit part in this tale)--with its increasingly intense and virtuosic music, was still at least three minutes off. I was still working my intro, letting a modicum of true historical horror seep into their tough, seen-it-all minds. Letting the fact that they were listening, not watching, establish itself in their assumptions. Convincing them that yes, with some music and meager words, I was preparing to gently force them to imagine an entire movie.
I looked out over them. They were totally silent. Fifty-seven minutes to go.
--Odds Bodkin
