The Odeon: Bowdoin's Offering to Music, Gatherings, and Outdoor Space

The Odeon: Bowdoin's Offering to Music, Gatherings, and Outdoor Space

By Rebecca Goldfine

You know that semicircular hill on campus with granite slabs for seats and stone steps? The place that's tucked behind Studzinski Recital Hall and next to Smith Union?

Yes, that place, the one no one has known what to call since it was built in 2021. It isn't an amphitheater, it's not even really a theater. Amphitheaters have seats all around an open stadium, while theaters, which have seats on just one side like this spot, tend to be larger.

Rather, the nook is an odeon-which in ancient Greece referred to a small, intimate venue typically used for singing. While the Greeks thought of open half-circular theaters as places to see plays, they preferred to hear a singer or a chorus in their cozier local odeon.

"You've heard the term 'ode,' a song of praise, and this is a place where Greeks imagined you could be close to the performer," said Jim Higginbotham, Bowdoin's associate professor of classics on the Henry Johnson Professorship Fund and associate curator for the ancient collection in the Museum of Art.

Two new signs at the top of the odeon on campus have been added to clear the matter up (and to help prevent more cringing from scholars and students of ancient Greece). "The term amphitheater is misused in English quite a bit," Higginbotham said. "It galls us who know and all my students who have been taught the difference."

"For the Romans, an amphitheater was a building with seating all around (360 degrees) and an arena floor," he continued, "and was primarily used for gladiatorial contests, quite different than our odeon."

The half-basin that became the odeon was formed in 2007-2008 as an accessible back-stage delivery entrance for the new Studzinski Hall. But the location of a couple storm drains and a lack of seating made for a very uninviting space, said Matt Orlando, senior vice president for finance and administration.

Still, some saw potential there. "You could see this bowl shape that would lend itself to a theater-like venue," he said.

In 2021, when faculty and students were spending more time outside to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the College improved the site. It removed the drain and hired a landscape company to design it.

"We decided to break ground on that area behind Studzinski, and we opened it, but we didn't name it anything, so it just became referred to most commonly as the Studz amphitheater," Orlando said.

After WBOR held a popular concert at the odeon this autumn, billing the event as its "Fall Concert in the Studzinski Odeum/Amphitheater," Orlando called Higginbotham to finally choose an official name.

They settled on the Bowdoin Odeon. Some who are in the know might ask why the College did not call it an odeum, which is the Latin term for an odeon.

"Odeum, the Latin version, was not actually used much by the Romans," Higginbotham clarified. "It was a transliteration by the Greeks when they rendered the word into Latin. And it also has that unfortunate sound, like odium."

The oldest example of an odeon in the Roman world is in Pompeii, Higginbotham said. But the Romans called that "a covered theater, not an odeon."

Published December 02, 2024