Tag: storytelling

The Talking Skull

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A quick storytelling post on the back of another Verbalise at the Brewery Arts Centre. The slots are 4 minutes, and I’d struggled to find a piece I liked that fit that time frame – despite having loads at 1-2 minutes and several at 5-6 minutes. Eventually I settled on The Talking Skull; originally from Cameroon, I think, and a story I’d known for a long time before I started telling any myself – and one I heard completely reinvented by Nick Hennessey when I was on the storytelling course.

While keeping the structure the same, Nick moved the action to the gibbets and heaths of old England, bookending it with singing and drums and a clutch of corbies. I’m nowhere near drumming and I’ll never be a singer, but his translocation of the story was so deft and absolutely something to learn from. I shifted mine to the mosses of south Lakeland and used a Baron of Kendal for the villain. It’s a fantastic wee piece and I loved telling it – and I loved exploring how the bones of a story can hang with different skins. That’s something to remember.

My son drew the backdrop for the projector – much obliged that lad – and many thanks to Ann The Poet for the photo.

Autopsy by Brian Turner

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I’ve just rediscovered this – posted on Youtube almost 10 years ago (!) for my friend Kirstin who teaches English at secondary school. She asked loads of her friends to record their favourite poems for her class, and this was my choice: the shattering Autopsy by Brian Turner. I don’t know why I didn’t post it at the time, but I’m very happy to do so now:

The Six Blind Men & The Elephant

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Another storytelling update! This week I told a story in school for the first time – popping down to tell The Six Blind Men & The Elephant to my son’s class, who are looking at Buddhism. It’s a lovely wee school and the kids were very welcoming, a string of high-fives lined up on the way in and the way out. I’d planned a straightforward telling with some questions to follow, but once we were in the moment I started calling on the kids for ideas of what the blind men thought of the different parts of the elephant. They loved getting involved, which is a lesson for future tellings. Afterwards we had a fantastic chat about the importance of sharing – and of knowing how other perspectives can deepen and strengthen our own knowledge – and then we went round the class, imagining how the bits of our own favourite animals might resemble something completely different. It was a lot of fun.

I was packing up when they asked me for another story, and their teacher kindly gave me the time to tell it. I shared Gobbleknoll, and this is where the fluidity of storytelling showed itself so marvellously – even as I was telling it, I sanitised the tale and teased out the bloodier elements – and I thought nothing of stopping to expand or explain something, even to spell out some words. My knowledge of the story and my prior tellings gave me the freedom to tell it for this particular audience on this particular day. That was exhilarating and wonderful and fun and right. The kids loved Rabbit and his stone shoes and his ears tied down. Gobbleknoll has nothing to do with Buddhism – I could have told The Vain Crane or The Tigers & The Strawberry – but it went over well.

I’m learning several more stories at the moment – Aioga, The Name, Three Golden Heads Of The Well – and more and more, I’m finding my own ideas and instincts stepping in. Adding a few words of description here, or a colour there – adjusting a clunky dynamic between two characters – expanding or reducing dialogue. A story is not a box with walls, but a gateway – a road.

I’m learning.

The Magic Bowls

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A quick post in celebration of communities, no matter how small: having finished my storytelling course back in March, I recently met up with my classmates for the first of an irregular and very informal story circle. We met at Kendal Castle towards the end of the heatwave, with just the thinnest edge of cold creeping into the evening. It seems to be a wonderful year for swifts, and a score or more of them barrelled overhead. I told The Magic Bowls, which I first heard on Jay Leeming’s superlative Crane Bag podcast, then later found online.

I’m understanding more and more the looseness and freedom of storytelling; to let the story find its own shape in the space between the teller and the audience. I added quite a lot about the man and his wife at the beginning, because I wanted more love and empathy than the written version suggests – I wanted him to have a reason to come home, rather than keep on walking. I invented descriptions for the tree spirits, with moss for hair and snailshell eyes. Jay’s version turns the burly men into barbers and I kept hold of that, because it’s perfect. I added some participation in the banquet scenes, calling on the audience for their favourite meals: ‘Yes! They had pizza there too, covered in basil and oozing mozzarella!’ Stories evolve. A storyteller needs to give them space to change and grow and flow.

I don’t know how long it took to tell The Magic Bowls – only that it was my longest piece so far, and by some distance. Perhaps 20 minutes? I probably could have timed it or something, but also: much of my joy in storytelling is how ephemeral it is. In a world where so many things are digital and pinned into pixels forever, I like the fleeting moments. I talked too fast at times I think. I need to learn to dwell in some images for longer, not least to vary the pace throughout. I reckon this will come with experience.

Our circle will meet again in a month or two – no idea what I’ll tell, but I’ve a huge list of stories to learn, stories that really sing to me; stories of trees and bees, stories of loss and belonging, and stories which might not be stories at all, half-images summoned from the depths of murky memory. Leviathans inside us all – born with stories already in the cords of our beings.

Gobbleknoll

~ simonsylvester ~ 3 Comments

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There was a great grey lump of a hill that ate people…

…and Rabbit’s Grandmother told him never to go there, and Rabbit being Rabbit he went there as soon as he could, and he thundered his paw on the flank of that hill and called out, ‘Ho! Ho, Gobbleknoll! Open up! Show yourself! I want a word with you…’

…but Gobbleknoll knew Rabbit was trouble, and Gobbleknoll stayed shut.

So begins Gobbleknoll, a short folktale I came across in an Alan Garner collection and originally from the Sioux people. I performed it at the Brewery open mic last night, making for my first public telling, and first time performing since the Stealing Thunder storytelling course.

I added some bits and removed some bits – an extra beat in the middle, and a tweak to the end. Stories evolve. They flow like water from person to person to person, always changing and yet always water. I loved giving the story space to breathe – feeling it settle into the contours and corners of the room. It seemed to go over okay – lots of people spoke to me at the interval or after – most simply stating how good it was to hear a folktale. Adults aren’t given many opportunities to be children, and that’s one of the great gifts of storytelling. Storytelling shuts the door on the scream of life, if only for a moment.

Next up I’m reuniting with my peers from the story course… we’re forming informally, meeting irregularly in a circle to share new work. I’m preparing a story called The Magic Bowls for that one – it has the most wonderful twist.

Storytelling then. Feels like I’ve begun. If I get the chance, I’ll record my take on Gobbleknoll and pop the audio on here.

Open up.

I want a word with you.

Telling tales

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I’ve recently finished a 10-week storytelling course run by Emily Hennessey and Nick Hennessey of Stealing Thunder storynights. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. It’s taken me a while to process to the point that I can write something about it, and in truth I am still digesting, still chewing it over.

Readers of this blog will know I have a longstanding fascination for myths, legends and folktales – that is after all the substance at the heart of The Visitors – but this was the first time I’d ever explored performance skills in any depth. I loved being challenged physically and emotionally and narratively. I loved having my barriers knocked down and becoming something of a child again – finding wonder. I loved learning how folk tales strip away the layers and layers of window dressing we pile onto our stories, opening up the bones of what a story truly says. I loved the simplicity of it; how the arrangement of those bones bring meaning and comfort and magic. Many tellers, many tellings… I learned how stories float like seeds, and different storytellers bring radically different interpretations. I learned some of how the body and voice capture the story, can make it even more simple – a gesture, an almost imperceptible tilt of the eyebrows or the shoulders.

In truth I’m still reeling with it, still counting the distance travelled in those 10 weeks. I finished by telling The Pear Drum, an old English folktale – a caution to naughty children. I loved that too. I loved watching my peers on the course tell their stories – Bridie with Toller’s Neighbours and a line of lanterns in the dark – Ginny and the Grimms, clutching a severed head and dripping three drops of blood on the stairs – Jules and a selkie story, a seal pup in an apron. Magic happened in that horseshoe of chairs.

Above all, I loved the immediacy and urgency of the dynamic between the story, the storyteller and the audience. It happens in a heartbeat and is gone. For all the work I’ve done in prose, screenplay and film, for all my work in screen editing and story editing, for all the books I’ve read and words I’ve written – I don’t think I’ve felt so connected to the pulse of story that beats in us all. Story is in our DNA, knotted in the fibres of our souls. Story is the thing that makes us human.

I don’t quite know what to do with all of this just yet – only that I want to do something, I need to do something. This course has really lit a fire in me. I want to stay alight.