The Live Art of Storytelling Performance

Confusion often prevails when I tell strangers that I run a storytelling club.

“How often do you hold readings?” they ask, and “Do you publish your work?”

And I can understand their confusion, because I remember my own delighted amazement when I first heard that there were actually people who made a living from telling stories to live audiences. But the fact is that there is a ban on reading in the Narrative Arts Club, and the storytellers publish all of our work in live performance.

It is a sign of how marginalised the art of storytelling has become in the industrialised world that the very title of this art form has come to be widely used in a metaphorical sense for a range of other arts, including particularly writing, filmmaking and computer-game design. While storytelling is still practised and patronised as a well-developed profession in countries such as Iran, with rigorous training reminiscent of the now extinct Irish bard, the profession is almost unknown in Ireland. Nevertheless, there are a few dedicated artists working on the island of Ireland who bear the title of “storyteller” in the literal sense of one who tells stories, and who manage to make a living at it.

The fundamental difference between actual storytelling and the other arts that have become the more widespread means of expression for the narrative or dramaturgical impulse in the West is that arts such as writing, filmmaking and computer game design are all “mediated”, while storytelling is “immediate”. That is to say, novels, films and computer games are all distributed and experienced through various media, e.g. books and DVD’s, while storytelling is in essence a live performance, characterised by direct communication between artist and audience.

There is the world of a difference between reading a book and watching live-performance storytelling. Reading is essentially a solitary pursuit, where the narrative is conveyed through the words on the printed page and experienced in the imagination of the reader, and the sensation of the texture of the book in the reader’s hands is dispensable. In contrast, the experience of storytelling is characterised by the co-presence of artist and audience, often in interaction with each other.

Storytelling is visual and auditory, being expressed through the storyteller’s body movements, facial expressions and voice. It is potentially tactile, in that the storyteller might physically touch a member of the audience. It is even potentially olfactory, in that you might possibly catch the scent of the storyteller as he or she passes. Storytelling permits the audience to experience the artist directly through two or more senses. None of these sensory experiences of the artist is possible for the book-reader, the cinema-goer or the computer game-player. Storytelling is a direct experience of the story, and of the storyteller too.

Despite the fundamental difference in the way writing and storytelling convey narratives, there may be strong similarities between the narratives that are conveyed. Because the way we understand conflict and causality are the same whether they are conveyed to us as readers, viewers, players or listeners, the principles of dramaturgy are shared, and so we can speak the same language to discuss and develop our plots.

Having come to storytelling via training in filmmaking at the European Film College and screenwriting at Screenwriters Copenhagen (both in Denmark), I am aware of the sophisticated dramaturgical tools that screenwriting has to offer the storyteller. Turning my head to look from the perspective of the practising storyteller, I can see ways by which a knowledge of my preferred art form may be of benefit to the writer. My experience as the author of a graphic novella adapted from an original storytelling work of my own composition may serve to illustrate:

“Death in Baghdad 2003” was first composed as a satirical, contemporary piece inspired by an ancient Sufi tale, but featuring an American military intelligence officer pursuing his gory fate in war-torn Iraq. Having jotted an outline in the form of ten short phrases on the back of a white DL-size envelope, I rehearsed the tale and performed it in a 55-minute telling to a live audience at a storytelling festival in Denmark in May 2004. I told it again at the same festival the following year, and the year after. I was then commissioned to adapt it as the script of a ten-part graphic novella to be serialised in the summer supplement of the Danish national newspaper Information. A translator friend, Frank Grevil, translated my first English draft, and the paper’s freelance cartoonist, Jenz Koudahl, worked in close consultation with me to draw the ten half-page strips in “a fairly punky style”.

The most exciting and fruitful aspect of developing the story like this was the discovery that the story breathed a life of its own in performance. The presence of the live audience spurred me to improvise in the detail while sticking to a strong plot line. A slip of the tongue, by which I misnamed one of my characters, inspired me to devise a neat plot twist that otherwise might never have occurred to me. Also, the tone of the story shifted markedly from one telling to another: the first telling struck a chilling tone, whereas the second evoked intermittent laughter.

From this experience, I think other writers might find storytelling to be a useful and enjoyable way to keep their work flexible as they compose, giving them the freedom to devise and revise instantaneously until they are happy to commit a draft to text. Storytelling often draws inspiration from traditional sources, but permits and encourages each storyteller to adapt the folktale to suit his or her own experience of life and language. Since the body of folktales is vast and diverse, from the shamanistic Inuit tales collected by Knud Rasmussen to the Arabian Nights translated by Husain Haddawy, there is no end to the sources of inspiration. So, although I have heard of writer’s block, I have never heard of storyteller’s block.

Some writers may discover that they enjoy the thrill of storytelling for its own sake. Catherine Brophy is an example of a published novelist who has recently become a popular favourite in the storytelling night life of Dublin city centre. Perhaps the best club to demonstrate a diversity of approaches to storytelling as it is practised in Ireland these days is Milk and Cookie Stories, which hosts a show with guest tellers and open mike, with free tea and home-baked biscuits, on the second Tuesday of every month. For more details, please see: http://www.milkandcookiestories.com/

The Narrative Arts Club produces occasional shows in which the very diligent Adam Wilson accompanies me in telling new adaptations of old folktales. Over the course of the last year, we have enjoyed an inspiring collaboration with a very talented cellist, Claire Fitch, who loops and distorts her music through a pedal board and other electronic gadgetry, creating evocative soundscapes to suit the shifting moods of our performances. In addition, I hold a “storytelling playschool” once a month, where all are welcome to spend an afternoon playing storytelling games with other writers, comedians and storytellers. For more details, please see: http://www.narrativeartsclub.com/page2.htm

To get on the Narrative Arts Club's list for news of storytelling events in Dublin and elsewhere, please send your e-mail address and/or mobile phone number to:

narrativearts at gmail dot com

or 086 060 3818

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For ongoing news of a diversity of storytelling events in Dublin, organised by different storytelling clubs and performers, please subscribe to the Dublin storytelling blog:

http://www.dublinstorytelling.blogspot.com/

(c) Coilín Oh-Aissieux, August 2011

* Picture is of The O-Aissieux in a scene from the Arabian Nights. Photo by Blanca Perse 2010