Bringing Stories Alive
Learning Stories
It's great to learn stories to tell to your audience. The chief advantage is that knowing a story allows you to put down a book and free up your hands to help bring the story alive. A good way of learning a story is with the Retelling Method.
The method is:
1. Work with one other person. Person A reads all of the story to person B. Person B listens well without trying to read the story.
2. Put the written version away out of sight. Talk together to list all the characters and objects in the story. Have some fun with these e.g. ‘what is dribbling down the side of the big cooking pot?’ Just what does a troll look like?
3. Person B tells his/her own version of the story back to A. You don't have to get it absolutely right. You can make 'mistakes'. You can improvise. Your partner's job is to make it easy for you.
4. Talk together about ways of telling the story that will make the telling more interesting for your listeners.
5. Both teller and listener stand up while person A tells the story using some of the methods that you discussed in the last section. Standing up allows and encourages the teller to bring the story alive with movement, gesture and sound.
6. Talk about ways of involving the audience in the story or ways of co-telling or following up the story.
Some advantages of this method include:
- it works;
- you can work with a colleague and can both learn a story quickly;
- it can be used for learning any story, speech, joke, lyrics of a song;
- it is easily adaptable e.g. the original source doesn't have to be written. It can be an oral source.
- the more you use the method the quicker and the more automatic it becomes.
- it utilizes different modes of thinking about the story thus forming links about the story as you go.
- you prepare your telling of the story as you learn the story.
- it encourages improvisation and creativity
- it cuts down that block or fear of ‘I might forget something or get it wrong.’
Disadvantages include:
- it’s not especially good for learning poems, ballads etc where you want to learn the exact words but it does provide a good base from which you can add the exact words if you like.
Further information on the use of the re-telling method can be found in
- 'Read and Retell': Brown, Hazel and Cambourne, Brian: Methuen, Melb., 1985.
Bringing a story alive.
Every storyteller has his or her own style which develops naturally as one begins to tell stories to audiences. Whatever the style though, one's job is to help bring the story alive for the audience and to respond to the audience.
The first essential element in bringing a story alive is the enjoying of the story. Those stories that you enjoy or that you think have that 'certain something' are the ones that you will most easily be able to bring alive. In fact if you are not enjoying a particular story either find a way of enjoying the telling, or don't tell that story (maybe just read it aloud).
The structure of the retelling method also provides a useful way of working on bringing a story alive. Playing with the description of an object or character in step 2 can turn an ordinary character into a really interesting or more relevant one for a particular audience. Talking about how to tell a story so that it will be more interesting for your audience, step 4, might produce a list something like this:
- movement: i.e. the story can move around the performance area both horizontally and vertically. Also use hand and body movement and mime to help tell the story.
- expression is probably most important
* the easiest way is to add emotion to the telling. Think of how the character/s would be feeling at the time and add that feeling
* add expression with the voice, face, eyes, hands and body;
- characterisation i.e. different characters can have different ways of talking, standing, sitting, and moving. Little Red Riding Hood will speak, walk, and scream differently to her grandmother. One easy way to distinguish is with their emotional make-up eg. Grumpy, Smiley
- props and costumes can be useful but it is best that they be kept simple so as not to distract from the storytelling or absorb energy and time;
- sound effects can be great and are particularly useful for student or audience participation;
- changing the story to make it more humorous, dramatic, relevant, local, identifiable;
- variety of delivery is especially important. As teller you can provide variety by changing tone, loudness, speed, rhythm. This variety can be ordered to provide good pacing ie a sense of the right time to make the right change so that it all adds up to a satisfying whole. This comes with practice and with watching your audience for signs that they are becoming distracted etc. Watch other performers or your colleagues and decide when you would make a change in one of the above or for when the story has gone too long without a change.
Talking about how the audience can be involved in a particular story might give a list like:
- ask the children to join in on the repeating lines of a story
eg"Who's that trip-trapping on my bridge?"
- the children can take parts and help act out some stories
eg the pedlar and the monkeys in 'Caps for Sale';
- they can provide sound effects
eg frog or drinking noises in Tiddalick;
- they can be asked to suggest what should happen in the story next
(be ready for some surprise answers and be ready to improvise if appropriate)
Regularly thinking about how to bring particular stories alive while you are learning with the re-telling method has the added advantage of bringing some of these skills gradually in to your storytelling. Don't forget you don't have to know the story perfectly to be able to tell it. It is far better to tell it, reflect on the performance and improve it next time.
Play
Children in particular want to have fun during storytime. Probably the most important way you the storyteller can add to this is to engender a sense of play. How? Play. Have fun yourself. It’s interesting to think about how a small group of children ‘play make believe’. Basically they all enter into the spirit of the particular scenario. While they all keep on agreeing to do this they are playing. As soon as one says ‘No. I don’t want to do it that way.’ They have an arguement and play stops until everyone says yes again. Saying ‘Yes’ to the story and the wonderful gifts it contains is essential for playing. Saying ‘yes’ to offerings from the audience is another important part of the balance between total unstructured play and telling the story from beginning to end. We can play with this balance.
‘Impro’ by Keith Johnstone (Methuen) has some really good reading on this and many other aspects of performing.
Warm Ups
Warm ups are important from a number of aspects.
i) How do you warm your selves up to good story telling?
- The workshop game 'All the people who' works as a warm up to action, disclosing, storytelling, having fun, spontaneity.
- The 'object stories' work as a warm up to disclosing, interaction with others, thinking creatively, thinking of other sources of stories.
- Doing some physical warm up frees up your body for movement.
- Doing a voice warm up warms up your voice and allows the use of it's full range.
- Putting on your 'costume' or favourite storytelling hat, shoes etc can get you in the right mood. So can just standing watching the children having fun.
ii) How do you warm the audience up?
- What do you want to warm the audience up to?
- I want them to have fun, to pay attention to the story telling, to be curious, to be creative, to enter into the world of each story etc.
Audience warm ups can include:
- your storytelling 'costume' (hat, apron)
- your preparation routine,
- your props eg my trunk,
- a back drop, scenery, costumes, music,
- the way you welcome them into the story telling area,
- the way you behave ie the model you set - are you having fun?
Setting
How the performance area and the audience are set up can have major effects on the success or not of the show. For example:
- perform in front of a wall, divider, curtains, or backdrop so that the audience aren't distracted by activity or movement behind you;
- set up at the opposite end of the room from the toilets, office, kitchen, and any other noise or traffic;
- seat the audience so that their attention is more easily on the telling than on each other. A solid rectangle is the probably the best shape. A horseshoe encourages audience to interact with each other;
- sitting on the floor on rugs or carpets gives best visibility and the least noise;
- seat parents behind the audience not off to one side so that they won't be a source of distraction to the audience.
Point of View
One way of making a story more interesting for you the storyteller and for your audience is to change the point of view of the story i.e. who is telling the story? Three Billy Goats Gruff for example is traditionally told by the narrator but how would it change if it was told by the littlest billy goat, or the troll, or the bridge or even the Pasture Protection Board, or the R.S.P.C.T. This can turn the dullest or the most repeated story into something fresh.
Sources of stories
Stories are everywhere. The most obvious source is from storybooks. In terms of stories to tell rather than read the familiar childrens picture books are not necessarily the best source because the stories are often quite literary rather than oral in style. Collections of folk stories or fairytales from different countries are often a good source of tellable stories. In libraries with a Dewey system they can be found in the 398 section.
You don't have to wait till you've learnt one from a book or another teller. You can make one up or tell the story of one of your experiences or of one of the objects around you.
The object stories exercise is great practice for this. First talk about the object then tell it in the first person. It's good to start this with something like "Hi ! I'm Daryll's jumper." Everyone can do this. It's just a question of practicing in a supportive environment. Asking some one about an object is a good way of getting them to tell you stories. The two most important aspects of the object story are giving the object emotions (expressing them strongly) and creating pictures from the objects point of view e.g. what will a washing machine look, feel, smell like to a football jersey?
You can also make up stories about events that happen, or objects that can be found, in the centre or your children's environment. It may be appropriate to disguise the participants in the story by changing the names to ones that are similar. This may be particularly appropriate if you want the story to work as a lesson or as a way for the child to get over a particular distressing incident. (More info on this technique can be found in 'Annie Stories', Doris Brett; McPhee Gribble/Penguin,1986.)
But basically you find stories by reading lots of stories and selecting those that appeal to you. Collections of folk and fairytales are good sources of traditional stories.
It’s Easy
Don't forget storytelling is a participatory art. The more you do it the better you get and the less scary performing gets.
Don't hesitate to contact me if you would like to ask some questions or would just like some encouragement. Your local Storytellers Guild is also an excellent place to hear other tellers perform, hear different stories, see different styles and to feel like you belong to a tradition that is old as the human race itself. I'm happy to run any more advanced storytelling workshops that you might like to suggest. These can concentrate on specific topics e.g. improvising stories, storytelling for a specific age group, etc.
© 1998 Daryll Bellingham. One copy of the above notes are available for your personal use for developing your storytelling skills. If you would like to copy, distribute or publish them whole or in part please seek my permission.
