Since starting this PhD, a key theme to emerge very quickly has been that of 'context'. I have suspected since the beginning that what is different about storytelling for/with adolescents is much more to do with the
context - or what Michael Wilson (in his 1997 book on adolescents' oral culture) calls 'paraperformance' - than on the actual
telling. The influence of context on an audience's engagement with an artform is a basic idea in art research, which I have kept coming across in different forms.
For example, Augusto Boal in 'Theatre of the Oppressed' describes how Shakespeare originally wrote his plays for an audience who would be chatting, flirting, buying gifts of fruit during the performance - and would need seizing by the scruff of the neck. The much more reverential atmosphere in which we now enjoy Shakespeare plays makes them a fundamentally different experience now.
Back in November I gave a paper here at York St John University to a 'Research Snapshots' conference in the Arts Faculty. This was very much an effort to capture my position at the outset of this PhD - the beliefs I have started to crystallise through my years as a freelance storyteller about the contextual factors influencing a storytelling performance (of any kind) to a contemporary audience of young people. Until I work out how to attach documents into this blog, here it is in full!:
‘It’s not about the story’: articulating a practice-as-research inquiry
into storytelling with adolescents through a focus on context
Cath Heinemeyer, 1st year PhD candidate
Key words:
storytelling, reflective practice, context
Here I am standing before you as a storyteller of the 21st
century, about to embark on three years of practice-led doctoral research into
storytelling with, for and by adolescents – in many cases challenging, troubled
adolescents with thoroughly modern problems in their lives. In this paper I will draw on my own practice
to date and that of others, in order to lay out my starting assumptions, values
and questions about teenagers and the contexts in which they might benefit from
engaging with story.
Yet, to set the scene for you, and to start to articulate my
own research inquiry, I need to start with a brief sojourn in the past, in
times and places where oral storytelling was a simple fact of life. So let me take you back to the 1860s in the
Scottish Highlands. The folklorist
Alexander Carmichael described a ‘ceilidh’, an evening session in the house of
a local storyteller (Briggs 1977, p.3):
“The house of the storyteller is already full, and
it is difficult to get inside, and away from the cold wind and sleet
without. But with that politeness native
to the people, the stranger is pressed to come forward and occupy the seat
vacated for him beside the houseman. The
house is roomy and clean, if homely, with its bright peat fire in the middle of
the floor. There are many present – men
and women, boys and girls. All the women
are seated, and most of the men. Girls are crouched between the knees of
fathers or brothers or friends, while boys are perched wherever – boy-like –
they can climb...The houseman is twisting twigs of heather into ropes to hold
down thatch, a neighbour crofter is twining quicken roots into cords to tie
cows, while another is plaiting bent grass into baskets to hold meal. The housewife is spinning, a daughter is
carding, another daughter is teasing, while a third daughter, supposed to be
working, is away in the background conversing in low whispers with the son of a
neighbouring crofter…The tale is full of incident, action and pathos… Truth overcomes craft, skill conquers
strength, and bravery is rewarded.
Occasionally a momentary excitement occurs when heat and sleep overpower
a boy, and he tumbles down among the people below, to be trounced out and sent
home. When the story is ended it is
discussed and commented upon, and the different characters praised or blamed
according to their merits and the views of the critics.”
Here we have laid out for us a very vivid picture of one
particular, intergenerational social context for storytelling. I would like you to note that teenagers are very
much a part of it, and I would add that most likely the tale told had a
teenager as its protagonist – perhaps a young hero going to find and defeat his
family’s foe, or a folktale of a young girl cast out of her home and forced to
seek her fortune.
Apart from that, the key point here is that this context for
storytelling worked. It was deeply, intimately embedded in the
lives of the participants – it made sense of those lives, and enriched them.
This context is also, however, dead and gone in the UK. Lawrence Millman (1977) documented meetings
with some of the ‘last seanachies’ (traditional bards) in remote parts of the
West of Ireland – old storytellers who had lost their audiences and purpose. Sean Murphy, reduced to telling stories to
his sheep so as to keep them in mind; Tomas Walsh, from whom no tale could be
dragged because the television drowned them out; the Traveller Mickey Ward who
as a young man had travelled from town to town exchanging stories for bed and
board, but who in advanced age struggled even to tempt his youngest grandchild
to listen to one of his half-forgotten ‘histories’. They are poignant figures, cultural relics,
whose experience makes it explicit that there can be no storytelling without
listeners, and without a context in which storytelling is felt to be essential.
And yet Mickey provides a positive signpost to the future
too. For decades he stopped telling
stories and forgot them all, until one day he was forced to go into hospital
for an extended stay, and something about the environment ‘switched on’ his
stories again. ‘I don’t know how it
happened. The stories started comin’
back t’me aisy an’ free, like well-trained ponies. An’ then I started tellin’ them t’other
patients. If there was a fellow in bed,
middlin’ bad, I’d get in a place where he could see me an’ hear me talkin’ and
hear me tellin’ me stories. I’d sit
beside the fellow that was worrit an’ sick, an’ I’d tell him, we’ll say, ‘The
Little Hairy Man of the Forest’, what I hadn’t told in twenty years.” (Millman 1977, p.120-121) The hospital
chaplain praised Mickey for ‘doing more for the patients than the doctors could’,
and called him a saint.
What was it about the hospital that brought the stories back? The captive audience, the lack of distractions,
the shared experience? The fact that
Mickey’s own life had recently been hanging in the balance? The validation by an authority figure of
Mickey’s unique status? My own brief
period as writer in residence in a hospital corroborates the fact that there is
something in the hospital context that does turn people into storytellers, in a
way they can never be in the outside world with all its options for
entertainment and occupation.
Mickey’s experience starts to hint at the nature of a vibrant
‘context’ for storytelling. It shows
that its survival is not dependent on peat fires and spindles, but rather on
being embedded and necessary in
everyday life. So why have I come to
focus on this idea of ‘context’ in my research inquiry, and what do I mean by
it?
TWO RINGS OF CONTEXT
Reading theorists of theatre and storytelling indicates that
there are two ‘rings’ of context around a performance. The outer ring is located in the surrounding
society or culture. Gersie (1997, p.2-3)
emphasises that “economic, educational and cultural differences, with their
resultant privilege and power inequities, are realities which permeate any
telling situation.” Thus a performance
by a professional storyteller to psychiatric patients is a very different
matter to a storytelling circle of amateur enthusiasts who perceive themselves
as equals.
The inner ring consists of the rules and institutions, codes
and expectations surrounding an artform, which influence the way the audience
engage with it, and indeed how it must be presented (Boal 1971; Rowe 2007). Bennett (1997, p.112) suggests that audiences
can only really engage with a performance “through the codes (they) are
accustomed to utilizing”. Boal (1971,
p.177) goes further, by suggesting that any performance art need to conform to
a consistent structure, in order to be accessible to all. Within the structure,
creativity can be limitless, but, he says, “Previous knowledge is indispensable
to full enjoyment.”
Thus, the patients in the psychiatric hospital need to know
to what extent they are expected to interact with the storyteller as opposed to
simply listening; the storytelling circle in the back room of the pub will only
flow satisfyingly if everyone understands the rules of telling by turns, and
giving supportive feedback to other tellers.
What are the implications of this for storytelling with
teenagers, a group who very rarely come into contact with it as an artform? The last four decades have seen a resurgence
of storytelling for both adults and children, giving rise to new contexts,
codes and expectations. I want to turn
next to five ‘dimensions’ of context within this movement, and explore how
adolescents may interact with them, giving examples from my practice and that
of others.
DIMENSIONS OF CONTEXT FOR STORYTELLING
Virtuosity and professionalism
Performance storytelling for adults has developed to a
virtuosic standard in many countries. In
the US, tellers such as Sobol (2008), Harvey (2008) and Radner (2008) have seen
the professionalization and diversification of the artform as an essential move
away from its naive dependence on traditional tropes such as folktales, reminiscences,
and old-fashioned costumes. In the UK, a
debate continues in which some professional tellers see themselves in the
tradition of the elite bards of previous eras or other cultures. They argue that while everyone might be a
storyteller, not everyone can deliver an innovative, ambitious, perhaps genre-blurring
performance (often of myth) for a demanding contemporary theatre audience.
Yet aspiring to ‘be like theatre’ may not be the best way to
engage a teenage audience. Reason (2006)
describes the sense of exclusion and inhibition experienced by teenagers at a
theatre performance of Othello, something that prevented them from becoming
absorbed in the drama itself. The very
performative style of some storytellers may also alienate self-conscious adolescents
at times, particularly in the intimate settings of typical performances and
workshops. In a pilot storytelling
project of the ICAN centre, a group of Year 9 (age 14-15) participants felt
discomfort with the teller’s ‘full-on’ style – it was just ‘too much’ - even
though they admired her and her stories (Reason 2012).
Interaction
Away from the theatrical performance storytelling context,
one staple of many ‘jobbing’ storytellers (including myself) has been school-,
museum-, or festival-based interactive storytelling aimed at a family
audience. UK tellers typically give
informal, intimate renditions of lively folktales, and seek to bring an
audience of children and their carers briefly into another world.
Secondary schools rarely engage storytellers, and teenagers
are usually notable by their absence from storytelling in other informal
settings. When they are there, the
limitations of this mode of telling sometimes become evident. Performing at a small festival this summer, I
found myself in a yurt, unexpectedly telling to a group including not only
young children and parents, but also four teenage boys. I started to spin my tale of Maori
adventurers, inviting the audience to row with me across the ocean, chanting in
time with the oars. The boys rowed – and
how they rowed. They generated enormous
waves that sent them and other audience members crashing to the ground. They parodied the fairies’ wicked
baby-stealing and wailed like abandoned infants; they answered every rhetorical
question with a smart riposte. The
little children were transfixed by them, my ‘web’ of entrancement was broken,
and my cheeks started turning red. And
yet the boys stayed until the end of the performance. Later in the weekend, they asked me to come and
see an intricate ‘fairy theme park’ they had built in the woods, with lookout
points for spotting babies to steal.
Another visual image I often have while telling is of
suspending a ball in the air between me and the audience. The boys would not let me keep it up there
where I wanted it. They wanted to bounce
it and play with it – interaction, yes, but not as I knew it.
Wendy Luttrell (2003), in her ethnography of a pregnant
teenagers’ unit in a US high school, marvels at the creativity of her research
participants within the ‘transitional space’ of the workshops she ran. She wonders that educators don’t make more
use of this delight in performance and play that many adolescents possess. At 14, she discovered, most of her research
participants found it very difficult to narrate their experiences fluently, but
they could enact them eloquently – something which may act as a stepping stone
towards articulate storytelling.
Social embeddedness
Related to the above two ‘dimensions’ is the degree of
emphasis, within any given storytelling context, on what Jo Salas (in Fox and
Dauber 1999), referring to playback theatre, calls the ‘interactive social’
domain. She writes that any social or
artistic event, from a town meeting to a play rehearsal, shares certain “common
criteria for success” (p.21), which must be balanced against artistic criteria:
“These include planning and organisation
according to the purpose of the gathering; a congenial and appropriate physical
environment; an opportunity early in the proceedings for each person to be seen
and heard; an atmosphere of respect; some form of participation or engagement
from all present; the acknowledgement and inclusion of diverse concerns, point
of view, and feelings; time management; a sense of achievement in relation to
the meeting’s intent; and an adequate closure at the end.”
You can refer back to Carmichael’s description of a Highland
ceilidh and see that it answers all of these criteria – even time management,
in a sense! These are things that are of
concern to people whose stake in a performance event goes beyond that of the
ticket-purchasing connoisseur, to the long-term social bonding and wellbeing of
their community. Two examples:
·
Lawrence
Millman interviewed many elderly people who recalled storytelling ceilidhs in
their youth: ‘It was not the story that was in it,’ one old man told me. ‘Not the story really at all, but the idea
you were passing your time with the others.
‘Twas like mass, you see, because we went to the chapel for the same
reason.” (Millman 1977, pp.78-79)
·
Alida Gersie (1997, p.44) recounts how an international government adviser in one of her
storytelling groups told her, with surprise in his voice: “‘I actually tell a
lot of stories whilst I play golf.
That’s mostly what we do when we play… I guess you could say that we’re
a group of wandering storytellers.’…When asked what made this so clearly
important, he replied without much hesitation: ‘To have the space to share
experiences. That’s what you do when you
tell stories. Don’t you agree?’”
It wasn’t
about the story; it wasn’t about the golf; they were, in a sense, a means to an
end. Lots of other equally important
things were going on at the same time. The
evolution of performance storytelling in the revival can perhaps be seen
as an over-emphasis of artistry over the ‘interactive social’ domain; it is
very much about the story. It is also,
however, an attempt to reinvent and disseminate a context for storytelling. Bauman (1986) closely analyses the changing
style of a well-known US storyteller, Ed Bell, as he moved from his starting
context of his fishing ponds business, where he used to spin yarns for back
country fishermen like himself, to the festival stages of the storytelling
revival. The further he got from the
intimate, socially embedded setting of the fishponds, the more his style grew
larger-than-life, luxuriant, explanatory. He had to teach the audience things they did
not know about how to listen to stories; his telling had to be ‘performative’
in the sense of subtly transforming the audience, showing them a different way
of being together as a group.
How does a teenage audience react when storytellers attempt
to transplant them into the social reality of another time and place? Might the ‘interactive social’ domain need to
be rethought for their own needs, so that it isn’t about the story, but the story
becomes an essential route to whatever it really is about for them? I like Jack Zipes’ (1995) formulation that a
storyteller can “point a way toward creating a network within a community that
brings people together around the concerns they may have…” (p.6).
Ritual
To Salas’ dichotomy of ‘artistic’ and ‘interactive social’
dimensions of playback theatre (and I would argue this applies equally to
storytelling), Fox (in Fox and Dauber 1999) adds ‘ritual’ to form a
triangle. The ritual, or rite of passage
element of story has, in most cultures, had a special importance for teenagers
– you could almost say that most myths are about and for them. In a more practical sense, storytelling also
depends on socially recognised ‘rituals’ of starting a story, gaining the
audience’s permission to keep telling, signalling it is over.
Caribbean storytellers are famous for their ‘Crick –
CRACK!’; ‘Once upon a time’ does the same in English folk tales. The equivalents in informal settings, within
the youth group or gathered around the dinner table, are more subtle. My mother-in-law, when moving from ‘normal
conversation’ to ‘storytelling’ mode, always says, ‘Jetzt kommt es!’ (Now it’s
coming!) – then we know to shut up and listen up. Yet where there are multiple entertainment
options right there in the living room, it feels quite counter-cultural, quite
a brave thing to do, to seek to command the generality’s attention in this
way. I have many friends who will pay
for tickets to my storytelling performances, but very few brave enough to
invite me to tell a story at their Christmas party.
What elements of ritual need to be reinvented, in order to
give teenagers access to storytelling as a social practice? Nick Rowe (2007) objects to the idea of
ritual in playback theatre as embodying canonical content, thus limiting the
possibilities open to individual participants in an artform. However, I am talking here of ritual as
encoding process and values, for example, that it is safe to tell and important
to lend an empathetic ear. I am
interested to discover whether groups of young people might invent their own
codes and rituals of telling.
Instrumentality
Debates over the instrumental relationship between arts and
social issues are fraught within all applied arts (e.g. Belfiore and Bennett
2007). Jack Zipes (1995, pp.2-3) has
described a widespread “instrumentalization of the imagination of children” in
education. Within mental health, the use
of arts as therapy (as opposed to
simply arts in mental health or with mental health service users) can
create a more instrumental context and perhaps less equal power relations
(Stannage 2013).
Practice-led research may put a new frame around the question
of instrumentality (Nelson 2013) by welcoming forms of knowing beyond the
‘objective’, and within my research I will need to seek sensitive means of
evaluating the impacts of storytelling on participants’ wellbeing, empathy and
learning, through both ethnographic and artistic approaches. But the question that concerns me here is
rather the participants’ own perceptions of the ‘purpose’ of what they are
doing when engaging with storytelling.
Teenagers’ daily experience of education, health and social
care systems focused on goals, targets and outcomes can lead them to expect a
direct relationship between activities organised for them and some eventual
outcome. They may resist this; for
example, when a local drama practitioner was asked to work with a group of secondary
pupils to tackle bullying, the young people saw her agenda, refused to play
along with it, and she had to change tack and work in a more open-ended way
with them. Alternatively, they may
internalise it: in the ICAN pilot project, one group of 14-15-year-old
participants took part in storytelling workshops during their scheduled history
lessons (Reason 2012). In a focus group,
one comment indicated their perplexity: ‘we’re not going to use it for
anything’. Their expectation of
instrumental, external goals (e.g. that the stories would teach them historical
facts) was unfulfilled.
However, I think both cases above also give a sense of the
young people’s own conditions for committing their energies and creativities:
they perceived the workshops as having come out of the blue – being decontextualized
and lacking transparency – and the storyteller as an “alien, who comes from
some unknown place” (Zipes 1995, p.7). The middle teens is a period in which
young people start to analyse and question the world around them, rather than
simply accepting it (Alrutz 2013). This
suggests that for groups of adolescents, much more than for children, a
precondition for successful engagement with storytelling will be to spend time
co-constructing the context for the work, how it fits into their wider lives,
and why we are doing it.
THE ASPIRATION and THE DIRECTIONS
If one of ICAN’s aspirations is to help return storytelling
to educators and young people as a normal pastime (Mello 2001; Ryan 2008), part
of the texture of everyday life, where can we look for roots of an adolescent
‘context’ for storytelling? None of
these dimensions I have explored provide any answers, but I think they give me
some starting points in my long-term practice with groups of teenagers.
They free me from any obligation to conform to established
genres or ‘codes’ around storytelling, and oblige me to ask participants to
help me create ones that work for them.
I will look to their love of performance and interactivity, but on their
own terms (Luttrell 2003). I will seek
to create safe ‘transitional space’ in which they can play with options for
their own identities (Perry and Rogers 2011). Rather than aim for specific behavioural
outcomes, I will need to prize transparency and involve them as both
co-researchers and co-creators of the rationale for our work together. I hope the work will enshrine and disseminate
their own unique knowledge, rather than follow the agendas of others.
In conclusion, I would like to restate that there is nothing
antiquated about the art, or craft, of storytelling. While the casually and necessarily
intergenerational social context in
which it was embedded in Carmichael’s time has gone, the basic human needs have
not changed. I am looking forward to
finding new ‘rituals of process’ for storytelling with teenagers, and trying to
embed these in their everyday environments of school, extracurricular activities
and home. Teenagers will always respond
differently to adults or to younger children; they will always want to ‘bounce
the ball’; so how can we re-invent the process to celebrate their unique
relationship with story?
REFERENCES
Alrutz, Megan (2013) ‘Sites of
possibility: applied theatre and digital storytelling with youth’. Research
in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 18:1,
pp.44-57.
Bauman, R. (1986) Context, Performance and Event: contextual
studies of oral narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Belfiore, Eleanora and Bennett,
Oliver (2007) ‘Determinants of Impact: Towards a Better Understanding of
Encounters with the Arts’, Cultural
Trends 16:3, pp.225-275
Boal, Augusto (2000) Theatre of the Oppressed, 2nd
edition. London: Pluto Press
Briggs, Katherine M. (1977) British
Folk-tales and Legends: A Sampler. Paladin Books.
Fox, Jonathan and Dauber,
Heinrich (1999) Gathering Voices: Essays
on playback theatre. New Paltz, NY:
Tusitala Publishing.
Gersie,
Alida (1997) Reflections on Therapeutic
Storymaking: the use of stories in groups.
London and Bristol, Pennsylvania: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Harvey, Hannah B. (2008) ‘On the Edge of the Storytelling
World: The Festival Circuit and the Fringe’. Storytelling, Self, Society 4, pp.134-151
Luttrell,
Wendy (2003) Pregnant Bodies, Fertile
Minds: Gender, Race, and the
Schooling of Pregnant Teens. New York: Routledge
Mello, Robin (2001) ‘Building
Bridges: How storytelling influences teacher/student relationships’. Paper presented at the Storytelling in the
Americas conference, St Catherine’s (Ontario), August-Sept 2001
Millman, Lawrence (1977) Our Like Will Not Be Here Again: Notes from
the West of Ireland. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Ruminator Books.
Perry, Mia and Rogers, Theresa (2011) ‘Meddling with ‘drama
class’, muddling ‘urban’: imagining aspects of the urban feminine self through
an experimental theatre process with youth. RiDE:
The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 16:2, pp.197-213.
Radner, Jo (2008) ‘On the Threshold of Power: The
Storytelling Movement Today’. Storytelling,
Self, Society 4, pp.36-49.
Reason,
Matthew (2006) ‘Young audiences and live theatre: Young audiences and live
theatre, Part 2: Perceptions of liveness in performance’. Studies in Theatre and Performance 26:3, pp.221-241
Rowe, Nick (2007) Playing the Other: Dramatizing personal
narratives in playback theatre. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley
Publishers.
Ryan, Patrick (2008) ‘Narrative
Learning / Learning Narratives: Storytelling, experiential learning and
education’, Lecture for George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling, University
of Glamorgan, Thursday, 29 May 2008
Sobol, Joseph Daniel (2008) ‘Contemporary Storytelling: Revived
Traditional Art and Protean Social Agent’.
Storytelling, Self, Society 4,
pp.122-133
Stannage, El (2013) ‘Tread softly: ethical considerations in
participatory arts research’. Paper to Research Methods Conference, York St
John University, 11.11.2013
Zipes, Jack (1995) Creative
Storytelling: Building community, changing lives. London: Routledge.
