Is storytelling 'high art' or 'low art'?

I spend such a lot of time trying to work out what my research is really about. 

Here's a potted history of storytelling:

Once upon a time...it was a folk art, a 'grounded aesthetic' (as Paul Willis would call it) not respected by the art establishment.  It was sometimes conservative, sometimes subversive, sometimes brought communities together, sometimes kept them apart.  Teenage tellers never told it quite the same as their elders, sometimes they didn't even allow their elders in when they were telling.  It was whatever people needed it to be.

The times they were a-changin'...and it became a means of resistance.  One of the many cultural spin-offs of the 1960s.  A rough-edged crusader against high art, elite culture and economic power.

It 'sold out'?!?! It became too good for the arts establishment to miss out on.  It appeared everywhere and became zeitgeisty.  It was best served with a glass of wine and some appropriate world music. 

Time to give it back? It's possible that my whole PhD is about finding whether teenagers want it back, whether they want to make room for it in their 21st century 'grounded aesthetic' or whether it's already there. 

I think, more likely, it's about finding common ground between forms of storytelling flowing up from the 'ground' and down from the 'air'. Finding a 'new vernacular' which works for a given group of young people and 'feeding' or 'seeding' it with stories from the high/low tradition of storytelling while they are getting going (which is my contribution). 

Willis (in Common Culture, 1990), along with most cultural theorists after him, feels that commercial cultural commodities - film, magazines, TV, music, computer games, consumer culture - have stepped into a breach which late capitalism and 'High Art' have left empty.  Work no longer exercises most young people's creativity and skill. 'High Art' comes with its meanings already bundled into it, and repels young people, he says.  Consumer culture and media give them more to play with and transform into their own meanings - so capitalism is the cure for the disease of capitalism. 

Well, maybe so and maybe not.  Storytelling is never some ethereal thing existing independently of the economy - far from it - but I think it would be a very welcome additional presence in that same breach.  Always bearing in mind, it needs to be an 'open' kind of storytelling - a 'writerly text' (thanks Barthes) - which has no specific designs on its listeners.

On my optimistic days, I think the respect now accorded to storytelling as a 'proper' artform might mean it could act as a special language for young people to articulate their perspectives to the adult world. 

Layering stories on stories

I have written before about Jack Zipes' suggestion that we not worry too much about what 'message' we are giving with a particular story - instead we should provide alternative versions of it and let them accuse each other.  His classic example is 'Red Riding Hood' - it could be the classic anti-feminist tale (little girls: stay at home and keep safe!) but providing both matriarchal peasant versions and modern retakes on it (e.g. Quentin Blake's - right - who 'pulls a pistol from her knickers') alongside the Grimm version allows young people to decide for themselves.  More than that - they get a distance and critical perspective on the story-making process itself, and start to be able to use it for their own purposes, and to critique society. 

I have gradually and painfully come round to this, having been reluctant to open stories up to such postmodern dissection.  Yet, Brechtian alienation and all that...I do know he is right.  My preference has been to develop workshops where, rather than presenting versions of the same story, I have told different stories within a similar structure, such as the 'hero's journey' - both mythical and contemporary true stories.  I have helped groups look for the similarities and differences between these and find a structure they can play with.  We've then created a character together, who in some way represents the group or its fantasies.  This character is then sent off on its own story, either by all the group together or each member individually.  These have been some powerful experiences for groups, and generated some tremendous stories.

But you never get to sit still for long in this research game.  On Tuesday I was privileged to attend a brilliant event at my university, York St John, organised by my supervisors Matthew Reason and Nick Rowe.  It was called 'Elusive Evidence' and focused on challenges of documentation and research in applied arts practice - that is, arts in social, health, educational settings.  Run as an 'open space' event, there was plenty of time to discuss with the many stimulating speakers.  One of these talks raised a question for me, which we later explored in discussion.

Olivia Sagan (of Bishop Grossetest University) spoke about the potential for doing harm with our work. It's always possible to see an intense response by a group, and assume this is a good and beneficial one.  Groups I have worked with have certainly produced strong, creative, moving work fed by stories - but might processes like the one I have outlined have risks as well?  Creating a marginalised character to represent a marginalised group of young people might be a horizon-limiting thing - strengthen the bonds between them but make them feel more cut-off from others.  Yesterday a group of 13-year-olds told me their character was 'quite happy living alone with his animals' and did not need to go anywhere or find new friends. 

What are the answers to that? I think Zipes would say, don't sweat it, give them another story!  Let it be a contrasting one which questions the last one.  It can be hard to escape from the 'hero's journey' myth in this age of Disney - find something else, let it be subverted.  And I think forum theatre practitioners would say: stick with it, but let the young people explore all the perspectives in the story, not just that of 'their' character.  Let them put their character in tricky situations.  Celebrate the conflicts in the story. 

Occasionally I have the instincts to do this.  I'll leave you with a great poem written by a bickering and rowdy group of Year 7s yesterday, inspired by the feelings of a cartload of plague victims travelling to their lodge beyond the city bounds.  The teachers and I managed to resist our temptation to smooth over the differences between them - their version of the story became a reflection of the many ways to see a bad situation:

We are divided into rich and poor

We are scared, terrified and shaking

Will we die, there is no cure

I heard we should cut the sores to release the pressure

People are fighting and stealing on the waggon

We should not steal or we’ll go to hell

Thomas Morton is praying for us

But who cares its our last day lets just have fun

In the moonlight we dance around  the fire to cheer ourselves up

 Why is god punishing us?

I don’t want to die

We’re missing our dear children

We did what we could for them

Left them food, look after to each other, stay hidden

I’m thankful they are still alive

But will they survive?

Can a storyteller be as interactive as a computer game - or more so?

On Monday I was at the University of York Theatre, Film and Television department's annual postgraduate symposium.  I gave a paper myself - tackling this question of why teenagers often ask 'was that a true one?' after I'm finished a story - and what this questioning suggests about the practice of storytelling with this age group. 

Seeing that the programme was strong on screenwriting, 'transmedia' and even research into computer games, I wasn't sure how relevant the symposium would be to my own work.  It turned out to be more than relevant - I don't think I've ever scribbled more on my handouts during an event. 

To start from my concern: teenagers' questioning as to whether my (fantastical) stories are true or not might just be because they do believe some quite mad stuff, or because they need to say something to breach the silence.  But does it also suggest that I speak with a false authority, or am imposing yet another 'top-down', unchallengeable form of culture on them, disguised as folk culture? (as in the archetypal scene right!)  Would it be better to work within their own rich 'grounded aesthetic' of film, music, sci fi, dystopias, urban myths, popular culture, fantasy fiction... (see Paul Willis' 1990 book Common Culture) instead of assuming they need me and my stories of long ago, or far away?

I gave my arguments for the defence and some case studies.  Tolkien talks about the story vocabulary of 'stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine' (in his wonderful 1968 essay 'On Fairy Stories', p.10).  This can be a liberating set of images, outside the rules and limitations of our culture and in a way outside any culture.  They are what Baz Kershaw (in his 1997 article 'Performance, Community, Culture') calls a 'rhetorical convention', which create a safe space for an audience to stretch and challenge their own experience and values.  So the question 'was it true?' is perhaps a way of working out how much of the story was 'rhetorical convention' and how much was an 'authenticating convention' - a way of establishing the story's relationship to the truth and how much space it creates for play.

And of course young people do bring their own 'grounded aesthetic' into the mix.  Taking inspiration from Jack Zipes' Creative Storytelling (1995), I have found that 'layering' two stories, for example a mythical 'hero's journey' and a modern-day true equivalent, can lead groups into interesting places.  They add their own associations and invent their own characters and plots which contain elements of what they have just heard, as well as material they bring from other places - e.g. the wonderful character 'Mr Imagination', developed by a group of 13-year-olds with additional learning needs, seems to have much in common with Harry Potter.  In the story they developed about him, Mr Imagination was forced to retreat from society because he could not stop imagining terrible fates for his tormentors, and they all came true - he had to learn to master this power before he could return:

I and the teachers present felt that this powerful story was a way for the group to exercise its substantial creative muscles in a way they often couldn't (and express things about their own identities), feeding off the stories I had told them. 

A few words on some of the speakers at the symposium who gave me food for thought around these concerns:

* Romana Turina's talk on the developing art of storytelling in computer games.  More recent games have characters with depth, interesting storylines, explore aspects of culture and society.  However, there is always a tension between genuine interactivity - that is, allowing the gamer to make his/her own decisions which affect the game - and making sure the storyline of the game is enacted.  This is hard to do and the results can be disappointing.  It is often, to date, the illusion of interactivity.

* A panel of speakers from Bolton University spoke on their innovative transmedia project 'Bolton Storyworld'. This a platform for student creativity, assessment, research, and marketing Bolton University itself.  It has included 120 writers, producers, actors and others; the 'storyworld' features live events, GPS interactive maps of Bolton, social media debates, Youtube programmes, and a website, all centred around a central storyline resembling the X-Files. 

Two things really interested me about this project.  Firstly, the difficulty of balancing the need for a strong storyline with the often chaotic demands of interactivity - as with computer games.  Krishna Stott of the creative agency Bellyfeel showed a graph (right) which shows that the storyworld needs a boundary and the main plot needs to be preeminent, no matter how much 'granular content' you have spinning off from it.  This granular content is not really going to affect the central plot itself, in most cases.  So you mustn't raise false hopes.

Secondly, the inspiring academic leader of the project, Anna Zaluczkowska (who, I was delighted to hear from her accent, is Northern Irish!), talked about how most of the students were much more focused on the quality and arc of the central storyline, than on the postmodern, fragmented, multiple-interpretation potential of it. 

I often hear that young people are instinctively postmodern, living as they do in a relativistic, multimedia world.  And yet, my experience confirms that following a single, unified storyline still holds a unique power.  A group of fragile young people in one of my workshops yesterday were discussing 'Peter Pan'.  One of them said she had heard 'the real story' - that Peter Pan was a malevolent child-snatcher and the pirates were grown-up Lost Boys whom he had never allowed to escape (I think she has picked up on some of the psychoanalytical criticism of J.M. Barrie's book of the last few decades!).  The others, in one voice, protested that she had 'ruined it for them'; that they had loved that book so much.  I suggested they could still love the version they had read or seen, despite hearing another interpretation?  No! they cried unanimously.  They believed in that truth of that story - in some sense it wasn't a story at all, but a form of reality. 

I remember this black-and-white state of mind from my own adolescence.  And isn't this, in fact, what the question 'Was that a true story?' is getting at?  Is this a statement of reality which I can have faith in, and use to move around in? 

So, to wrap this up: I scribbled on my notes 'Let young people play me like a computer game!'  Maybe a storyteller can be a genuinely interactive thing.  The group who invented 'Mr Imagination' could develop a bit more of his story together, then send me away to work it up into a developed story.  I could return for their critique and they could send me off down other paths.  A sort of 'Choose Your Own Adventure'.  Because surely it is an important lesson for a storyteller to teach that we can create our own stories; they are not handed down from the sky.  You can still enjoy Peter Pan, or tell your own version which is safe from the predations of the world if you decide to make it so.  And that could really make you stronger.

What stories do teenagers tell?

Last week I was musing about what stories teenagers enjoy listening to.  But what about the stories they tell - either in response to stories I tell, or more informally in other parts of a workshop?

Well, it's a universe, just as it would be for adults.  It's also likely to be heavily influenced by the kind of stories I have told to them - and, of course, what my ears are open to really hear.  However, I am starting to discern themes and types.  I also perceive common influences on their storytelling style, cultural material from films and books and popular culture that they sometimes weave into their stories, often very creatively.

So here are some.  I'll take younger teenagers first, 12-15s.  I'm going to put them in a (biased, subjective, approximate) hierarchy of greatest to least interest as stories:

• hero tales of misfits and outsiders finding their role in life - or failing to do so
• folktales of the granting of wishes, special powers
• stories about bullying, isolation
• true stories of family mishaps
• urban myths, usually ghoulish
• novelistic stories of the experience of 'being a teenager'
• stories with subverted endings - where the baddie goes unpunished, or the heroine turns out to be corrupt
• tales of judgment, punishment
• action adventures high on technology and short on realism, except sometimes (and strikingly) in realistic relationships between characters
• destructive stories where everyone is killed off and nothing ever really changes

And older teenagers, say 15+ - much of the above but also:

• love stories
• personal tales of how one came to be the way one is, or how a character in a story came to be the way they were
• vampire/horror tales
• stories of personal mishaps and troubles

A lot of this reflects the experience of other tellers who have worked with this age group - but some of the items on these lists I haven't encountered in the literature.  I'd be very interested to hear from you if you have worked with teenagers using storytelling and have any thoughts.

"Was that a true story?"

I will shortly be presenting my first conference paper outside the university - hopefully it won't be too intimidating a venue for this debut, as it's a postgraduate symposium just down the road at the University of York's Dept of Theatre, Film and Television (TFTV), on 2nd June. 

The question I've chosen to tackle in this short paper is one of the things that has surprised me most about storytelling to teenagers: their frequent response to a fantastical story being 'Was that a true one?' Younger children rarely ask this (being less concerned about the difference between reality and fantasy, perhaps), so it takes me aback that their older counterparts often do.  Can a 15-year-old really think that a woman was transformed into a whale?  Or does she actually mean something else by her question?  And what implications does this have for the storytelling exchange between a teller and their teenage listeners?

This is the abstract I've drafted - any thoughts welcome in advance of the symposium!:

‘Was that a true one?’ – teenagers and traditional stories

Cath Heinemeyer, PhD student, York St John University / York Theatre Royal

I use traditional stories and myths as the basis of much of my practice-based research into storytelling with teenagers.  It could be argued that I am importing material, and genres, that are fairly alien to most young people, rather than drawing on their own ‘grounded aesthetic’ (Walcon 2012).  Indeed, the reaction after a story finishes is often a disoriented ‘Was that a true story?’, or variants thereof.  Implicit in this question is some or all of the following:

•          A querying of my authority to tell that particular story; 

•          Unfamiliarity with story conventions;

•          Musing whether this story is a useful source of knowledge and/or worth passing on;

•          The need for a conversational and psychological bridge back into ‘normal’ communication and ‘reality’.

Traditional motifs can, however, act as a ‘rhetorical convention’ (Kershaw 2007), allowing young people to explore possibilities beyond the constraints of their own assumptions.  Tolkien described this story reality as a ‘secondary world’ or ‘sub-creation’ (1968).  In this paper I draw on my work with groups of teenagers in both mainstream and alternative education settings to exemplify how traditional material can provide a surprisingly powerful springboard for young people to tell their own stories.

My experience supports Zipes’ (1995) view that young people benefit from gaining a sense of mastery over story motifs and archetypes by comparing or layering stories over each other.  This contextualises their intellectual concerns about ‘truthfulness’; it also gives them distance from the magical world of the story, as well as from their own daily lives.  In contexts where young people feel safe to draw on aspects of their own personal experience, I describe how certain individuals and groups have moved from this position of ownership of traditional story structures to generate powerful contemporary stories.

What stories do teenagers like?

When I tell people I am researching storytelling with teenagers, the most common question is then, 'What sort of stories do teenagers like, then?'  There is a scepticism in the question: surely it's a matter of competing with films and horror or fantasy fiction?

for example.....!


Well, yes and no.  And I don't know.  In a way it's a 'shadow' question to my main research questions.  The stories which do something for teenagers do themselves act as a key to the 'bigger' questions of what storytelling can do for teenagers, how teenagers engage with storytelling.

My instinct has told me two things from the start, and experience so far has confirmed these. 

Firstly, that I should choose stories which contain all of life.  That is, adult themes such as betrayal, disappointment, violence, abuse, sex, love, exclusion, conflict, should be in there.  These things are present in most of the world's fairytales and mythologies, and the stories help to make sense of them.

The other night I watched a brilliant documentary on the BBC iPlayer, 'Tyger Takes On Porn' - about young people's ever-increasing access to pornography and how it's affecting their relationships.  Watching it, I was thrown back into all my own adolescent anxieties about fitting in, keeping up, being normal.  It reminded me how readily teenagers take on the dominant cultural narratives and how ill-equipped they are to challenge them.  This reinforced for me the fact that sex, for example, should be woven into the plots of stories so that all its myriad sides can be seen as part of a whole story, whole lives, whole relationships.  This might just act as a counterweight to the story of sex which tells young people they must conform to certain trends or stereotypes. 

Secondly, that stories for teenagers should not be neatly wrapped up, or have a simple moral.  Rather, if time permits, they should be involved and open and multi-faceted, like myths.  There should be multiple points of entry and potential identification.  I am guided here by my own reaction to storytellers I listen to.  Hearing the wonderful Jan Blake tell the West African epic of Sogolon over two hours, my friend and I spent another two hours in intense argument and debate over the characters' decisions.  I was struck by the dilemmas of the parents in the story; she was intensely concerned whether the hero had abused or rescued the heroine... Nothing was tied up, everything was up for interpretation.  This is what teenagers need too, I think.  Not parables, but new landscapes in which they can explore what happens to X when Y does Z and whether it was Y's fault or indeed F's, or maybe it was fate or society....

These two 'principles' are not research, however - they are beliefs, or even preconceived notions.  To test them, I'd need to try other kinds of stories as well, where there is perhaps a simple message.  There might well be a place for the simple metaphorical tale  - for example, therapists who use story often choose these kinds of tale (see for example G.W. Burns' (2005) 101 Healing Stories for Kids and Teens: using metaphors in therapy) - but I am not drawn to them when faced with a teenage audience.  And it's very hard for a storyteller to tell a story she doesn't feel like telling.

And yet I have to confess that teenagers often seem to like telling them.  At the Young Storyteller of the Year competition I heard the story of the giant Fear who gets smaller the nearer you go to him, told and received with great enthusiasm.  Teenagers, like anyone, like what they recognise.  Sometimes, if I tell a story that seems too 'different' or morally ambiguous, the reaction will be simply 'that story was weird'.

So what marks out my practice as 'research', then? How will I use my practice as a vehicle to answer this 'shadow' question?  I try to pay attention to what surprises me.  I have been struck by the response of two different groups of teenagers with additional needs to the hero myths of various cultures.  I have been just as struck by the uproar with which another group responded to a story ending which did not please them - which violated their sense of what was a 'proper' story.  These 'janglings', where a group makes its collective feelings known, are one thing. And on a finer-grained scale, it's the old thing: in the eye contact between me and the listeners, the moment-to-moment shifts in mood and attention, that you always attend to anyway as a storyteller.  It's a matter of attending to it more critically, storing it away for reflection afterwards.

Next on my reading list is Gail de Vos' annotated bibliography 'Storytelling with Young Adults: a guide to tales for teens'.  I am interested to see whether her choices of material chime with my instincts and findings so far. 

More musings on copying and retelling

On Friday I attended a seminar led by my main academic supervisor Matthew Reason on 'documentation and disappearance' which raised further thoughts around copying and retelling (see previous posts). 

One theme we discussed is the ephemerality of performance - how the telling of a story, say, can never be repeated or fully documented, so there is a little bit of loss, or death even, at the heart of it.  We fear this and make many and varied efforts to capture and retain the essence of the experience.  This struck a big jangling chord with me.  Of course I have to document my workshops for the purposes of my research, but is there another deeper and more basic reason for it?

Last week I held a workshop with a group of Key Stage 3 pupils with additional learning needs.  I hadn't seen them since November, that's six months ago now.  That time I told them the Sumerian myth of 'Lugalbanda' and the group made a poster retelling the story visually - since then, the poster has remained on the classroom wall.  So I wasn't that surprised that they all recalled the session, but I was astounded by one boy who retold us the whole thing in great detail.  He gave many visual details which I had put into my original telling, but his words were all his own, and they were fluent and moving.  There was stunned silence and then applause.  He put his head in his hands, as if overwhelmed by the effort he'd just made. 

This was, of course, like a birthday present for me, and his teacher.  We got it on audio tape.  We were delighted that it had made such an impression on him, and that he had revealed such a talent.  But what exactly was delightful about this?  He had stuck quite closely to my version of the story, rather than making significant interpretations of his own.  This happens quite often, particularly with classes less familiar with drama and creative work.  

You could say the poster, and the retelling, were as much for the gratification of myself as storyteller - to assure me that my work was not ephemeral and pointless - as for the young people.  Maybe he felt my strong desire to hear the story back from him, and this was the cause of his exhaustion afterwards. 

I suppose the other question for me is: if a young person deeply absorbs and retells the details of my version of a story, are they also unquestioningly accepting my version of its causality, morality, themes?  How can I find this out?  And what does it mean for how I ought to tell?  Ought I to leave more 'blank spaces' for the listeners to fill in their own details? 

There could be a role for this simple absorption of a story.  Over a lifetime we integrate and reexamine all these stories which influence us, and create out of them what we need.  But I must admit it is gratifying when this process (rarely) materialises in front of your eyes.  I have had workshops where young people have moved well free of my telling and its moral arc, and used it to generate new material of their own - and this is where a real sense of the rightness and value of a story come in.  But I can't make this happen if the conditions are not right. 

I continue to believe that retelling is the first step towards transformation, rewriting of the story and (in a small way) of oneself, but it has become a bit more of a problematic idea for me.