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taken from a photograph by HeppieOne of my missions this semester is to seek narrative in all types of performance, which leads to a collection of minor musings on a performance poet, a computer game, and a burlesque show.
I nearly missed the performance poet, since he performs under the title Athens Boys Choir, and I’ve never been a huge fan of choral music. I’ve not seen a lot of performance poetry, and despite a fascination which stretches back to Kerouac and Ginsberg, I tend to stay away because of how often Open Mic nights turn out to be painful. But, it seems an essential genre to understand in relation to Storyteling – with a performance circuit whose audience might be prepared to crossover and become our attenders – and a theoretical connection via the characteristics of oral culture as explored by theorists such as Ong, which can be found in some of the street conversation from which rap has evolved.
Katz is not the greatest artist. The event is important in social terms – profile for a transgender performer – who is happy to play with depicting themself as vulnerable and needy in order to gain audience sympathy – but as a rule, the poetry whilst perhaps valuable to anyone struggling with identity issues, does not have that transcendant wider appeal. The rhythms are just not that strong, the metaphors not that interesting. Narrative is, at best, implied (which is not a weakness per se, but lacking other interest, narrative might have been useful). Unlike pictorial implied narrative which takes a single action from a story, and suggests the rest, the discourse of Katz’s poetry focuses on expressing a range of emotional states – from which we might extrapolate the narrative which created them.
Its main interest for me is in how the body movement is used to recall language . When Katz stumbles for words, he bends his body and moves his free hand, sketching through a series of postures until he hits the one that conjures the next line. Very vivid.
The second half of the show is cheap video edited sexual content and very poor hip hop, accompanied by trying to get a relatively unwilling audience to dance. Weak.
From a performance where narrative is absolutely not essential, to one where it truly is – but definitely hasn’t been understood as necessary by the performers. Firstly, let me say that Bettina May and Gogo Amy are both gorgeous, talented costume makers and reasonably skilled dancers and creators of the Burlesque image. Heather Holiday frightening as a sword swallower and Donny Vomit is an accomplished compere, and is the one performer who shows an understanding of how narrative can add to his act – particularly in the tiny poem that accompanies the mousetrapped tongue…
However, though broadly entertaining, the show totally fails to reach its potential by ignoring the importance of narrative. And before you suggest that narrative is not necessary to the titillation of burlesque, and that I am applying inappropriate standards, let me explain. I used to live with a guy who wrote scripts for telephone sex lines. These are character (well ok stereotype) driven narratives. The control of narrative development and pace is essential to both the clients pleasure and the profit margin of the service provider. Without a doubt, good burlesque should operate on the same lines, but with a greater artistic sensibility where possible.
The raw materials are there in the Pretty Things Peep Show – Gogo Amy strips to “This Old House” and almost bothers to establish a housewife character, Bettina May starts a prison routine well, pouting over being stuck in handcuffs, but takes it nowhere. In every routine, the reveal happens very quickly, with almost no tease. The mood, for every routine, no matter what the costume, is the same.
On this level the failure to pay attention to narrative only makes the show a little dull. At the overarching level, the same failure costs the company money. They are operating a popular carni model known to me (admittedly only via HBO’s Carnivale) as the Flop – a final act, which the audience needs to pay for to see. The major prop for this act is on stage throughout – but no one mentions it until the end of the show, nor is it carefully treated as an object not to be mentioned. With no narrative to build our interest early on, Donny Vomit has to try to whip up a frenzy following the last act, and it can’t be more than 10% of the audience that he draws in. I’m convinced early build up through a careful narrative could have turned my interest around. (although there is also the issue that the audience don’t seem to get to see anymore than they have at any other point in the show – something needs to be held back, or an illusion created that the prop offers a view that is somehow better)
And last, to an event that is not really a performance at all. Echo Bazaar is a computer game. One that is being loudly touted as a wonderful piece of storytelling.
Now I rather think that I am on the side of Espen Arseth, who argues that discussing games in terms of their storytelling ability devalues what games actually are, (here, and I assume elsewhere also) and that different modes of analysis are required. But if people are going to insist on describing games as storytelling, then I don’t think Echo Bazaar is a good example. It is a game with wonderful snippets of writing. It has a colourful world background, which may – if you are prepared to spend a very long time in the gameworld – turn out to be a beautifully constructed story. But fundamentally the following seem to be true about the gameplay (in the initial stages at least – I find the repetitive grind of the game too tedious to investigate whether this changes later on):
- The player is put in the position of being an active central character in an unfolding story
- Random information is provided – unrelated to game actions – which drips information about the world, and background story
- The player cannot use any of that information to inform their action choices whilst playing their character (a side competition is running so players may speculate on world truths)
- Whilst actions have consequences – opening up new chains of events – they do not have parallel consequences closing off chains of events (eg you can simultaneously be buiding connections with church, hell, bohemians, and having disturbing dreams from all directions). In order to create a personal story where plausible cause and effect occur, the player has to limit their action choices more than the game interface does
- The player has to repeat actions to progress and this requires significant suspension of belief in order for it not to interfere with a narrative unfolding
There are other flaws – but the perspective I am moving towards is that if a game is to be praised for its storytelling – then it must offer a narrative experience for the player as the focus of its game play – rather than them having to construct that narrative experience in spite of the game play.
I don’t think that it is necessary for a game to take this approach in order to be a good game, but I wonder at why commentators are prepared to celebrate the storytelling of a game which does not actually attempt to provide a narrative experience. I’d appreciate thoughts on this, particularly from those playing, and anyone who sees the presentations at The Story
I hate to be British and constantly comment on the weather, but yesterday began in thick fog with a cold sun hidden behind it, then hit 70 and clear blues in the sun by 11am. This is November in Tennessee.
Hate sitting in the classroom in this weather, with mountains just out of my transportational reach, but between taking lecture notes, I’m finally getting round to a quick review of National Story Night. This is run by National Storytelling Network (one of the two major Jonesborough organisations with professional staff, the other being the ISC (International Storytelling Center), who run the festival and the May – October weekly teller in residence program). And yes, there’s a political history to all that!
National Story Night offered everything the festival didn’t. Scheduled to begin at 8pm, on a not particularly warm night in early October, in one of the large festival marquees, there was bustle and joy as people arrived, many dressed up, a sense of reunion in the air.
Well I didn’t finish this when I started, and in between I escaped from storytelling altogether for a day, to hike Buffalo Mountain. If you have a car, it’s an easy hike. Three or four miles on trails that are so sensitively made that often they are a cut into the side of the hillside not much more than a foot wide, and part of that slipping down the slope. When I got there I had to focus hard on moving forwards and trusting balance to beat vertigo kicking in, particularly where the vegetation was thin. Sheer bliss though. Solitude, as I chose one of the least well used trails for the ascent, and then 3000ft above sea level (cheating, the city is at 1500), the tree topped ridge blocking the fact there are radio masts on the next peak over, and the view through the haze to five or six ridges distant .
To get there, I had to walk a mile of suburban streets, and a mile of state highway winding through a valley called Dry Creek – though it was the quietest road I’ve been on – before heading up the trail of more than 20 switchbacks, then skirting a valley side before more switchbacks to join a ridge to reach the summit. The leaves were dropping as I walked, and the reds were bright, brighter than bright in the undergrowth against the blackened trunks of a forest fire a season or more ago. Hanging round a few corners, the bark of the thin trunks that I clung to felt familiar – on further inspection they turn out to be almost leafless rhodedendrons, and I was instantly transported to Hawkstone Park.
To get back to civilization I chose a trail called Cascades, that led instead to a trickle, but also took me down Staircase Spur, and to several stunning viewpoints, before I had to slog the final five miles back on tarmac. Ice cream was necessary as a reward
But you were waiting to hear about National Story Night. Well it is gradually fading in memory but I shall do my best. From the all American gung ho emceeing of Kindra Hall, to the closing communal singingit is an event that seemed to pull people together. I opted out of the singing, but it got me nevertheless, when in an interval between choruses they began to name the dead. It was a marathon – five tellers in the first half which lasted about an hour and a half, then a second half of award ceremony, where of course, both those doing the presenting and those doing the receiving liked to tell stories.
Particular points of interest? Well foremost in my mind there is Valerie Tutson. For a start, in poise, movement and vocal dexterity she seems to me an American Xanthe. Her material was more straightforward though. A subtle blending of her account of meeting a spiritual and storytelling mentor in South Africa, together with a retelling of one of his tales. She was the first glimpse (prior to Baba Jamal) of the kind of storytelling I am most interested in, and prompted me to start asking questions about the extent of the Afro/Caribbean influence on storytelling in the UK.
Secondly, though chronologically actually they came first, and interestingly, in relation to Young Storytellers work in the UK, the show was opened by Misty and Autumn Joy two young, multi-lingual US tellers. They sing, they shake, they shimmy. They get the audience on their feet. They use two languages. They are engrossing. And somewhere in between all that, they tell the pourquoi tale about the frog going to the party in the sky. I enjoyed them. But I think they fall into the trap that some of our young storytellers can fall into of putting the performance so far up front, that they’ve almost forgotten the story is why they are there (this does not apply, I hasten to add, to Tim whose blogging I linked to above). I’ve heard this story before. Michael Harvey tells it (and his Frog sounds like Rigsby from Rising Damp) it is both hysterically funny and heart wrenching. Here it was neither. On the other hand it got the night off to a rousing start. Maybe I shouldn’t complain. But I think it is a dilemma.
They die slowly. The cicadas that is. Not a sudden silence, but a gradual diminishing of sound. Meanwhile, there is frost in the morning, trees of every shade of orange and red over the mountainsides, but the grass is still green, and the air fills every afternoon with the hum of ride-on lawn mowers. My senses are confused and Fall smells of the cut grass of summer.
I wandered through this Fall/Summer sun yesterday afternoon, trying to find my way to the small mountain ridge not far from my house. Thwarted, by private drives and no trespassing signs, I made it instead round a looping road called Sinking Creek, complete with said creek babbling alongside. In between larger houses with airy roofs, and porch colonnades sit trailer homes which remind me of English farmyards. Collections of children’s play equipment rust and tip in front gardens, whilst grassy yards are full of overgrown vehicles. One here has a yellow school bus next to a pepsi cola trailer. I am walking through a rural graveyard of Americana. I could see my breath in the air this morning, but I have sunburnt shoulders from that afternoon stroll.
In other respects, the weather reminds me of home. The past couple of weeks have been mostly raining, and if not raining, damp. Mist makes everywhere look the same. There is nowhere in the Lake District, where I could see the colors I experienced at Grayson Highlands Park a couple of weeks ago, but somehow the mist made it feel like Grizedale last February. The differences of the city too, are less noticeable in rain.
The physical differences at least. Walking in the rain I discover unusual traits in the people. Drivers on the main roads ignore me and soak me as they pass just as I would expect, but on the narrow road that winds over the hill to my house I get one of two responses. People lean out of the windows either to yell “get out of the road” or “would you like a ride”. I can tell which it is going to be, because the second type slow down. I’ve only accepted one lift, on a day where my various errands had me fitting about 8 miles walking into the day. It was only a short ride, thankfully, as the very kindly lady proceeded to tell me that my aura looked in need and the Lord was here to save me. I ungratefully wondered why the Lord didn’t tell her that she could heal the planet’s aura if she stopped driving a ginormous 4×4 round city streets.
More about the changing seasons bound to follow, plus some bite size performance reviews.
I promised a National Storytelling Festival review – and so here it is. The voice you may find a little strained, as it is written for a class essay as well as a blog!
The National Storytelling Festival is an event that suits its town. Tickets are calico swatches, giving attendees the opportunity to take away a piece of Historic Jonesborough, whose main street, lined with antique shops and candy stores, provides the backdrop for the festival. On those streets, an audience made up of predominantly white over 55s form queues for food, and vanish into the performance tents. The town’s population has swelled by several thousand, but away from the events themselves, it doesn’t feel crowded and at break times I wonder where people are.
Most notable is the lack of families. One tent is programmed with family material on the Friday of the Festival – the choice of day reflecting the fact, I assume, not having made it to view the audience, that it is mostly schools which take up the opportunity. Other than my fellow student David, who is frequently to be found blowing bubbles on the street, there are no arts and crafts, no music making, no processions. None of the the things that would enable families to break up their day between performances – except of course the food.
The lack of family events is compounded by a general lack of anything happening spontaneously. I have to fill in two pieces of paper, and be given a third in order to tell at the Swapping Ground – where a superfluous microphone is set up to tell to four rows of haybales. (And yes, I do admit my hatred of microphones is down to personal poor skills in that area). In the tents, the Emcee’s announce the festival rules before every performance. Necessary perhaps – although an interesting twitter/blog debate about whether the organisers have missed the point of social media is running which could reduce that list of rules significantly – but it creates an idea that the audience is not to be trusted (always correct for a small proportion, and the larger the overall numbers, the more the small proportion matters)which I dislike.
But would the audience actually have time for spontaneity? More often than not in the breaks they are heading to save a seat to see one of the regular featured tellers, telling personal stories in a southern tradition. Shared points of reference, that might be called way of life indicators, abound and nostalgia for bygone days or rural ways are pedaled from a raised stage, to over 1500 listeners. A student from Kennesaw University described it scathingly “They’re all the same story, a child does something naughty or a preacher does something unusual and a good lesson is learned while we laugh” . And whilst he is harsh, it is not entirely unfair. Even the surreal stylings of Bill Lepp who even manages to slip in some light political comedy, don”t stray too far from that pattern. Familiarity seems to be what a large percentage of the Jonesborough audience seek – and I feel churlish criticising, and attempt to appreciate the festival on its own terms. Some of these tellers are masters of this particular branch of the art, and vastly entertaining.
My perspective is also somewhat skewed because I have two five hour shifts monitoring the biggest, most popular tent. Of course, there are other types of storytelling represented – I hear of crowds following the Reverend Robert Jones from tent to tent – one of the new voices at the festival he blends storytelling and music; and Niall de Burca is a hit – wearing a radio mike, shifting about on stage, and playing with the audience, drawing them in and throwing in fake jump moments just to prove he has them in the palm of his hand.
There are also performances which I don’t think we would count as storytelling in the UK. Oral recitation is appreciated, even eyes closed, arms lifted, head tilted to the ceiling recitation of a self penned fairy tale as offered by Jennifer Munro got a standing ovation (to be fair to her, her equally recited story of pregnancy which formed the first half of the set was clever and well delivered) while Syd Lieberman and Barbara Macbride Smith both effectively deliver scripts written by their spouses.
But the variety feels like dressing tacked around the southern core. You have to search hard for the really powerful moments. I did get one, tucked away in the Tent on the Hill which is a tenth of the size of the largest venue. There, Baba Jamal Koram got an early morning audience singing a four part piece with barely a blink of his eye; told a simple ” girl teaching an eagle to fly” story with magical moments of metanarrative, and then whilst telling a wonderful tale, in a fashion so oral you don’t doubt that the source he quoted was purely that, he managed to stop – seguy into three or four minutes of personal narrative and back to the tale again. Deep moods.
And I would go and sit through all the rest again just to hear Baba Jamal give that performance. But I am left with two questions nagging at me, and I know they have been asked before. Has the size of this festival weakened the sense of both festivity and of community? And does it really represent storytelling in the USA today?
Acclimatizing to life in Johnston City has been a process of absorbing new sounds.
For many weeks after I arrived, I found myself waking between two and three am, at first assuming it was some strange lagging remnant of jet lag. Eventually I realised I was being woken by the hoot of the train rattling past on its tracks almost half a mile away.
These are freight trains, and I cross the bridge above their tracks at least twice a day. They screech by, endless rusting wagons full of coal, stretching out of sight in both directions, while I stand there. I stand long enough to consider the movement of coal in relation to the hill top mining protest gig I failed to attend; to wish that the well used tracks carried passengers as well as freight and to note the lack of sliding doors and possibilities for hopping into a carriage; to hear snippets of Tom Paxton’s “The man who built the bridges” playing in the back of my mind and to gawp open mouthed in both directions like a slow motion spectator at a tennis match. These same trains are a rite of passage for tellers at the National Storytelling Festival – interrupting performances for up to five minutes at a time.
The trains are only the first of the alien sounds which form part of the pattern of the day here. From Millie, the lovely mongrel in our back yard, to the yappy creatures at the top of the hill who like to bring me to a standstill, my route to school is accompanied by the howls of different hounds. As they get used to my presence, the volume doesn’t diminish.
The tone has changed over the weeks though. The white Alsatians behind the Beware of the Dog sign still greet me at the edge of their wire fence. They have exchanged an aggressive stance behind the main gate, for running round the perimeter with me, yelping joyfully (I imagine) to have company for a short while. I don’t like the culture of keeping dogs here – the yards are large and grassy, and in the case of Millie, she gets plenty of attention from her owner – but they don’t get taken for walks, and somehow it seems wrong.
Another constant accompaniment to the walk to school came as a huge surprise. Cicadas. Previously associated with mediterranean seas, feta salad, and mountain goats. Here they are present in every corner of the city, and loud. So loud, that to start with I thought they were something to do with the telegraph poles and electric cables. Vibrating throughout the day, but loudest of all in the dark of the humid September nights where the constant chirrup on several different pitches verges on the oppressive. They are still going now, in October, although less strident, and I wonder whether they will gradually fade away, or I will wake one morning and all of a sudden there will be no cicadas at all. The first cold air has already come, and they aren’t gone yet.
We’re reviewing Albert Lord and Walter Ong in one of my classes at present – and the three phase model of learning to tell (listen to tales, practice without making it far from the idiom of the tellers you’ve heard, evolve your own style) are very much in my mind. Particularly as I listen back to some of my work on telling Loki’s punishment and hear cadences that I’m sure belonged to Jo Blake, or more often cringe and think “now you’re just trying to sound like Xanthe again”.
Well if having multiple masters is any way to head for a strong voice of your own, I’ve made the right choice in coming to Tennessee. There are performances in Jonesborough every week – and the style is very different to the UK.
Jonesborough Storytelling Guild has been around for fifteen years. In many ways, its open night each Wednesday shares a great deal with the Storytelling Cafe model. It is based in the back room of a fabulous cafe called the Cranberry Thistle, which does the best hot roast sandwiches and an interesting dish called a Blue Plate special, which doesn’t come on a blue plate. It also does cake. There is not quite enough room for all the audience, who are a mixture or regulars and those visiting the area. Finally, unlike many guild events, instead of a storyround, each week there are one or two featured tellers and some shorter guild spots.
They have the advantage of being in a town which people visit specifically to hear storytelling, and also of being connected with the International Storytelling Center – whose storyteller in residence performs as a featured teller every week between April and September – unheard of luxury in terms of funded programming for us in the UK (although I’ve been told that the teller-in-residence program is entirely self sustaining). Interestingly, guild members go through a series of 3 auditions and MC training before they are admitted to the telling roster. Does all this add up to a great night’s entertainment?
Coming from the UK tradition, so heavily rooted in folk tale, wonder tale and epic, it is a real shift of ear for me. Personal stories are the bread and butter here. Three weeks I’ve been going, and I’ve heard them in a range of styles. Quirky, quite clever story poems are one. Then there are the slowly, slowly told old time stories with laughter and morality, from local Appalachian tradition bearers (have you heard the one about the preacher who, in the habit of performing “miracles” in front of his congregation, got his comeuppance when a couple of small boys greased the glass plate he was going to use to walk on water). But the most common are what I would call “recognisable experience stories” (summer camp, teaching troublesome students, a childhood trauma) told, to my ear, with strong voice and good physicality, but an awful lot of exposition and not always the strongest use of pace.
As you might guess, I struggle with the latter. There is variety though, folk tales do turn up, and humorous tales told by a husband and wife duo – and though here as a storytelle, Chic Streetman is a great blues singer who happens to frame his songs with well put together life story patter. I’m sure there will be more over the course of the year. I would also add that the MC’s have been excellent (and on one week for me probably my favorite part of the evening)
But rather than the individual performances, I am fascinated by the event itself – because it offers a strange blend of a public and closed community space. Last week we celebrated the wedding anniversary of two of the tellers with a blessing. The tourist visitors loved it, and I couldn’t decide whether I was kitsched out or quite moved (the not being able to decide means it was powerful – normally I’d have found something like that cringeworthy). I’m not close to articulating it yet, but I think there is something interesting about an event which creates that kind of sense of sharing and community in its audience. It’s not appropriate for everything of course – but sometimes it is. Perhaps the closest I have found to it in the uk is the wonderful warm atmosphere Taffy and Chrissy wrap everyone up in at their events, although it is also turning up in the cakes that seem to be accompanying Mythstories series of workshops this year.
I think we all like to feel part of a tradition from time to time.
Saw my first fireflies last night, or lightening bugs, as my housemate from Virginia likes to call them. Popping up out of the lawns in front of the houses as I walk down our road laden with grocery bags, they flash and fade so fast I have to count a few before I’m sure they’re real.
But let me wind back a little. Just over two weeks ago I landed in Douglas airport, Charlotte and bought a copy of Time Magazine. My first ever arrival in America and the soundtrack that invades my brain is Allen Ginsberg reading America over the piano playing of Tom Waits. Perhaps this is why I experience the boarding gates area of the airport as a street market where flight attendants hawk their trips to waiting passengers in accents from every corner of America. I am certain that the red faced attendant touting tickets to Huntsville, Texas calls out for ‘last seats and souls’ to board before the plane leaves – but that might just be because of Mr Sandmann.
A night’s sleep in Johnson City and I settle into a few days of rampant consumerism: buying furniture for a wonderful (walk-in wardrobe, en suite bathroom) but barely furnished room; succumbing to the lure of Wallmart and therefore failing my “stick to my ethical shopping principals” test from the word go and being confused by the way cell phone contracts work.
The next phase of acclimatisation was getting the office in order. I’ve emptied and refiled a filing cabinet, salvaged an ailing Outlook contacts system, and built a simple database in the last few days – all this whilst completing immigration bureaucracy and beginning the process of noticing all the minor, don’t matter at all, but stop you briefly in your tracks nevertheless, cultural differences. Earlier this summer, in a storytelling workshop, we all cried out in confusion as an American on the course mimed switching a light switch on by pushing it up instead of down – the flip-side of this is that in America, every time I go to switch on a light, I miss. Also, I have to dial 8, not 9 for an outside line. Oddly, it is the things that are arbitrary in the first place that puzzle me most as cultural differences.
On an entirely different scale, the city is odd to me. The whole thing feels like suburbs – drive in restaurants, out of town shopping malls and detached houses with lawns everywhere – there is no height to it, not even in the area they call downtown. And yes, on our road there are at least three porches with rocking chairs – although they are usually inhabited by small dogs not southern belles or dashing gentlemen. My walk to school involves climbing up over a hill past a piece of woodland that I want to call jungle because it is so creeper laden. It is a narrow road with quirky wooden houses and lots of twists and turns that lead to views – some of the city, one across to the blue balloon of a water tower, and all taking in the dragon back mountain ridges that surround the city. Alien mountains – they are covered right to the very tops with trees.
Classes have begun, alongside the storytelling itself, I am studying narrative across media, which promises to get interesting as it will encompass interactive narrative and other elements/worlds. There are already rumours that my professor and I may work on creating a conference called Imagined Worlds, inspired in part by the fact he was accidentally in Leipzig during WGT this year.
Lastly, I have already found my home from home here. The Acoustic Coffeehouse, where we will hold a monthly story night, and which has open mic nights and bands and benefit gigs, and serves chai, smoothies and milkshakes alongside free wi-fi – what more could I need?
