Point of Focus or POF: What Is It? How Do You Use It in Storytelling?

Antonio Rocha

One of the most fascinating things about talking shop with storytellers is learning how they do what they do and why they do it. A couple of years ago, Antonio Rocha and I were talking about Focal Points or Points of Focus if you are so inclined.

Focal Points refer to creating objects, characters, and places in space during a performance by giving an audience visual or vocal cues as to where objects or characters are located in the story.

For instance, if you have a mother and son, the son character might turn his head and upper torso to the right and lift his chin to look up at his mother when he speaks to her. The mother turns left and lowers her head when she speaks to her son. 

Another example would be if all of the characters are referring to a particular object like the moon, or a mountain and whenever they refer to that thing, they point to it.  

I have learned over the years not to make that point of focus somewhere behind the audience because audiences of all ages who completely understand that they are not in a palace, jungle, or your living room will automatically turn around and look behind them if you point to something out of their view. 

Anyway, the storyteller establishes the physical presence and autonomy of each character or thing. Audiences track this movement or plaement, and whenever they see the storyteller move their head to engage someone in the story, or point to a specific thing they know what is being referred to, who is speaking, and to whom they are speaking.

This is a great way to help audiences visualize what is happening. 

This is also a skill you learn when you are participating in forensics...no, I am not talking about dissecting bodies or finding biological clues at crime scenes, but the performative speaking competitions I loved so much in high school.

I participated in Original Interpretation and Humorous Interpretation. I was also on the debate team. (I know, shocking!) 

In Humorous Interpretation, you choose a scene out of a play that has multiple characters, and you have to do all of the parts. One of the skills necessary to pull this off is to choose focal points for each character so that you maintain the character's voice and physicality as you move from one person to another over the course of the scene.

 Antonio definitely uses focal points in his story when he has two characters discussing something. If you get a chance to see him, be on the lookout for this very effective technique.

After that discussion, it made me think about how I use POF in my stories. When I first started storytelling, I know that I did a great deal of POF work, and I even taught it in workshops. It has been years since I focused on it in my own work.

There is a reason for this.

After a technique becomes second nature and it is just part of what you do, you don't necessarily think about it. This is why it is hard for some people to articulate how they do what they do. it is just second nature. It doesn't have a vocabulary or a process they identify. It is just what they do!

My discussion with Antonio brought the whole idea of POF raging back at me and caused me to reexamine my current work. I had a feeling that there was some Point of Focus stuff happening, but I had no idea what it looked like. 

Had I gotten exceedingly lazy and just wasn't doing it? 

Was I practicing it without thought. 

There was also the chance I was doing it unconsciously!

So, into performance evaluation mode I went!

I paid attention to what was happening in my stories and how or if I was using POF. I learned some really interesting things!

1. I am definitely using Point of Focus, but it has morphed into a very particular kind of participation technique. 

2. The audience has their own bias about who they want to be in the story and how they want to respond.

3. The audience uses their power of Point of Focus to help them navigate through the story

4. I have way more observation to do as I move through my repertoire!

I love story crafting!

It turns out that the thing that I like to say, that the audience is part of the performance, they affect the performance, and they transform the teller and the stories was the key to helping me look at Point of Focus and understand why I use it the way I do in lots of my stories.

Over time, audiences respond to some things and not others. The more you tell a story, the more it settles into a rhythm. What works stays, what doesn't falls by the wayside, and when you get reactions, you continue to do that thing. It changes the pace, language, and apparently, the Focal Points!

So, here is how these observations play out in a story.

1. Participatory Point of Focus - Instead of having the characters speak directly to each other - apparently, the audience has become one of the characters in some of my stories. This is particularly true of highly participatory stories. The "audience as character" technique works like this. 

When I am any other character, the Point of Focus is the audience. I point at them, look at them, and sweep the audience. When the character the audience inhabits speaks, my focus is much more general and not direct. I look slightly over their heads or am somehow unfocused. (It was pretty amazing to realize I was doing this)

This does not mean the audience only participates with that character, but I certainly treat them as if they are that character.

Example:

I am telling Epaminondus. The character that the audience embodies is the title character. At one point, he puts 2 pounds of butter on his head under his hat. His mother has told him to do this if he is bringing something home he might squish. As he walks home, the butter melts all over him.

Me - He got butter in his hair. I make a face and pretend to flick butter out of my hair.

Audience - (what typically happens is that even though I don't say anything, the audience says "EWWW!"

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Me - He got butter down his face.

Audience - vocalizes his disgust

Me - He got butter down his neck.

Audience - vocalizes his disgust

In other words, there are parts of the tale where I say nothing and the audience speaks for the character without me even cueing them to do so. I was amused to discover that I have several stories like this. I hadn't considered why this happens.

When you have given the character over to the audience, they have the space to jump in and play.

This was not my idea. This is what audiences have done for so long, that I make space in the story for them to do it.

2. The Audience Bias - I have learned that based on the way I craft my stories -audiences have picked which characters they want to become! 

I thought I had been the one choosing who they become and how they move through my stories, but I can now see that they have wrenched the focus out of my hands and decided for themselves who they want to be!

In Epaminondus, I start the story by teaching them the thing his momma says which is, "Epamiinondus, you ain't got the sense you was born with." There is an appropriate black woman neck maneuver that goes with this. It is always fun to watch kids and adults try to move their heads back and forth and then side to side. Some people discover a new skill, and some have never in their lives tried such a thing and they cannot do it for love or money.

The storyteller might have seeded them with mom's physicality and cadences, but they much prefer to be Epmainondus!

3. Emotional Point of Focus - Giving the audience their own character means they have skin in the game when it comes to the outcome of the tale. It also means that they have the power to decide how they are going to navigate the story. 

In the case of Rumplestiltskin, the kids love the funny little guy who shows up and spins the straw to gold. He is funny, sounds silly, and has an odd look to him. He is also helping the miller's Daughter. It is only when he asks for the baby that they begin to question whether or not he is a good guy. 

He has his own sound and way of speaking. I can hear them repeating what he says to themselves as we go through the scenes with the miller's daughter. 

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I understand why they like him. The miller is a liar who got his daughter into the mess. The king is selfish, and he adds to Anna's distress without any concern for her. Anna is miserable and trying to fix the damage that is being inflicted on her by the king and her father...who wouldn't want to hang out inside the only character who comes in with mirth and a peppy attitude?

Just the same, on the last day of the contest to guess his name, when the queen is finally told who he is, they are so excited to watch that grinning little man get in trouble that they use his sound to usher him back into the story with great gusto. 

An audience will turn on a character on a dime if he betrays them. Rumplestiltskin has to face the music in the last scene of that story, and the listeners are calling for his blood!

4. Working the Technique - This way of thinking about an audience is not new, but I have only been focusing on it for a couple of years - most of which have been Covid virtual years, so I haven't had an opportunity to do much fine-tuning. 

I am still discovering how I am using it, and now that I know what I'm seeing, I can make choices about how to shape it effectively. This work is always fascinating to me, and extremely interesting.

I can't wait to find out what I will learn next!

Happy Telling!