Skills of a Lifetime Are Useless: Rethinking Performing

I have a degree in theatre from Northwestern University!

I trained with Rives Collins!

I was mentored by Nancy Donoval, Sue O'Halloran, Beth Horner, Jackie Torrence, Janice Del Negro, Jim May, Syd Lieberman, Donald Davis, Jay O'Callahan, Dovie Thomason and many others!

I know how to read an audience. I know how to find the sweet spot in the story that reaches out and grabs people's hearts.

I know how to approach an audience and find a place where we can build a community together.

I know how to use stories to reach through generational and cultural barriers.

I know how to craft stories for different age groups, and adjust those stories in the blink of an eye if I feel the need to do so.

In the world of a global pandemic, none of those skills matter.

Why?

I didn't train to be a sound engineer!

I didn't train to be a video editor!

I didn't train to be a film director!

I didn't rain to design lights!

I didn't train to be a tech director!

I didn't train to design soundtracks!

I know how to tell stories.
I know how to tell stories to live audiences.

That's what I got.

Unfortunately.....

Yeah, typically it is monkeys, but I like frogs

1. I cannot see my audience.

There could be five, or five hundred people in the audience, and I cannot see them. Even if they are on the screen I cannot see them. I have to focus like a laser on the camera. If I don't, it will look like I"m not looking at anybody.

2. I cannot hear my audience.

So many of my stories are about creating communal sounds, chants, calls, and expressions, that without them, the space around me isn't full of anything. It is very odd.

3. I cannot interact with my audience.

I cannot take a quick poll of a raise of hands, point to someone who is having a particularly good time, laugh with someone, share a quick look with a particular person, or identify someone who is lost or looking confused and bring them back into the fold. In fact, I can't do anything at all when it comes to making individual personal connections.

4. I do not have a cohesive audience.

I am at my home, and every other person is somewhere in their own spaces. They cannot hear or feel or sometimes even see other people listening. They are having their own private little show, and they are not drawn in or carried along by the energy of anyone else in the audience.

I don't have one audience I have twenty or more. Each one encased in their own little room.

5. I am a floating head in a box.

I do not have the full use of my whole body. My movements have to be curtailed, I have to be aware of what the camera sees, blurring effects, my background, and anything that comes into camera view becomes immediately distracting because everything else has been carefully eliminated so as not to be distracting!


Luckily, I am not yet dead. This means I can still learn some new things. Actually, it means I must!

We are all on a learning curve.

Nobody knows what this looks like.

I have been recording stories since the second week of March. I finally got the hang of it in the last two weeks of May.

I have done more reading about lights, and movement, and the camera, and microphones, and Zoom, and Vimeo, and who knows what else in the last three months.

I have joined groups, asked for help, left groups, asked for help, started groups, asked for help, cocooned, reached out, gone into despair, recovered from despair, shouted my defiance, sheepishly apologized for being a jerk, learned programs I never knew existed, spent money I didn't know I would ever need to spend, worked through fear, anxiety, worry, and frustration.

Then, days ago, the world turned itself right-side up.

Everything started humming. I have found peace in the storytelling work.


1.  I imagine the person or the audience. I imagine how they are reacting, and I tell as if they are right there with me.

2. I make space for the reactions that I feel belong there.

3. I interact with them anyway, and anyone watching can play or not

4. Every single audience is having their own personal experience, and that is lovely

5. I am engaging in a form of media that more people have seen than storytelling. If this is a way to introduce them to my art form, then so be it.

Most of my shows are pre-recorded.

I started uploading shows to our Vimeo with password-protected content. The client can access the content and share it, but nobody else can. When their time ends, we change the password, and the show goes back under lock and key.

I felt like I was starting to get the hang of it. Then, on Tuesday, a pop quiz arrived.

One of the services I offer to libraries is a customized intro. They give a shout out to the Friends of the library or something like that. It is a promo that's just for them.

One of the things I figured out how to do was detach the audio from a clip and replaced the image. So, I got this idea.  I recorded the shout out, took out the video, and replaced it with the sponsor's logo.

I was feeling all clever. 

Apparently, the sponsor saw it and decided that they wanted something better. They have their own studio department, and they whipped up a smooth commercial for summer reading, sent it to the library, and said they wanted to replace my "commercial" with theirs.

The library sent me the sponsor's spot, said they could do the substitution. All I had to do was give them the footage of the show.

Our new business model does not allow for people who are "renting" the material to download it.

Two months ago, I would have had to wake up my son and ask him if he could do this. Six months ago I would have taken it to my daughter and asked her if she could do it.

This morning?

This morning I downloaded the commercial.

Went into my back up disc, found the original show, put it back on my laptop

Loaded the new commercial and the old footage into my editing software

Replaced the old commercial with the new one

Downloaded the new show onto my laptop

Went to Vimeo and isolated the video that needed updating

Replaced the old show with the new one without needing to change the link, and finished my breakfast.

My old skills are not much use right now, but my new ones?

My new ones are pretty awesome.

Happy Learning!

Cultural Misappropriation Is Easy To Do: The Accidental Appropriator Part 3

Helen Bannerman

In  1899, a Scottish woman named Helen Bannerman published a little book for her children. Her husband was a physician and officer who worked in the Indian Medical Services. At that time, India was part of the British Empire. Helen's book was set in India and involved a fantasy about a child overcoming a dangerous situation. In 1900, the book was published in America.

The story concerned a boy who was out walking in his fine clothes when he was accosted by a team of tigers. The little boy climbs a tree, but the tigers will not go away. The boy ends up throwing his fine clothes and parasol down to the tigers. The tigers fight amongst themselves and then run around the tree until they turn into ghee - which is clarified butter. The boy climbs down, gets dressed, and takes the delicious ghee home to his mother. She makes pancakes for everyone.




That's a fun story.

When it was first published, the western world praised the tale as a positive book for children about black people. Most children's books of the time showed black people as brutish, violent, and stupid.

This black child defeated tigers.

The name of the book? Little Black Sambo.

Sambo is depicted as a pickaninny. This is a racial stereotype of a black child who is associated with idiocy and violence. It was a dehumanizing way to think of black children. The fact that he defeated tigers was considered a step forward.

Why did Bannerman pick the name "Sambo"?

It would surprise nobody to know that the word "sambo" is an ethnic slur that means you have "Indian Blood". That's how the English referred to this group of "lesser" people in their empire.

"Black Sambo" was also a slur. It meant that not only was your blood of Indian origin, there was also some African somewhere in you.

Anyone reading the book at the time understood that the hero of the tale was an "other" in the way the white Europeans thought of others. The idea that somebody black would either read this book or have some thought about how they were being depicted didn't cross anybody's mind.

Most people in the dominant culture of the western world had absolutely no problem with ethnic slurs. In fact, they didn't think of them as slurs. They thought of them as the truth. The language was created to make sure that those who deserved to be held higher in esteem got to determine what the lesser people were going to be called. Otherwise, how could you make sure they knew they were lesser?

In the late 1800s, none of this was problematic. It was an accepted way to think about this story, those people, and how society worked. It was lauded as a more humanizing depiction of blacks.

I spent a morning learning about Little Black Sambo. I had no interest in it before I started my research, but now I am fascinated!

1) I was told Little Black Sambo was based on an Indian Folktale. It is not. It came fully formed from Bannerman's head.

2) Bannerman misappropriated things from two different cultures to create this tale.

3) People have been trying to save this story for some reason for a couple of generations. I'm not really sure why.

4) Bannerman wrote a number of these little stories, and except for one, all of them start with "Little Black" and then a name. I am almost interested in finding out more about these other "Little Black" books.

5) Why was she so hot to write these odd books with African Americans engaging with animals and items native to India? Did she know any black children? What was her motivation other than amusing her children? Did she have any motivation?

6) This story should be used not to talk about the racist pictures (they are really bad), but to talk about what happens when you just throw things together without giving the slightest thought to the people or cultures from which they are misappropriated.

7) To be fair to the society that spawned Little Black Sambo, what did a white, privileged woman know about black people? Besides, she was championing a better image of black folks, right? She didn't mean any harm, right?


Cultural appropriation was not a thing in the 1800s. If you doubt it, go into a British museum. They spent the 1800s pillaging every culture they came across without a shred of concern!

The Great Maya Angelou

How many Little Black Sambo moments have you had? How many times have you blithely walked down a road and into a buzz saw you didn't even know was there?

Add caption

I was lucky enough to see Dovie Thomason tell when I was still in my tender years as a storyteller. I don't recall just where, but I know it was in the first five years. She said something that set me back on my heels.

"I am telling these tales, but you do not have permission to tell these tales."

I sat there in confusion for a handful of minutes before she started telling the stories. As she told them, I saw them as they were; beautiful, powerful, personal, and hers. They belonged to her at some level that they could not belong to me. I was fascinated.

So, I insinuated myself next to her at some meal and proceeded to ask about her stories. I received what has got to be the most eye-opening lecture about stories I had ever had. That woman took me to school. By the time she was done with me that afternoon, everything looked very different.

I made some decisions about what I would and would not incorporate in my work. I made some decisions about how I would go about collecting stories, and I would be really careful about stories that were an active part of any religion whether I belonged to it or not.

So. All solved, right?  No.

I keep learning more about cultures, ideas, people, and subjects. I discover that there are tales I should purge or learn something about before I go further. I learn that some words no longer work or apply. I learn that often I have had a backward idea about a thing in history and I have to rethink a whole bunch of ideas and assumptions.

I learn, and learn, and learn and re-imagine, and re-imagine, and re-imagine.

What have I learned?


1) You are human. You can't know everything, so learn when someone points something out to you. They could be right. They could be wrong. Look into it.

2) When you encounter new information, consider it. Look into it. It might be right. It might be wrong. You won't know until you investigate.

3) You are human, failable and forgivable. If you get it wrong, correct it. Don't keep committing the same foul over and over.

4) Don't be afraid to learn. Don't be afraid to be wrong.

5) Adjust. The best thing about folklore is that it travels and speaks to people. See how many versions of the story you can find. If you discover that this tale comes in many versions, either create your own based on the elements of the story or pick a version that does not have serious cultural issues.


You have only the language you know in which to tell a story. When you are telling it, you could be using images and language to talk about a culture that is insulting, belittling, and damaging.

You wouldn't be doing this on purpose. The language you are using was created by the dominant culture. That culture often uses language to discriminate against the surrounding cultures by naming and categorizing the people.

It is a difference so slight you might not even realize it.

For instance -

When referring to the state of bondage African Americans lived in prior to the abolishment of slavery, it is more accurate to refer to the people as "enslaved"  as opposed to "slaves"

Enslaved is something someone has wrongly done to you.
Slave is a thing you are.

When referring to the state of people who are here in America without paperwork it is more accurate to call them "undocumented" than "illegal"

Undocumented refers to the status of your paperwork. There are all sorts of people in this country who were invited to America who are undocumented. Migrant workers are a good example of that.

Illegal suggests that there are two types of people: Legal and illegal. If you are illegal, you are lesser. You deserve less. You can be treated as less. Your needs and concerns are less.


What about this story?

Welfare Queen!

Think about the way our society tells stories about people. What language do we use when we want to dehumanize? What language do we use when we want to make people sound scary or dangerous? What language do we use to throw blame away from ourselves and onto victims or oppressed people?


Language is a tricky thing.

Stories can always be used to spread darkness. Sometimes this happens completely by accident.

Our presuppositions are invisible to us unless we hunt them down.

Happy Hunting


Part 1 - Cultural Misapproriationis A Better Term: Some Thoughts
Part 2 The Cost of Cultural Misappropriation: Invisibility
Part 3 - Cultural Misappropriation Is Easy To Do: The Accidental Appropriator
Part 4 - How Do You Know If You Don't Know Enough?
Part 5 - What Does It Look Like to be an Ally in Your Own Work?