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!

What Does It Mean To Be A Successful Storyteller?

Storytellers tend to feel it when we hit it out of the park. When we leave a stage or a classroom after having been incredibly successful, we can feel it all through our body. There is the energy, the excitement, the lavish praise, the joyful expressions and the contentment 

Alas, not all events are that successful.

Sometimes we leave and we feel like we did a good job, but something was missing. Maybe things didn't land the way we hoped they would. Maybe we feel like it was good, but didn't rise to great.

Sometimes we leave and it seems we did an adequate job, but there was nothing that made the experience stand out.

Then, there are those shows where we feel like a train hit us on the way out the door. What happened? Why didn't the story or stories connect? What went wrong?

When I was at Northwestern, Jay O'Callahan came to visit. He is a remarkable man who danced and told his way through one of my all-time favorite original tales called The Herring Shed. When he was finished, I was exhausted and in love with the images dancing in my head. It was obviously magic. 



My first set watching Jackie Torrence perform Brer Rabbit tales was beyond amazing and I sat there watching Brer Snake tempt that possum while laughing my fool head off and drinking in the sound of her voice. I never could have imagined anything so breathtaking as being part of an audience with her at the helm. I could actually feel the magic. 

 



I wanted to hit the stage someday and be that magic or as close to it as I could get. I wanted my audience to be that spellbound and joyful when they left me. For a long time, I worked to achieve that. Only, in my eyes, when I became a magic person, would I be a successful storyteller.


Unfortunately, there are no manuals about how to create actual magic. There are no books that explain how to actually turn dross into gold or any other useful thing. I suspect that it is this underlying quest for the keys to magic that has forced me to spend so much of my adult life researching storytelling and the human brain.

Many years have passed since those early days of youth and ignorance, and I've seen many storytellers and told many tales. I've worked to refine and challenge myself as I learn and work with audiences. 

I've had magic moments and moments I hope to never relive. 

In the end, I've figured out what success really means to me.

source

Success for me means I look at each audience and give them what I have. I also strive to meet them where they are. I hope they have a good time. I hope they get something fun out of it. I hope I learn something about humans or literature or nature or how people think or how to time something in a story. I hope I get just an ounce better each year. If you are not growing, then you are either atrophying or dying. Learning is the only thing that makes us better.

Sometimes I miss the mark entirely and the stories don't sing. I dissect the choices I made and debate what I might have done differently. If I learn something that helps me in the future, I succeeded.



Sometimes I partially miss the mark, and the stories limp through. I look through the stories to see what worked, what didn't and what I could or didn't do to help. Sometimes the problem is I stand in the way of the story. If I work out some bit of business or figure out a way to make something transition more smoothly, I succeeded.

Sometimes I do a credible job of giving what I've got and we all have a good time, but not a transformational moment in any way shape or form. I look through those shows and see what can be learned from the interactions with the audience and the amount of animation or energy I threw off during the set. If I can find anything at all to work on, I succeeded.

Of course, every now and then, I manage the thing I always strive to do. Every now and then, I am able to apply all of those things, those hopes, those techniques I spent my life practicing, the audience is hungry for the stories, the situation is perfect and I float into that sweet spot and we make magic.

The magic happens, but I was wrong about where it occurs. I thought it came off the storyteller, but the truth is, it comes through the storyteller. We are brilliant when we are conduits. 

Jay O'Callahan is a magic person to me. Jackie Torrence's magic changed my life and instructs me as a storyteller even unto this day. 

As for me, I feel like I've got a handful of magic beans and every now and then, I manage to plant one. 

There are many ways to measure success as a storyteller. I have learned to settle for learning, striving, trying and never getting knocked down for good even when I am discouraged. 

I make my living as a storyteller. 

In that, I am succeeding.

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If you're a pretender come sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”

― Shel Silverstein

Happy Telling.

Without A Net

Base Jumping...not my style

There are risky things in life.  Take for example base jumping.  I'm not going to do any base jumping...ever.  I'm what you call a straight up prude when it comes to the whole  'life and limb' thing.  One of the common refrains said of me as a young teen was that I was 'levelheaded'.

Needless to say, when I told my father I was going to be a professional storyteller, he was taken aback.

"What is a storyteller?"  He demanded, having just forked over a small fortune to Northwestern University.

When I started explaining what it was, he shook his head and held up his hand.  "Stop."  He sighed.  "Just call when you need money."

Three years later he flew through O'Hare International Airport and called my apartment.  He thought he'd surprise me and take me out to lunch.  He called the apartment for three hours without reaching me.  (For those who find this story confusing, I should point out that nobody had cell phones at that time.)

When I got home, my roommates told me to call my dad because he was freaking out.  When I reached him at his hotel in D.C, he asked, "Where were you all day?"
"I was working."
He was silent for a moment, and then said, "What do you do again?"

If you would like a pictorial representation of what storytelling looks like.  Tim Ereneta has put together a fabulous collection of images that show storytellers and storytelling.  Check it out.

When I first started going to middle and high schools, I would freak out the principals.  When I showed up at the school, they'd ask.  "Where is your stuff?"
"What do you mean?"
"Don't you have props or scenery or an instrument or something?"
"No."
"No?"
"No.  I'm just going to stand in front of the mic for forty-five minutes and talk."
At that point they would smile, but behind their eyes, I could see them cursing the PTA with all of their might.

"The three little frogs jumped into the water with only their eyes sticking out."

After the show I would get the inevitable question, "How did you do that?"
I would look as innocent as possible and ask, "Do what?"
"I've never seen them sit that still for anything.  You had them in the palm of your hand!"
"I'm a storyteller."  I would explain.  "That's what storytellers do."

I have had the occasional audience who I have trouble reaching over the years, and I get to experience one of those moments of 'introspection and growth'.  Being on stage without a net can be scary, and sometimes I fall.  I pick myself up, I brush myself off, and I go back to work...like anything else.

I strive to get better at my craft.  I remind myself that even great performers can have off days, but that doesn't mean you don't keep striving for great.  I have discovered that even when I think the show didn't go well I'm often the only one who noticed.  Storytelling is a very forgiving occupation.  I don't expect to get it right all of the time.  Nobody is perfect.  Well, except maybe Jay O'Callahan.  He's pretty awesome.

Jay O'Callahan

Despite how effective and engaging storytelling can be, there are still folks who find it risky to hire a storyteller.  I attended an arts showcase last thursday, and a pair of women who brought me into an elementary school last year stopped by my booth.


"I've just got to tell you."  One of them laughed.  "We never had so many teachers compliment us on a program before as we did when you visited.  They said that when you first came out and you didn't have any props or puppets or anything, they were nervous, but the second you started talking everything changed.  They loved it, and the kids are still talking about it.  We can't wait to have you back!"

There are many storytellers who could tell that story.


Here's a clip of me doing the stand in front of the mic routine.



Twelve years ago, my husband and I decided to switch roles.  He became a stay at home dad, and I went back out on the road to become the bread winner.  Both of our fathers went a bit wild around the eyes.  For starters, they are from a very patriarchal generation, and couldn't get their brains around me 'taking care' of my husband instead of the other way around.  Besides, they told us, this is risky.

Well, everything is risky if you look at it from the right perspective.

Aside from the logistics of traveling and raising children, I rarely regret the decision to rejoin the work force.  It has given my family not only stability, but flexibility.  We've got retirement funds, savings, college funds, a house, two cars, and two kids getting ready to go off to college.  Yes, I know, that sounds like a risky lifestyle, but we manage.

Last year I was driving my son to school.  We were talking about his future as he prepares to choose a career.

I said to him, "In this economy, you have to have a flexible type of job.  It needs to be one that can't be outsourced to another country for pennies on the dollar; it needs to be skilled enough so that your contribution is recognizable and desired.  If you find that you have been booted out of a company or corporate structure, you need to be able to hang out a shingle on the turn of a dime and become either a small business, or a consultant to your industry."

My then seventeen year old son gave me a dramatic sigh. "That's easy for you to say, mom."  He grumbled.  "You and dad are lucky.  You're a storyteller."

I love these storyteller clay figures!

Yes, I am lucky.  I'm a storyteller.  We do it with words.  We do it with imagination.  We do it without a net.


Happy Telling!