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!

How Do I Become A Storyteller? A Common Question

When I started this blog, I made several assumptions. I assumed people who found their way here would already be somewhat involved in the world of storytelling. What did not occur to me was that there would be people who were trying to figure out how to get into storytelling. 

Recently I was on a thread, and a person made the comment, "This is all well and good, but how do you get into storytelling?"

I get this question fairly often when I'm out traveling. People want to know how to become a professional storyteller. They aren't asking how to get to the next level, no, they want to know where to begin.

This is such a common question, it even has a Wikihow page.

Most people who decide to become a professional storyteller have encountered the art and been taken with it. They see a professional up there doing their thing and say to themselves, 'I could do that'. 

Here is one of the best rocking the stage. Go on with your bad self, Donald!

If you get a professional doing their thing, it looks easy. That is their power. Good storytellers seem to just bring the story to life. 

What you don't see is all the work that goes into making it roll off of the tongue. So, if you are just beginning, you don't start at the art point. You have to start at the beginning.

Wikihow offers five steps. I thought I would do the same!

1. Get some stories under your belt. 

You can either tell traditional stories or you can write your own, but you need to know some tales.  Where do you find them? Well, you can google folktales or folklore and take your pick. You'll have to write your own personal material if that is how you wish to go.

Under no circumstances should you tell anyone else's personal stories!!!

As you learn stories, you need to make sure that you are shaping them with your own personal tastes.

Try not to completely copy an existing storyteller. Find you own style.

2.  Next, you must engage in the craft of storytelling

Craft is how you put stories together, and how you present them. This is important, because it shapes what type of storyteller you are, and what types of stories you tell. You will spend a great deal of time in this stage before you ever get to the last step.

There are many ways to work on your craft.

a. Go to university and study storytelling.

Karen Chace did a list of universities where you can study storytelling

I went to Northwestern University and studied under Rives Collins. Call your local community college and find out if they have a storytelling program. Go to festivals and conferences given by storytelling organizations and take workshops and classes. 

b. Find storytellers in your area.

You most likely live in a state where there is a storytelling guild. You might live near one and not know. Go to a guild meeting and get to know your local storytellers. Listen, get feedback, and consider what people have to say. The link above is for the National Storytelling Network organization that has catalogued guilds for every state. Click on your state, find out where your guild is, and enquire if there is a group near you.

David Novak is going to be teaching a two and a half day workshop in NC through the North Carolina Storytelling Guild! Click for the details!

David Novak is a wonderful performer and teacher. Catch him if you can!

c. Read. 

I cannot stress enough that you should read about storytelling. Parkhurst Brothers, and August House publishers have a great number of books about storytelling.

d. Tell! 

You must find opportunities to tell your stories to the audiences you wish to serve. Whether adults or children, you must find willing guinea pigs. Find out if you can volunteer to tell in your local public library. Find open mic nights. Do what you have to do.

3. After you are confident that you've got some stories ready, you feel comfortable telling them, and you are ready to roll out your carpet and invite the paying public into your world. You have to tell them you are alive and offering a service.  That brings us to the most annoying part of this whole thing. You have to start the onerous part of the whole process.

MARKETING

There are lots of books about marketing. I did mention you should read, right?

4. The Business of Storytelling.  I haven't written much about this on this blog, but the thing that goes here is the business of storytelling. This is the part where you schedule, produce contracts, set prices, cold call, put together email lists, contact people, and make connections with others. I don't do this part of the business, but it is an essential part of making this job work.

While all of that is happening, you get to the last step in the process.

5. Working the Art

You are now up on a stage somewhere telling stories. If you get to this point, just keep going. There are perils, pitfalls, joys, moments of conquering the world and being conquered by it. 

Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather rinse repeat! This cycle of gathering material, crafting it, working the material, engaging with new audiences, marketing to new places, and working the art is not a fait accompli...it is a cycle.

So, there you have it. Some really basic steps to becoming a professional storyteller.

Is this a really simplified list? Yes. Will it be quick and easy? No, probably not, but it is a roadmap to becoming a professional.

I leave you with some of my favorite tellers.

Peter Cook! I do love this man!

Good Luck! We'll look for you out there! 

Crafting 101: The Questions I ask

There is a difference between crafting a story and just getting up and telling one.  Pretty much anyone who isn't afraid of speaking in public can get up and tell a story of some kind.  We share stories at weddings and funerals.  We share them during worship services, and amongst friends.  We share them on the radio and television.





In this series of Blogs, I will look at a single story, and show the process I use to get from my first exposure to a tale all the way to the finished structure.

This entry will deal with my first exposure and the questions I grapple with before I do anything else.


The first storytelling class I took was taught by Nancy Donoval.  She was putting together a piece of story theatre, and she needed actors who could also rock some storytelling.  It was fascinating and it opened me up to an entire art form I never even knew you could spend your life pursuing.

Nancy Donoval doing her thing

Rives Collins was my next teacher.  I spent two years at his feet soaking up any and all of the information he cared to offer.  He shaped my understanding of solid story structure, helped me begin to identify the types of stories that drew me, and gave me an incredible platform on which to build my career.

My mentor at Northwestern University, Rives Collins

My next teacher was Donald Davis.  I spent a summer as a scribe in one of Donald's classes.  I learned a great deal from watching him work a fictional story based on his life into a performance piece.  I also began to understand that this was not going to be a type of storytelling in which I would specialize.  As much as I enjoyed it, telling stories from my own life on stage does not interest me overly much.

The Amazing Donald Davis

I'm pretty sure that's because I like really far fetched fantastical stories.  The less reality the better.  That's the kind of literature I like to read.  Those are the movies I like to watch.  If I could see it on a street corner, I don't want to read about it, tell it or watch it.  This is just a personal preference.

A few years ago I took a master class with Bil Lepp on crafting, which I found fascinating since my brain doesn't work like that at all.  This coming summer I will be taking a class from Bill Harley mostly just because.  I mean, who doesn't want to spend a few hours playing with Bill Harley?



So, how do you craft a story?  Well, that depends entirely upon who you are and what kinds of stories you tell.  Here is the method I use.



First, I identify a tale I'd like to tell.  Some years ago I called Milbre Burch and asked if she had a story she could share with me.  She told me this old story called The Pot Maker and The Tiger.  Click the link to read a very quick and dirty version of the story.

The marvelous Milbre Burch

Okay, where to start?

- Do I like this story?  Yes.  This is important, and obvious.  Don't tell stories you don't like.

- Do you know any variants of this tale?  No. I'd never heard of this story before.  I liked the variant Milbre told me, so I decided to work on it from there before I went to find other sources.

When I get stories out of books, I like to read as many variants as I can, when I get them from people, I like to build on the feeling, cadence, and flow that they give me when I first get the story.  Later, I will go back and see if I can find some variants.  Sometimes I get new material from these written versions, but most of the time, I find the hardest bit of the work has already been done by the teller who gave me permission to tell the story, and the worst of the clunkiness is left on the page where it belongs.

- Do you connect with this story on some level?  Yes.  It tickled me a great deal, and I wanted to explore it.

Great!  Now I've got the story.  What's next?

First - Who is this story for?

Well, I wouldn't tell this tale to anybody below the 3rd grade because it has far too many plot twists in it.  Most little kids won't follow this very well.  Some can, certainly, but most will be lost.

There is also the fact that there are elements in this tale that require a certain amount of knowledge in order to be understood by an American audience.  How much background do I need to give, and can it be done in the body of the tale as I tell it?



Second - What are the beats in this tale?

Where are the obvious funny bits?

What kind of pacing does it need?

When does the audience need a break from all of this nonsense?

when do I need to drive a point home?



Third - What is the feel of this story?

What sort of tone does this tale have?  Does it need to be broken up into 'chapters' or is it a story told seamlessly.  In other words, is there some, 'Meanwhile' that actually needs to be said, or does it have more of an, all of this is happening over time feel?

Is it serious in places, or is the whole thing completely farcical?



Fourth - How much interior structure do I add as a teller to make this story feel authentic to me?

Do I need to add explanations?

How much character enhancement do I need?

How much do I do in the way of sound effects?

Are there parts that need more wallowing?

What sort of structure does this story need to be graspable by different ages?



Fifth - What is the audience's job during this tale?

Are they just watching the whole thing?

Is there some type of audience participation?

Is there some kind of repeating phrase or idea?



Sixth - Last and most important; how do I introduce this tale?

Does it need another story to introduce it?

Does it need some kind of personal narrative?

Does it need just some geographical info?

What do I think this story is about, and what do I want the audience to focus on in the back of their minds as I tell it?

So, before I stand it up and start telling it to myself, I begin grappling with these ideas.



Posts in Crafting 101

1. Questions I Ask
2. Crafting 101:  Building the Structure
3. Crafting 101:  Flesh On The Bones
4. Crafting 101:  Donkeys and tigers and War Horses., Oh My!
5.  Crafting 101:  There Are No Little Characters
6.  Crafting 101:  Putting It Together
7.  Crafting 101: Introductions!


Happy Crafting!!!