Justice: Fairy Tale Style

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Over the course of my storytelling life, I have marveled at how kids react to villains.

Depending on what that character is doing, kids turn on a dime. They will love that character right up until the moment he betrays them, and then that character is dead to them.

They don't care what happens to the villain as long as he/she gets their comeuppance and they are happy to punish the character in whatever horrible way the story decides.

Rumpelstiltskin is a great example of this.

actor Robert Carlyle as Rumpel in Once Upon A Time

He shows up at Anna's great need, and spins the straw to gold. The first two times he takes baubles from her. The kids find the little elf man funny. Whenever he is about to appear I make a specific sound and hand movement.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! (My hands open and close as I move them in a circle. This happens every time the little man is set to appear. By his third appearance, they have this down to a science and they take over doing it in the story. I become the audience for them.)

He has a funny voice and gestures, and moves in a quirky manner. He sings a little song as he spins, and they start doing it with me by the the second time through. They adore him.

Then he crosses that line from savior to sinner. He asks for her baby in return for his services. 

The children gasp in disbelief and shock. They can't imagine he's serious. They beg Anna not to agree. She speaks to herself, but really to the sea of shocked children,

"What if the king is lying? Maybe he won't marry me. Even if he does marry me, maybe I won't have a child. Some people don't have children. The future could be anything, but right now? Right now I'm in trouble."

So, she agrees to give up her child. The children are upset. They still spin gold with the little man, but the tide has turned. They are no longer looking forward to seeing him.

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The next series of events unfolds until the queen has a baby. Usually one or two children whisper, "Oh no." under their breath. 

I continue, "Then, one morning, she heard a sound she hadn't heard in almost two years. What sound was that?"

The children make the sound, but they are not enthusiastic about it.

When he shows up to collect the baby, they are now pulling for Anna to get the right name. Some kids, the ones who know the story, can barely hold themselves together. Most of them don't remember the name. Those who do are trying to reassure their classmates sitting around them that it is going to be all right.

The first two days she does not guess correctly. 

Then, the maid arrives with the little song that breaks the whole story open.

"My lady, I saw a strange little man. He was dancing around a fire and singing this little song."

Today, I brew

Tomorrow I bake

On the third day

The queen's baby I'll take!

The queen must guess

This game she can't win

For my name is RUMPELSTILTSKIN!

At the end of this little song, the audience lets out a collective breath and the kids get really excited.

The queen says, "Thank you." 

I give the audience a knowing look and say, "A few hours later, you know what she heard."

Now, up to this point in the story, whenever the children made the dinging sound and the hand movements, they mirror the way I did it with exactly the same gestures. Some of them actually stop making the sound after he asks for the baby. They want no part of bringing the little horror back into the story.

 This last time, however, when they know Rumpelstiltskin is about to get his comeuppance, they all lose their collective minds.

The exuberance with which they start making that sound, and the forcefulness of their hand motions is amazing. It always startles the educators and adults in the room. At least, it startles the ones who aren't participating. The grown ups who are participating are just as excited as the kids.

That horrible little man who they loved so well at the beginning of the story is about to get his little green clad butt kicked, and they cannot wait to see it.

Personally, I always felt sorry for Rumpel. I mean, he was helping Anna out. True, he did get greedy at the end, but if her father hadn't told that horrendous lie to begin with, she wouldn't have been in that situation in the first place.

I always thought he got a bum rap.

The kids in my audiences don't have this problem. 

I wonder if I would have had their experience if I'd had a storyteller tell me the tale as opposed to hearing it on a record. I wonder if I would have felt the same if I'd had that little man in my body and voice as he betrayed the helpless girl who was at the mercy of an exaggerating father and greedy soon to be husband.

I'll never know. My audiences, however, are not the least bit confused about why he should get punished.

The last half of this year I was telling social justice tales in schools. These are stories about people with power taking advantage of people who had no sure way to face them.

The children had no trouble identifying when the person in power was doing something wrong. In fact, they would yell at him/her. 

When one character decided he didn't want poor or ugly people around him, I heard about it vociferously from my audience. When one character stole from another, I heard about it. The kids had no patience for injustice. They were quick to call it out and let me know it was no bueno!

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My favorite moment was when the West Wind stole cornmeal from Willa and offered her a ratty old tablecloth as a a fair trade when he could not return it.

I said, "Willa looked up at the North Wind, then she looked at that ratty tablecloth and said..."

Before I could get the next line out of my mouth, a third grader sitting a couple of rows back shook his head and said, "Bro!"

The kids around him nodded. That was the only possible reply one could give to somebody taking something valuable and then offering you a big rag as compensation.

I replied, "Pretty much," and went on with the tale.

I was quite proud of our children all across the country. 

I hope, as they get older, they keep their ability to recognize injustice, cruelty, liars, hatred, and intolerance. I hope they call it out when they encounter it. I hope they feel the same outrage in the world around them if they witness the abuse of power, and I hope they choose to stand against it in times to come.

Happy Telling - 

Kids Are Capable: They Just Need To Practice.

I am here in beautiful Beaufort County North Carolina for a week.

I've had a pretty easy tour through this part of the world. Two shows a day means I have lots of time to write, relax, and well, mostly just write!

I was given an interesting challenge today. I had to convince some grown-ups that their children were perfectly capable of handling an assembly.


I'm used to going into a middle or high school and having the principal be leery about my ability to hold the attention of a prepubescent or worldly wise audience. What I am not used to is a group of folks who don't think I can hold the attention of six and seven-year-olds.

We got a call earlier this week from a principal who was concerned about the length of the program I was going to offer. She was worried that even thirty minutes would be too long, let alone forty-five minutes and an hour was out of the question. These, she informed me, were only first graders, and they didn't have the attention span or the capability of an assembly that was longer than half an hour at the most.

The David told her that I was not planning an hour long show. I was just going to do forty-five minutes. This did not fill her with confidence.

The David told me that even though he assured the principal that it would be all right she had her doubts.

I arrived at the school in the morning, and first few adults I came in contact with told me that their first graders were "rambunctious", "immature", "wild", "not well behaved". The assistant principal let me know that she would come in and check on me as much as possible to make sure I was all right during the show.

I also found out it was a Pre-K - 1 school, but there was no way the Kindergarteners could handle an assembly.

Well, I'd planned to tell Why Mosquitoes Buzz In People's Ears, maybe Too Much Noise, and possibly a little finger game, but after all of this certainty that the kids wouldn't sit I threw that out of the window. I decided we were going to go for one of those involved, slightly unsettling European folktales. I settled on Rumpelstiltskin.

Now, you might ask, "Why would you tell that story?"

Easy.

My telling of it is about forty-five minutes long, it is highly participatory, and it fits nicely into all of the language requirements I employ when telling to a pre-reading audience.

I decided that not only was I going to tell a forty-five minute story, I was going to tell for an hour...unless it would disrupt the schedule.

My goal was simple. After I told for an hour and the children were well behaved it might open the school up to offering the kids more arts opportunities instead of keeping them out because of "short attention spans" and "inability to engage with presentations".


The telling went very well indeed, and the kids had a smashing time. When we hit forty-five minutes, I pointed out to the teachers that we'd been sitting for that long. They looked shocked. I asked them if I could tell another story, and they were enthusiastic. I told a fifteen minute story and then dismissed them...in silence.

I have a little dismissal trick I like to do with the kids. They leave quietly and are very proud to have done so.

After the set, when the multi-purpose room was completely empty, the assistant principal said, "That was amazing."

She proceeded to tell me that they'd had a different assembly at the school in the past that wasn't completely age appropriate, and the kids hadn't even managed to get through twenty minutes of the thirty minute program before they'd had to call a halt.

I pointed out that I'd offered age appropriate material.

She waved that off at once and announced that it wasn't that, but that I had presented the work in such an engaging way. I switched the conversation back to content. I pointed out that kids this age are actually hard wired for storytelling.

She informed me that she'd left to go back to her duties after about twenty minutes into the story, but she was kind of bummed. She'd bumped into the principal who'd asked how it was going. She'd told the principal it was going well, but the woman was still worried. She told the vice principal to go back into the assembly just in case I needed help.

"I didn't say anything to her," the vice principal admitted, "but I was happy to go back because I love that story and I couldn't wait to get to the part when she guessed his name."

We talked a bit then about the importance of stories in children's lives. I told her I was disappointed I didn't get to tell with the Kindergartners and she said she was disappointed in that choice as well.

"The next time you come," she said, "I'll make sure everybody gets to see you."

I thanked her and left the school.

The David called to check on me. "How was the assembly?" he asked.

"After all the worry, I was sort of annoyed that the school had such little faith in their kids. So, I told for an hour and dismissed them quietly back to their classes."

Laughter on the other end of the phone. "I knew you were going to do that."

I've been chewing on that all day. I certainly have been in schools where the kids were difficult, the work was hard, and the telling was like offering up my blood. It was completely possible that when I got in front of these children, they would all turn into the zombie apocalypse of audiences or something of that nature, but I knew right away this was not going to be the case.

The most important thing I do before I open my mouth is to check out the audience. I see how the kids come in, what their teachers are doing, how they are behaving with each other, and how they respond to the break in their schedule.

Last week, I had a kindergartener come into their multi-purpose room, look up at me and say, "Oh God, not another assembly." The police and firefighters had been there all day because of Veterans day and she was heartily sick of looking at presentations. By the end of the set, she was right in it with everyone else, but she came in clearly not expecting to enjoy herself.

There are lots of ways to diffuse a tough audience.

The kids who marched into the multi-purpose room this morning were not even close to a problem. What I did notice was that only a few of the teachers bothered to participate with me. The rest of them sat like stones. Two were actually facing the opposite direction during much of the telling until the end when they gave up being annoyed by the assembly and decided to enjoy it.

As is the case with lots of schools, the kids take their cues from the teachers. Luckily, we were all too busy playing to worry about what the detached grown-ups were doing. By the end of the set, a number of teachers decided to join in the fun.

Not for the first time in my career, I wanted to shout at the grown-ups...it might not be the kids!

Don't assume they can't sit still! Don't assume they have no attention span. Expose them to arts and ideas. Model good audience behavior. Kids won't get any better at being an audience member if they don't know what to do. Give them space to practice.

Happy Telling!

DW

Janice Del Negro: The Power Of Story Casts a Spell On Young Adolescents

Janice Del Negro
Ca

The phrase the “power of story,” is ubiquitous in the storytelling world. We talk about it all the time, no matter what kind of storytelling we do or what sorts of listeners we engage. We are not all talking about the same thing, of course; defining the power of story is a deeply individual endeavor. Reading articles and books, historical and contemporary, on storytelling in the United States one encounters power of storytelling references often, most frequently referring to the nearly indefinable power story has to hold listeners in a nearly trance-like state with narrative. 

Alice Kane

I remember having this experience in a half-empty tent, listening to Alice Kane tell Irish fairy tales. She wore a pale blue suit, and stood, one hand on a podium to steady herself, and with her voice and the power of her narrative transformed the world for her listeners, taking them out of literal time and space and transporting them to a moonlit field where an outcast watched fairies dance in a silver ring. 

Fairy Ring

Having this experience as a teller is always something of a shock; intellectually I know the power of story is a real thing, but I am often surprised when it actually works, although experience indicates I should not be. A few years ago I began working with students at two local high schools. The first year I gave a (very) brief history of the folk and fairy tale that focused on the changes made to tales to make them suitable for children- the elimination of sexual activities of any kind, the violence left, if not intact, at least strongly present. 

Little Red Riding Hood Was Not A Very Tame Tale.

Shrek's Rumpelstiltskin

I told ghost tales and folktales, including radical retellings of traditional tales such as “Rapunzel” and “Rumpelstiltskin.” The following year I was asked to concentrate on “something to do with writing.” This time I talked about fairy tales and popular media, told more radically retold fairy tales, and did exercises with students on retelling and rewriting the traditional tales they knew. 

Once Upon A Time's Rumpelstiltskin

Here is what I learned about high school students: they are smart. They are aware. They know a lot more than they let on. They are exuberant (although a little wary) when given opportunities to be creative. 
When they are interested, there is no stopping them. They are as comfortable with sheets of paper and markers as they are with other forms of more elaborate technology. They are capable of committing to narrative storytelling in a way that is almost uncanny. The stories to which they commit must match the emotional intensity of adolescents juiced on their own energies. The controlled emotions of supernatural or gory tales have immediate impact; the lush, romantic fairy tale is surprisingly effective. Retellings of the familiar Disney Default folk and fairy tales - either earlier, more adult versions or radical re-imaginings- hold these listeners with a combination of familiarity and altered perspectives. Given the opportunity to reconstruct a familiar tale, young adults engage with a will that reveals an understanding of the complex spectrum of human emotion. Their demand for transparency keeps the storytelling honest, and helps create the circle in which narrative energy is personified in the dynamic connection between teller and listeners.  

Janice M. Del Negro, 7/2014

Janice Del Negro is a published author of children's books. Published credits of Janice Del Negro include Passion and Poison: Tales of Shape-shifters, Ghosts, and Spirited Women, Willa And The Wind (Ala Notable Children's Books. Younger Readers (Awards)), and Lucy Dove.

She is also a professor at Dominican University.

BA, Hunter College

MLS, State University of New York at Geneseo

PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Academic Areas of Interest: 

Youth services & programs in public libraries; literature and other young adult & children's materials; storytelling; evolution & evaluation of folk & fairy tales; reviewing & criticism; programming for youth; images of the feminine in folktales