I just completed a Halloween storytelling gig. It was a marathon performance. Four – 45 minute shows in one day. Knowing that you are going to be telling for 3 hours you really need to prepare not only the material, but your voice. Choice of stories and songs is always crucial to the preservation of your voice. Not to mention lots of water and Fisherman’s Friend (a throat lozenge that contains menthol). It also helped to use a microphone during my performance, so I didn’t have to push my voice to be very loud. I did the first two performances with my wireless microphone clipped to my shirt. The last two I did with a standing microphone. It had better quality, though didn’t allow me as much movement.
It is important to me to make sure that if I’m going to perform any stories that might scare anyone to give the audience a strategy to help prevent bad dreams and the like, especially if there are little children in the audience. I start every one of my Halloween type storytelling events by sharing a legend that I learned at the National Storytelling Festival from Kathryn Windham and Jackie Torrence. When going to bed at night take your shoes off and put them on the floor at the base of your bed one shoe facing away from the bed, the other facing towards the bed. I’ve been doing this for the past 25+ years of storytelling. It works. You’d be amazed at how many people that have heard me tell over the years come back to me and thank me for helping them out.