When I go to my son’s school music concerts, I’m always amazed at the concert behavior some of the audience exhibits. When a group performs, one should be quiet. When your child has finished performing and there are other musical groups to follow, you don’t leave. Yet adults either do these things or sit by while children do them. How do you instill the love of art and music, if you demonstrate to your child that the only reason you are there is because your child is in it, not because you enjoy music. Whose job is it to teach audiences proper etiquette?
I find this issue somewhat similar as a professional storyteller. How do you get audiences that generally do not go to storytelling events to react to you?
Continue reading
One of the important things to consider as a storyteller, is, “Why am I doing this?” Storytelling is an art. And as any artist, one uses their genre for self-expression; A way of sharing that which they enjoy. Unlike most arts that can be satisfied by doing it for one’s self, storytelling requires another person to be the recipient of the story. As a storywriter, I can write my thoughts and imaginings with no other person needed to be my listener. As soon as I choose to storytell, I need an audience. The audience can be as simple as a child when they go to bed, to a colleague that you’re sharing an incident that happened. But audience is the key.
But I’m a performer, I want more than a single listener for the tales and stories that I share. What is it that I have to offer that would encourage an audience to have me. Why do I tell? This is a crucial question to be asked.
Continue reading
Telling stories on my own requires a lot of work. I have to find the story I like, decide for what audience it will fit, learn the text of the story and then craft it to become a telling tale. This takes time and effort. For the first time in my professional storytelling career I recently learned a story to be told in tandem (two people telling a story together, in this case my fellow storyteller, Debbie, and me). Learning this story added new challenges to the telling a story process, for now I was working with another individual.
Continue reading
