I drove two and a half hours alone to the annual storytelling festival in Ojai, CA my senior year of college. I went alone because I assumed the place would be full of grade school children. Wouldn’t my college peers consider me juvenile? Weren’t stories just for kids?
The sloped auditorium seats were full of people of all ages though. Together we watched one man play a harp while he recounted the clever problem solving of a poor man who turned his fortunes. Each of the little wink and nod adventures struck familiar chords for those of us scraping our rent and lunch money up in scrappy ways.
Another storyteller instructed all of us to recite a little rhyming jingle each time the hero approached what felt like an insurmountable task. We started in mumbling tones at first but let our voices loose by the time the hero reached the dragon’s cave. Our collective voice was itself the hero’s courage.
It was the third storyteller that captured me and set me on my path. The story she told was about a woman who set out across an unforgiving landscape in pursuit of an impossible prize. The story sparked the tinder I had tucked away in my own heart. I fell in love with that story. That story made me a storyteller.
I had been sustained by story as a child. Through stories I traveled to faraway lands, or discovered the magic even within the ordinary world. Of course, as inspiring as writing and reading were for me, they were solitary activities. It wasn’t until I started directing live storytelling performances that the rich world of story bloomed into a place of connection and community.
Performing stories is a ritual art. The story-teller and the story-witnesses enter the space, take a journey together and return to the ordinary world changed. We are entertained or educated or utterly transformed by story.
I had been part of theater and dance performance for much of my life. The electric energy though of telling a story while looking people full in the face and including them directly was a bright revelation. We were creating the story together.
The local paper wrote about the first storytelling show I produced. They called it a refreshing, new sort of performance. Yes, we had a live post-rock, experimental band, and modern dance choreography. But the core of the show was actually one of the oldest sorts of arts. Storytelling has been part of community for at least as long as we’ve kept records. It was the way we held history before we wrote it down.
We still value the human connection of the art. The recent popularity of personal storytelling from Moth performances to TED talks confirms it. When we hear one another’s stories we are participating in a long tradition. Whether we hear them at stand-up comedy shows or in cafe conversations.
It is this co-creative spirit that feeds my storytelling. When I stand before a group of story-witnesses, I can watch the effect of the story. It shows in the widening of a person’s eyes, the surprised gasp or the sudden dawning of a smile. I turn the story a little this way or that like a fractal gem that catches the light and shines it back.