About Culture
(More from the Edge)
When I was attending a storytelling school in June 2001, one of the leaders was a great teller from Manchester called Dave, with the most carefully cultivated and maintained Mancunian accent. And one of the course members, Briony, was a sweet, proper, refined lady from Cheltenham. I still smile when I remember Dave's comments about her during the final assessment session. "You've got a very strong regional accent," he said (and who would dream of suggesting he might have been winding her up just the teensiest bit?) Briony bridled and seethed, every fibre of her being seemed to scream, "Me?!"
I thought of this when I was enjoying some of the tellers at the Edge, especially TUUP and Peter and Gorg Chand. Fantastic stuff, with all sorts of ideas and themes and techniques that I would love to be able to use. But they work because TUUP is Guyanan and the Chand Boys have all the Punjabi cultural background which is so fascinating and enriches their telling. And somehow you don't have any of that when you're plain vanilla with an Oxford accent. Where's the distinctive and interesting cultural flavour of this bit of Wessex? There should be one; but it's just so familiar and close-up, that it's virtually invisible.
This is one reason why I want to work on Tales of the Parish. To stress the specific local-ness and particularity of this place, these people, the events that have happened on this soil. All these are every bit as real and valid as the culture of East Anglia, Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria, Scotland, Ireland, the Punjab, Guyana or wherever. It's just learning to look at it, and tell it, in such a way as to see and reveal the strange within the familiar.
When I was attending a storytelling school in June 2001, one of the leaders was a great teller from Manchester called Dave, with the most carefully cultivated and maintained Mancunian accent. And one of the course members, Briony, was a sweet, proper, refined lady from Cheltenham. I still smile when I remember Dave's comments about her during the final assessment session. "You've got a very strong regional accent," he said (and who would dream of suggesting he might have been winding her up just the teensiest bit?) Briony bridled and seethed, every fibre of her being seemed to scream, "Me?!"
I thought of this when I was enjoying some of the tellers at the Edge, especially TUUP and Peter and Gorg Chand. Fantastic stuff, with all sorts of ideas and themes and techniques that I would love to be able to use. But they work because TUUP is Guyanan and the Chand Boys have all the Punjabi cultural background which is so fascinating and enriches their telling. And somehow you don't have any of that when you're plain vanilla with an Oxford accent. Where's the distinctive and interesting cultural flavour of this bit of Wessex? There should be one; but it's just so familiar and close-up, that it's virtually invisible.
This is one reason why I want to work on Tales of the Parish. To stress the specific local-ness and particularity of this place, these people, the events that have happened on this soil. All these are every bit as real and valid as the culture of East Anglia, Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria, Scotland, Ireland, the Punjab, Guyana or wherever. It's just learning to look at it, and tell it, in such a way as to see and reveal the strange within the familiar.
posted by Tony at 7/20/2004 09:58:00 pm
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