The Paralysis before the Performance
maggi has written about her writing deadlines, and how hard it is to get your head around them till the last minute, when suddenly they become overwhelming. But at least she concludes that with a few seriously late nights, it will all come out right.
Right now I'm feeling paralysed by the thought of some of the storytelling deadlines that are beginning to appear on my horizon. Because somehow storytelling doesn't work the same as writing. The creation is all in the performance, and then it's gone. And in many ways (I find, at least) it's hard to prepare or rehearse or practise, because until the audience is there, and the moment of the performance, the story isn't able to arrive either. This makes learning and practising hard for me - I don't know how the real professionals deal with it. It also feels worse because I haven't had any real performances for several weeks or longer, and I find I lose my nerve (see The Emperor's New Clothes below), and it's a bit like having fallen off a horse and needing to get on again. The sooner you do it the better; and the longer you leave it, the harder it gets.
I have a couple of larger gigs coming up, than the regular Sundays (and these are, after all, often preaching times more than storytelling). The first is the Wallingford Bunkfest next Saturday, when I'll be telling stories with Peter Hearn, Barbara Neville and Tina Bilbé. Then the Diocesan Annual Reader Conference on September 17, followed by a talk to a church group on September 20. The Bunkfest will be mostly secular stories, which in a way are easier because you remember more by images, and verbal accuracy isn't quite so important. But in the other two, where I'll be telling more biblical stories, that verbal accuracy does matter. Following my teachers in NOBS and The Telling Place, I prefer the 'text telling' approach. And this is incredibly time consuming at the preparation stage. The internalising, learning by heart, of the text, is a slow, patience-demanding process. It's more like the formation of a soul than the baking of a cake or building of a model - and even those often demand patience.
At the moment I'm trying to learn the Creation story in Genesis 1; but even as I'm doing it, I realise how rusty my memory of other stories in my repertoire has got, and I'm dreading the thought of how long it will take to revise them.
Right now I'm feeling paralysed by the thought of some of the storytelling deadlines that are beginning to appear on my horizon. Because somehow storytelling doesn't work the same as writing. The creation is all in the performance, and then it's gone. And in many ways (I find, at least) it's hard to prepare or rehearse or practise, because until the audience is there, and the moment of the performance, the story isn't able to arrive either. This makes learning and practising hard for me - I don't know how the real professionals deal with it. It also feels worse because I haven't had any real performances for several weeks or longer, and I find I lose my nerve (see The Emperor's New Clothes below), and it's a bit like having fallen off a horse and needing to get on again. The sooner you do it the better; and the longer you leave it, the harder it gets.
I have a couple of larger gigs coming up, than the regular Sundays (and these are, after all, often preaching times more than storytelling). The first is the Wallingford Bunkfest next Saturday, when I'll be telling stories with Peter Hearn, Barbara Neville and Tina Bilbé. Then the Diocesan Annual Reader Conference on September 17, followed by a talk to a church group on September 20. The Bunkfest will be mostly secular stories, which in a way are easier because you remember more by images, and verbal accuracy isn't quite so important. But in the other two, where I'll be telling more biblical stories, that verbal accuracy does matter. Following my teachers in NOBS and The Telling Place, I prefer the 'text telling' approach. And this is incredibly time consuming at the preparation stage. The internalising, learning by heart, of the text, is a slow, patience-demanding process. It's more like the formation of a soul than the baking of a cake or building of a model - and even those often demand patience.
At the moment I'm trying to learn the Creation story in Genesis 1; but even as I'm doing it, I realise how rusty my memory of other stories in my repertoire has got, and I'm dreading the thought of how long it will take to revise them.
posted by Tony at 8/28/2004 11:41:00 am
2 Comments:
Let us know any time you'll be in the northwest. I'd love to hear your storytelling.
I didn't even know there WAS such a thing as a storyteller up until a couple years ago. "Storyteller" to me conjured up pictures of some eccentric old man sitting around in the Middle Ages telling a bunch of people fables and playing a panpipe. It was only when I went to live in a particular part of Greater Vancouver (of which I won't mention the name, since it would rob me of my online anonymity...!) where there were lots of artists and writers, that I realized storytelling was an actual pasttime that people engaged in, and that there were events and conventions and whole gatherings devoted to it. I even went to a few storytelling evenings myself, and was due to participate (reading some of James Thurber's fables) until I was laid up with flu at the last minute.
Some of my regular audience would think this a not inaccurate description - at least, as far as the panpipe, which in my case I have not got. The real, hardcore, macho storytelling groups tend to frown on the reading of stories, however. Hence all my anguished stuff about learning them.
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