Storyteller's World

I was thinking again about how extraordinary storytelling is, after yesterday evening's Scouts Service. I had devised quite a simple little story about someone receiving a 'gift', and finding that it grows and improves when they use it to help other people. The story itself was quite thin and insubstantial, so I had to make up for its light weight with a bit more 'technique' than usual: mime, detail, pauses, etc.

And it went down a treat! The church was full, and everyone listened in rapt attention. Yet these young people are supposed to be a generation whose attention span is so atrophied that they can only concentrate for a few seconds before needing some new image or stimulation. Even though these are children who belong to uniformed organisations, and therefore more used to discipline than some of their peers, it didn't seem to quite add up.

But then I remembered one of Alison's reminiscences from her days as a primary teacher on one of the more deprived estates on the edge of this city. She had a class of Year One children with so many social and domestic problems it was an education for me to hear about them. One day Alison decided, instead of the usual Story Hour practice of reading a picture book to the class (to model reading to them) to tell them a story: The Three Billy Goats Gruff. When she came to the end of the story, the whole class spontaneously applauded. There was something about this event that even these kids recognised as different, more worthy of appreciation, than the being-read-aloud-to that they were used to.

Storytelling has this impact because it engages the listeners. The whole person of the storyteller, body, soul, sound and gesture, enters into some kind of comm-uni-cation with them. It compels attention, because it is the giving of a gift, not just a thing that is external to teller and hearer alike (even if it's a well-known old tale), but that somehow is a giving of a part of the teller's own being. A sharing of life.