Theatre Forms: Once upon a Time

by Patrick McDonagh

Storytelling is primal: whether they are tales from the bards of prehistory or those we are told as children, stories lie at the root of our understanding of the world. And whether they provide deep catharsis or light entertainment, they exercise our capacity for empathy. These days no one is scrambling down bean stocks with angry giants in furious pursuit, but at one point most of us have imagined what it must be like. “There are lots of versions of ‘Jack’ tales, although some things may stay the same — the giant or the treasure, for instance,” says Mary Louise Chown, a Winnipeg-based storyteller who is also an actor, visual artist, and musician. “But when people move, stories change: the way stories are told is very reflective of their community.”

Oral tales in endless variants were collected by the Grimm brothers, and Charles Perrault (among others), but in recent decades these have been bowdlerized for mass marketing by Disney and its ilk. However, a growing number of artists are rejuvenating the form; old tales and new are coming to life in festivals, on stages, at schools and libraries, in pubs — anywhere a teller can gather an audience. Events such as the 25-year-old Listen Up! Toronto Festival of Storytelling, organized by the Storytellers School of Toronto, and the 16-year-old Yukon International Storytelling Festival draw impressive crowds; this summer, 3,000 people gathered to hear stories for three days in Whitehorse. “Storytelling is definitely not a dying art — there is no shortage of interested people,” says the Yukon festival’s executive director, Lil Grubach-Hambrook.

Good storytelling is not easy, though. While opinions vary on what makes a great teller, Grubach-Hambrook offers a tentative recipe: “Someone who has a really intuitive relationship with an audience and a huge repertoire to delve into based on what people might want to hear at a specific time and place — whether it’s about Chubby the talking lizard or a Celtic creation tale.” Empathy, it seems, remains the key.

Traditional Sources, New Spins

By all accounts, Dale Jarvis, based in St. John’s, can hold an audience. Jarvis and his collaborator, German musician Delf Maria Hohmann, have developed a story sequence called Under the Juniper Tree, which they have performed in the Yukon as well as at numerous other events. “Most of the stories in the sequence are traditional ‘Jack’ stories from the Grimm collection,” he says. “People sort of know them, but the tales have changed with popular media.” But Jarvis and Hohmann have changed them back — or, more accurately, have taken the originals and given them their own spins. Says Grubach-Hambrook of Jarvis and Hohmann, “They’re real performers — an absolute blast. They tell traditional tales, but viciously — most of the audience appreciates it, but some are horrified.” Jarvis also runs a “haunted St. John’s” tour in the summer, allowing him to turn a small profit on macabre tale-telling.

As with the theatre, performance skills are critical to any storyteller. “Most of the stories I tell come from the 398 section of the library — the oral tale collections,” Chown says. “But the preparation that I do in order to tell a story and to create a character for a play are very much the same: an exploration into why someone is doing something.” However, she also identifies clear differences. “I don’t memorize stories like an actor memorizes — my storytelling is an interactive process, so if I tell the story to different audiences, I might add or drop levels.” This intimacy is a major appeal of Chown’s storytelling — for both the artist and the audience. “I like the stories I tell and I want people to hear them — and I love the eye contact,” says Chown. “It’s a gift, but coming from a very vulnerable place. I’ve told stories where I’ve ended up with tears in my eyes.”

New Territories

The Yukon festival defines storytelling broadly and has incorporated spoken-word, hip-hop, dance, and puppetry into its programming. “They really push the definitions of storytelling,” says an approving Jarvis. Montreal-based writer and actor Catherine Kidd has been pushing many of the same boundaries. Last fall Sea Peach, her collaboration with soundscape artists and DJ Jack Beets, drew rave reviews and packed in audiences for a series of narratives taken from her soon-to-be-published novel, Bestial Rooms. Kidd’s approach to storytelling adopts much that is traditionally theatrical — including a script and props — and the material ranges from first-person narratives by her fictional protagonist to animal fables. “Storytelling, like theatre, is a temporal art form; it’s an event where everybody in the room participates,” she says. As a theatre student who moved to studying philosophy and then composing fiction, she found the loneliness of writing to be oppressive. “Storytelling is less solitary, and you are part of a community. Also, a lot of what I was writing concerned the relationship between a person’s story and how their body carries that story, so it made sense to use the body as the carrier of the text.”

Perhaps one of the most important qualities of a storyteller is that he or she also be a good listener — as when Chown is moved to tears by the stories she tells. Explains Kidd, “When I hear a story, there is often some line or image that feels like a special gift just for me. You have to assume that you never know when that might be happening for somebody when they’re hearing a story, so you’re just letting the images be there with the grace they have.” And the primal connection is made once again.

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