The following article is from our monthly webzine, September 2009: "Storytelling" (...in which, via flip-photos, a little bird makes a cross-continent journey, we have 3 streaming songs that take different approaches to musical storytelling, one video from back-in-the-day, and we look at Storyboards and Storytelling telling Conventions + More!!!)
The Stories We Tell...
It's been my working method for a long time that we are our stories.
Both individually and collectively, the tales that fill our minds and lives shape our language and experiences, acting similar to a filter or headset with which we interact with the world, whether we are conscious of it or not. How our earliest caregivers talked about their days, their work, their family, their loved ones, their hated ones (their challenges, conquests, petty likes and dislikes...), all intimately formed our own emerging language and worldviews.
These thoughtforms lurk in the shadows of who we become. Those early stories gave us, if nothing more, a verbal shorthand
(how is “shorthand” for an archaic term?), a code, perhaps, that even if we believe we rejected our family or care-takers' values and attitudes at any point, was still a jumping off point in our own developing stories as they unfolded. Even all grown-up, if we have heard a signifigant other's story often enough, we can fill in the parts, nodding and interrupting to either move the umpteenth retelling along – or perhaps, more generously-hearted, as a way of participation (as if we had actually been there at the recounted event).
Change the stories or how we tell them, and one can transform their life experience – not by rewriting the past, but by altering our perception of it. Difficult people, jobs, and situations either infect our lives as constant nemesi, or become the fodder for new or different choices. At some point, we no longer find it necessary to circle the same blocks over and over. We recognize the scenary and realize it's time to move on. Yet for some, the ability to turn the page and start a new chapter remains a terrifying roadblock, postponed until it either becomes a critical emergency to do so, and they no longer have a choice but to effect change, or the idea remains frozen, reserved for often-failed New Year's Resolutions.
A story I have found myself telling evolved from an attempt I made many years ago to discover what the difference is between those that seem able to make leaps of life-transforming change, and those that appear paralyzed by the very thought. I eventually called that tale "The Archelogical Dig", because when I tell a story often enough, it tends to attract a title, and the metaphor that spoke to me centered around two groups of people I neatly divided the world's population into: those that could go on an archelogical dig for a year, and those that could not.
Nevermind that we don't all want to go on such digs, and people truly don't fall into neat piles of either-or. The details of this story I told myself, before ever sharing it outloud with another, helped me work out some ideas that were themselves life-transforming. I have since found myself in very creative places and situations that I had never anticipated when I first puzzled together the dynamics of how to do what I felt I must do, when the logistics
seemed daunting. But right now, I'll save the recital of
"The Archelogical Dig" for another day, and perhaps another format.
How we tell our stories continues to evolve. We can now compose stories 140 text characters at a time, often in quasi-collaborative efforts at exploring "new" narratives (or harnassing shorter and shorter attention spans). Myself, I've constructed stories from scribbled sticky-notes and the contents of my purse dumped out on a table -- my collagist leanings, I guess. Our snapshot collection accompanying our Setpember issue returned again to cut and paste in telling a bird's story (very imagined) in 9 photos. The little papermache theater also pictured here, "Storyhouse", is a work in progress that I have experimented with as a device for staging visual stories or tableaus.
But in thinking about the many ways storytelling infuses the arts, we've only touched on a few in these pages. Some of the concepts we didn't broach are at the core of this subject, such as audiences. Another, one of my favorites, is the role of editing in story development and refinement (though our articles about story-telling conventions and storyboards both give brief insights into that aspect). A couple of books we looked at recently for ideas are listed with our resources.
- Carli Castellani, Artistic Director
An Arts Collaborative: Art + Music + Comics + More...