So what do storytellers do when you "unplug" them from their repertoire?
They improvise. They make up a new story then and there. Get a suggestion from their audience and start telling stories.
In December 2006, Bridget Frederick and Rebecca Fisher of Berkeley's Tell It On Tuesday solo performance series, "commissioned" a new work... they invited Ruth Halpern (who invited me, who invited Shaun Landry, who invited Kurt Bodden) to combine our storytelling skills and our ability to improvise to create an evening of stories in the moment. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, we did meet twice before the performance. Once to brainstorm ideas of how the show might work, and once to try out our proposed format. We discovered we needed to reign in our impulses to show off our "Whose Line is It Anyway?" style comic chops to focus on storytelling. And when it came time to put the show on its feet, we presented an evening of stories, sometimes solo, sometimes in pairs, or trios, or a quartet... and quite a variety of forms, from quiet monologues to narrated dramatic scenes to interactive fairy tales.
Since that time, we've managed to perform again, at venues like the San Francisco Improv Festival and the San Francisco Theatre Festival. Audiences really respond to our focus on stories... some audience members told us the format reminds them of radio, in that as they hear the stories, their imagination is activated to create corresponding visual images (great! that's how storytelling should work!).
So we've hung our shingle out on the Web. Drop by the Storytellers Unplugged Web site, and if you've got the bandwidth, watch some the video. Keep an eye out for our next shows.