The Big Lie of Storytelling
Storytelling and Power
Over the weekend of the 8-10 of March 2019 I was asked to speak at the Leeds Storytelling Takeover in the Carriageworks Theatre organised by storytelling production company Adverse Camber. I was part of a panel and my brief was to talk about Storytelling and Power. It is not a subject I would ever have chosen for myself but there was something both exciting and scary about the title and they only wanted fifteen minutes, so I went for it!
The first thing I felt was fear. Not scared of anything in particular but just having to approach and talk about ‘power’ from the point of view of a creative professional working in a form that is all but invisible to the mainstream made me feel uneasy. However, whoever had decided that this was a subject worth talking about had asked me to deal with it and it felt like a challenge worth taking up.
Luckily I had already been introduced to a creative approach to fear by the Canadian author and creative writing tutor Barbara Turner-Vessalago. Her advice (derived from her mentors) is “Go fearwards!” So I did. “Fear is where the energy is”, says Barbara and she’s dead right. All the ambitious storytelling collaborations and projects I have taken part in that have succeeded had a big fear element from the outset. What made these projects work was that the whole team were in it together, working on the hunch that this thing we were cooking up would work but with no certainty that it would. The projects that started scary are also the ones I enjoyed most and learned most from. Looking back I can see a pattern that less successful collaborations and projects all had people involved who were doggedly working within their safety zones.
So what is the power of storytelling?
Storytelling is an art form that has largely hidden it’s light under a bushel but there are some vibrant and well-established storytelling forays into the arts programming mainstream (Adverse Camber, The Crick Crack Club etc) and the welcome publication of Hannah MacDowell’s book Performance Storytelling which is a grown-up look at storytelling economics and marketing.
According to search engines the power of storytelling includes the ability to hand down learning and knowledge, engage curiosity emotions and imaginations, connect with any audience, influence people, improve whole system flow (whatever that is), appeal to hearts as well as minds and create empathy. These are all good things and the more stories can help these things happen the better the world will be. Storytelling has been re-discovered as a great tool by people who, in the main, never really bothered with it before. The narrative element may be crucial to create these beneficial effects but it is tiny. Of course, the applied use of storytelling has many beneficial effects but this is not the power of storytelling.
Storytelling is not a tool - it is the world.
Simply put, the power of storytelling is that while one person (or occasionally more than one) tells a story to a live audience (ideally in the same place at the same time) the jointly created reality of the story becomes more real that the ‘real’ world. Somehow or other we are able, by telling and listening, to manifest the world of the story in the space where we happen to be so that we inhabit the story in a deeper and more present way than we inhabit the ‘real’ world. If that isn’t a superpower I don’t know what is.
The applied use of storytelling is aimed at a specific outcome. This can be beneficial, like breaking down resistance to positive change or getting people out of their work silos and communicating better or facilitating creativity in education. Or it can be deliberately misleading and harmful like the slew of misinformation and conspiracy theories that are swirling around us right now.
When storyteller and listeners meet the story becomes real and the world of the story is summoned. There is a clear and palpable presence in the room created by the participation and attention of those present. There is a shared mutual gaze and in the nexus of gaze, attention and imagination the story begins to weave itself as a jointly felt reality. And just like reality, those taking part and making it happen can have widely varying stances on what the story means, why it is important and which bits of it are felt to be acceptable or not.
Feral Storytelling
When a storyteller goes into a primary school where the pupils have little or no story input at home, within minutes of starting a story the group know exactly how to respond, react and participate. In the urban venues where a young adult audiences gather to hear performance storytelling (for example the Crick Crack Club’s shows at The Cube in Bristol and the Soho Theatre in London) they understand instinctively how to react and join in. The mutual gaze of audience and performer, aided by the event’s MC, bring the audience out of a contractual and separated relationship into a lively community of experience and imagination.
If you’re interested in my take on storytelling performance you might like to have a look at this research paper I wrote for the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at the University of South Wales.
Quantum power
We are now a long way from using elements of our own experience in order to have a specific effect (beneficial or otherwise) on our listeners. Something much more interesting is happening. In my workshops and coaching sessions I, like many other storytellers, will use the basic storytelling modes as a foundation of practice. These modes are basically ways of speaking and include Action, Description and Information. This is not the place to go into a lot of detail but each of these modes has very specific ways of embodying the story, use of gaze and different levels of momentum. The fun starts when you get people to swap at random from one to another. Immediately we are pushed out of our comfortable patterning and, out of the chaos, a new and deeper reality of the story emerges that is told with greater freedom and authenticity.
I love facilitating this exercise just for the joy on people’s faces as they call on creative resources they didn’t know they had. They do something familiar in a completely new way. They become bright-eyed, spontaneous, surfing on the story and also - very powerful! This is not the power that gets people to buy into a new exercise regime, purchase the latest gadget or even sign-up for a storytelling course but an authentic and empowered experience of world-making.
I am a fan of the anthropologist Tim Ingold. He is interested in one of the core skills of being human - improvisation. I learned about improvisation through clown, mask-work and improvised comedy so I was surprised to see it turn up in Anthropology. Tim Ingold uses everyday examples to illustrate his ideas and one of my favourites is sawing a piece of wood. Apparently, when you saw wood you should keep your index finger straight and touching the blade, not curled round the handle with the rest of your hand, which is something I didn’t know (thanks for the woodwork tip, Professor Ingold!). When you do this you set-up a feedback loop between yourself, the saw and the wood. In effect, for the duration of the sawing, you, the wood and the saw become one thing and your part of the deal is to respond in continual improvisation with the wood and the saw to make a nice, clean cut.
Storytelling in an Animate World
Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
The world we take part in and co-create is unpredictable and emergent. No wonder improvisation is a key skill! The same animate process is at work in live storytelling. I have been lucky enough to have worked on archeology based projects and have been able to handle hand axes made thousands of years ago by our ancestors. Something really strange happens when you pick up a hand axe. As soon as you hold it, you can feel its intention and purpose. Once you have it in your hand, it is almost impossible to hold it without intention and you feel filled with the urge to use it on something. Luckily, I managed to resist this urge.
This image of the frock-coated man on a mountain is a famous painting that has been seen as representative of the Romantic Revival. A sole, adult male surveys the scene from the summit of a mountain. No compromises are made in terms of footwear or clothing to the rigours of getting to the top and the only discernable nod to the great outdoors’ impact on said gent, is a mild ruffling of the hair. He looks out at the scene, no doubt experiencing some kind of sublime rapture. There is something else you need to know - it never happened.
Three Wet Performers After Getting Rained On All Day in Snowdonia. Photo credit: Chris Webb
Now have a look at the second picture. That is me on the left, singer Lynne Denman in the middle and musician Stacey Blythe on the right. Also present are two photographers, a marketing person and the producer for Adverse Camber productions. We have been in the same place most of the day, have been dodging the rain, gone to the pub in Trawsfynydd dripping wet and revived ourselves with cake and tea, chatted to other people in the pub and managed to get some nice moody shots in the drizzle. We are standing on top of Tomen y Mur which is a mound in Snowdonia that is the epicentre of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi. We are soaking wet, covered in mud, and grass-stained after dragging a harp up the mound. We had to pack, unpack and climb up and down the mound several times over the day.
We are a group at work, together in a landscape that is slowly absorbing us and leaving bits of itself all over us and in relation with those who live nearby. Grabbing chunks of the landscape and throwing it in the air seemed like an appropriate way to celebrate the end of the day and acknowledge the landscape as our creative partner. We may not be experiencing sublime rapture but we have done a job of work together in a beautiful and demanding place - and we are happy! And another thing - it happened, it was real and we have a story about it.
Animate Landscape and the Big Lie of Storytelling
Hang out in a landscape for long enough and you will become part of it and it will become part of you - literally! Our presence in the landscape is readily seen in the paths we leave behind for others and others have left for us. Spend a day outside and you will soon be unknowingly recruited as a vector and means of movement for pollen, insects and fungus. You know that strange feeling in woodland that the trees know you are there.? Well it turns out - they do! Much as we love to think that the world is laid out in front of us as a kind of inert surface for us to do what we want with, we are actually embedded and implicated in it.
Mulayndynang/The Seven Sisters, Wiradjuri Country, NSW
Storytelling is probably our main way of making sense of the world around us and the people, creatures and forces that we inhabit it with. We are told that we are ‘storytelling animals’ and that if you want to communicate anything effectively you need to ‘use story’. What if this storyteller told you it was all a big fib?
Storytelling pretends that one thing happens after another. It is structured with connectives (so, and, but, suddenly etc.) to keep us on the path of the story. It is easy to see why this happens. We all see the world from a unique point of view and knit the sequence of events into a coherent chain. From the point of view of the individual, one thing does happen after another. However that is not the world. In the world everything is happening, all the time, everywhere, at the same time.
So am I saying that storying the world and our experience of it is just an illusion? Not quite. When we are in a story and recognise it as such the dynamic tension along the red thread is palpable. We get ourselves aligned with the ‘what happens next-nes’ of the story. The tension along the line of the red thread exists in a resonant environment (aka the world) and when we pluck that string the world resonates according to the tension of the string and the environment we are in. If you happen to be in an environment with lots of cultural resonance, like Tomen y Mur in Snowdonia or near Mulayndynang in Australia, the story told or referred to resonates differently. If you take the time to listen you will find that the resonances can be more challenging, and ultimately more rewarding than expected.
The photo below shows us at the end of a day’s shooting in the rain. The grumpy looks are completely genuine - we were cold, wet and knackered. The two huge concrete blocks in the backgroun are the Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station which is being de-commissioned. The scheduled completion date is 2071 with the site cleared by 2083. Dr. Sam King from Radioactive Waste Management says “Some types of radioactive waste will stay hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years, and existing storage facilities won’t last that long.” (gov.uk 25/06/20)
Three tired performers on top of Tomen y Mur in Snowdonia with Trawsfynydd nuclear power station in the background. Photo Credit Chris Webb
We were doing a show based on Welsh mythology and wanted to get to know the landscape that shaped it and we were stuck with two massive, radioactive concrete blocks in the middle of our Celtic idyll. Or so we thought. We worked away at the story, plucking away at the red thread and, do you know what? The nuclear power station started to resonate with it. The story is about many things but one of the main themes is the use and misuse of magic and power that ends up rebounding on those who abuse it and leads to the end of a dynasty. And there we were on top of Tomen y Mur, posing for the camera, while behind us was a magic energy-making machine that would leave poison in the soil, from which we all come, for the next half a million years or so. Suddenly the Mabinogi became very relevant and there was a rôle reversal between artists and material. Initially we had being trying to find ways to bring the story to life in an authentic and relevant way but, as the show took shape it also started to work its way into us as a living and intentional thing. We thought we were in charge but the story was at work on us all along.
Tomen y Mur and Dreaming the Night Field artists Photo credit: Chris Webb