Oralcles for Storytelling
by Sam Yada Cannarozzi

t once dawned upon me that one could draw some interesting conclusions between the storyteller and...the fortuneteller. Personally I’ve never been to one. But the image of a man or woman reading cards, reading images and symbols and from these images putting together a coherent "story," gave me food for thought. From this developed yet another idea for the frame story, for a way of putting together an evening that would be as much a surprise for the teller as for the audience.

In fact, I thought of this possibility because of another question that storytellers often ask each other. When you are scheduled for a program with other tellers, how do you choose your story (stories) and how do you relate to the stories told by the others? I found here in France, and I suspect it is much the same, in part, in other parts of the storytelling world where the teller is a professional artist (rather than the traditional storyteller coming directly and only from oral tradition) that in a professional situation the storytelling artist tends to be more pre-occupied solely with his or her own performance and let the others take care of themselves.

I don’t mean to put everyone in the same bag of egotism or selfishness, but when you are invited to a festival and you know that the audience is made up in part of "potential employers" I would say that taking the safe road, and telling a story you know will work, tends to take preference over taking a risk and experimenting. Even in a more friendly situation, I have found that whether I have told with fellow artists I know well or with other storytellers I didn’t know, it was pretty much a fifty-fifty chance that the evening could swing either way. Since we were all professionals, the evening was never "bad." But then again it wasn’t necessarily something special either. Why?

One of the answers might be that, when telling together with others, you are never really one hundred per cent available to listen to what is being told, because somewhere in your mind you are asking yourself, "Well now so and so is telling an animal fable, so should I add another, or change directions, or perhaps I could sing a ballad," or other such questions. In reponse to this dilemma I developed Oralcle, Oral + Oracle, This is how it works.

I adapted four different oracles, representing the four world corners to my repertory: from the East, the I-Ching, from the West the Tarot, from the North the Runes and from the South Geomancy. I won’t go into detail here, but each of these oracles proceeds through image and metaphor. Perhaps the most common would be the Tarot deck—there is the Lover, the Tower, the Fool, the Devil, etc. Well, there are 22 cards in the major arcana of the Tarot deck. There are 64 hexagrams in the I-Ching, there are 24 letters in the ancient Runic alphabet and 16 symbols in the Geomantic oracle. Each of these 126 images has a name, quality or association. Ideally one could match up 126 stories, riddles, ballads, nursery rhymes to each of them. That task I haven’t taken up yet. But I did reduce the number of possibilities so that I would have in play some 18 stories from my repertory. I have used this system in solo, but more interesting is to give it a go with other storytellers.

Over a week long workshop organized by the Center for Oral Tradition in Vendôme south of Paris and founded by Bruno Delasalle, the man who almost single-handedly kicked off the storytelling revival in France, my companion and I hosted twenty tellers in an old school house we rented in southern Burgundy. It was to be a week of experimentation among professionals and so with Farzaneh Valai from Iran and Catherine Gendrin from France, we three presented an evening of Oralcle.

Each of us chose 18 stories from our repertory, associated them with the 18 oracular images, familiarized each other with the kinds of stories that might pop up, and then proceeded to finding a form for the evening. What resulted was something that I found quite interesting and immensely satisfying. As the other tellers arrived, they found arranged before them cards, stones, chinese coins and engraved pieces of wood. To see in what order each of us would tell, we used the equivalent of flipping a coin. Then also using chance operations, one of the oracles was selected and consulted. At that time, the other tellers would sing a song or play an instrument while the selected teller found the title of the story associated with the given oracle and the evening began.

This may sound a bit artificial, but each of the chance operations which designated storyteller, oracle and story was carried out in a simple yet forceful way: hands were slapped, coins jostled or cards shuffled, and color and movement were integrated into the procedure. It flowed in fact rather well. The audience which wasn’t necessarily familiar with all the oracles found an interest in the way each was consulted, the general layout and wondering how we would adapt story to the overall result.

But what I found most amazing was, while waiting for my turn, I had nothing to do but.., listen! Just like everyone else in the audience. I knew neither when my turn would come, nor which story would be chosen for me to tell. (Although I had the assurance that it was one of the 18 I had chosen.) It was a wonderful liberating feeling. I could really listen to and enjoy the person who was telling, because I was freed from the responsability of trying to match up something when it came to be my turn. In fact, as a general philosophy, the Oracle itself chose the appropriate story that was to follow. All I had to do was go with the flow. It was exhilarating.

I’ve only participated in three evenings of this sort, but as a frame for the evening, I have found nothing as unique. I invite you to take the dare. I hope you’ll find that it loosens up a lot of taken for granted ideas about how to control content and how to be professional in excess.

Oracles
The clasic translation from the Chinese into German of the I–Ching was done by Wilhelm and is easily available in English translation. Thorsson has published several books on the Scandinavian runes, such as Runelore or At the Well of Wyrd. Of course books abound on the interpretation of the Tarot deck. Perhaps hardest to find would be literature on the oracle of geomancy, not to be confused with the Chinese art of orientating a house. Geomancy, or the oracle of the earth, was developed by the Arabic peoples of North Africa, and is also practiced in a variant form in black Western Africa and perhaps indeed has descended from the original I-Ching, or Book of Changes.

—published in WIP Winter 1998

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