The Tale, the Word, the Teller and Those Who Heard
(the Interwoven Relationships of Story)
by Sam Yada Cannarozzi

torytelling (and by extension theater and the performing arts in general) could be expressed as 'Something special that happens between at least two people in a designated time and space.'

Sitting and listening to classical Iranian music one brisk, mid-autumn morning. The atmosphere is joyful, thoughtful and content, but it is not storytelling. Someone is missing, the other half of the essential, primordial couple. One who will eventually and alternatively take up the role of teller and listener. For this is something we do day in and night long- speak, talk, converse, communicate. But where are the aesthetics of this all?

The speculation cited above may seem austere and perhaps imprecise. We are in fact talking about what could well be the world's oldest art. And that should command something more. The matter is that this entire image of what I have chosen to call Storytelling revolves closely around the words, 'special', 'two people' and 'time and space.'

Poetry is the great grandmother of storytelling who is espoused to theater. One may address a poem to his/her God alone, anywhere over the great world. Special? Yes, but sometimes lonely. What is special if not confirmed and shared? Who knows if it really was, or if it were merely illusion? We need witness.

You could perform anywhere. But look at the actor or dancer: hands, feet, the entire body palpates the environment, and the mind and spirit savor the moment. Is it a kitchen, an outdoor amphitheater, the street, a beach? Yes. But not just any time or inadvertent place. There is conscious and even unconscious choice here.

So many things transgress in the simplest of circumstances. And it is these things that concern the art, the aesthetics. There is a correspondence (co- respond-dance) between the title of this essay and the definition. 'Special' refers to the tale, 'two people' to the teller and those who heard and 'time/space' modifies what might be called style. What are the specifics that make storytelling what it is and that distinguish it from sibling arts, and how?

Guidelines and Lifelines

In Europe as in the United States, these last twenty years have engendered the renewal-renaissance in storytelling. Unlike the ongoing and unbroken, oral tradition of most of the rest of the world, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and beyond, we have re-begun the search back that will take us forward again, retuning our heart's ears to the magical necessity of stories and their tellings.

Why now? It was the industrial revolution that marked the beginning of what is called literacy and technological progress, but also the going out of touch between people and the world. Somehow in particular this came to a head, a knot, in the West after two world wars and the scientific leaps of the sixties (computers and space), perhaps even more so than the first mechanical reaper or the telephone. But these are also times of liberation, revolution and re-thinking.

In France (where I have been living for almost twenty years) for example, not only were minority peoples awakening (the Britons and the Basques, the Occitanians and the Alsatians among others) but important immigrations from former colonies (that is lands and civilizations where the story was as yet virgin in the face of mass media, in which story was education and wisdom) were beginning to make their entrance into social consciousness and language in an important way. Simultaneously, and too rapidly, there was surplus in every domain- the economy and industry, politics, the arts. More, bigger and better. Somewhere, someone cannot continue to assimilate without end, unconnected with what is happening. And one day when there is just one too many video screens, loudspeakers or competitive aggression, a simple story struts across the imagination. Rich in its simplicity, far reaching in its depth, friendly, uncomplicatedly retold- and the spark jumps!

That was France twenty years ago. Today different groupings of professionals the country over are struggling to defend the art in face of tight, ever diminishing funding budgets and theatrical productions with memorized lines, costumes, staging and lights that are billed as "storytelling" simply because the piece presented is "Puss in Boots" recently rewritten by a well-known author. And of course we are still trying to tap a potential audience that has yet to be invited to the ritual of the tale.

So let's look at some of the qualities that distinguish the event of storytelling from other stage arts.

The first person to professionally try reviving storytelling in France was Bruno Delasalle. He presently heads CLIO, the Center for Oral Literature in Chartres north of Paris, tours extensively and just presented a childhood dream, the solo recital in verse of the Odyssey. In 1988 he made a presentation at the International Colloquium on Storytelling held at the National Folklore Museum in Paris. He talked about the aesthetics of storytelling, and specifically about the story-teller's repertoire. Any theater company can have a repertoire. But here is the point Bruno Delasalle drove home: the storyteller's repertoire is total AND lifelong. That is, the teller can retell any or all of his sto-ries, the tremendous repertory of the entirety of his or her knowledge, memory and art. I know of no actor, however talented or well known, who can come anywhere near such a claim.

At the very first storytelling festival to which I was invited, a friend, an excellent actor from a Company that produced marvelous masked/mimed versions of world legends, remarked to me, "This is the first time I have heard true storytelling. It's not theater, but I can't seem to make the distinction." I have several times since heard this comment and I think it is pertinent to the question of storytelling aesthetics. If we take an example of what might be most confused with storytelling, we can aim at a clearer idea. Sometimes when well performed, an improvisational, one-person show could very well be tagged 'story.' It certainly has the intimacy. These kinds of performances, especially in Europe, take place in coffee-houses. It often happens that the audience, more or less rowdy, will interrupt or question the actor. He or she, if competent, will roll with the punches. And when the performance is really excellent, it's hard to believe that there's a word for word script. Is the performer telling a story? There certainly is this ambiguity.

What is improvisation? It comes from the Latin 'pre- videre', literally
"to foresee." Can the stand-up comedian handle queries from his listeners?
Very certainly, as does the storyteller. He diverges, plummets, soars but finally glides once again into no, not the story, but the text. And what if he sees his audience needs more humor or on the contrary more depth? What if he suddenly realizes that after a quarter of an hour into an hour performance that the audience will never make it through the length of the show?!

All of these situations have happened to me, and worse- to come pre-pared, for example, for an evening performance and discover that the parents have left you to babysit with 60 under-8-year-olds! I won't claim that I systematically triumphed over all odds. But I have changed stories even programs in the middle of a performance, have lengthened and shortened, juxtaposed and juggled endings in stride and in wavelength with sometimes difficult situations and listeners.

But I have never heard of a theater director dropping act II of Troilus and Cressida in the middle of a performance because he judged that the audience needed a quicker paced play. There is improvisation and improvisation. The storyteller's fore-sight, in function of experience and talent, therefore exceeds even the most flexible actor. If I could quote another colleague from Picardy (who always opens his evenings with the phrase, "I heard these stories from my grandmother. My grandmother who saw the child with the head of a frog!") Laurent Devimes, " The storyteller is the actor's jazzman!"

Personally, in many storytelling evenings, I have less-than-rarely ever memorized. When rote memory enters into it, it is a question of riddles, fixed songs, etc. in which memory is very simply unavoidable. And if legends have come down to us over the millennia, certainly memory came into play to glue the essential into place. The expression goes that we learn something by heart. Well the heart part of it is certainly right. But as I heard in England once from a woman, "Stories should be learned not by heart but with the heart." And that is all the difference. A pre-position, a heartbeat away.

And then perhaps one more technical point. It is virtually impossible for me to rehearse a story, really and truly. The story literally cannot exist without at least that second person. Rehearsal of course is part and parcel of the theatrical tradition and I'd even say aesthetic. This of course does not mean that we don't practice or that our brand of improvisation is vague, unstructured fantasy or delirium. I dare telling a story for the first time before others so that the story can be birthed. When it has found its legs and voice then it can enter into a repertory program. How many actors or actresses have the opportunity to take advantage of such situations? Normally the audience demands polish from the very first line.

My intention here is not to establish priorities or brag superiorities. My eight years of professional theatrical training, dance, mime, bioenergetics, body expression etc. make my stories what they are today. I am an avid theater goer. But I know that what fascinates me at times in theater could not go over into my telling. After all, the actor acts and the teller tells. The actor has that instinct to show you physically whereas the teller creates the whole of it within the mind of the listener through word-images. There is that one thing though that unites the two arts. As Maurice Bejart, the contemporary Belgian choreographer, once said, "On stage it is not a question of doing but of being."

Time and Space

The storyteller is the peddler of popular traditions. He carries his theater on his back and makes natural space over into stage space. Instead of the architecture of the theater, you find around the storyteller, a natural space which at the actual moment of the performance becomes the space of the stage, -proven and respected by the audience. Once the performance finished, the stage disappears and the space that was occupied ... returns to the community.

--"The Art of the Storyteller
The Art of the Arabic Actor",
Youssef Rachid Haddad, Stage Arts Magazine, Brussels, Belgium.
(my translation)

Two archetypal images come to mind when I think about the storytelling space: fire and tree. It's not necessary here to take up the imaginings of anthropologists as to the upheavals in the life of the first creatures who succeeded in handling fire. It was sacred; it meant life or death. And it does still today where, in many parts of the world, and until re-cently in the West, that people gather around a fire to spin yarns. Curiously they insist on sitting around a fire on hot summer nights even after it is no longer the food cooked there that attracts them. The magic remains. Fire is heat and light and heat is life and enlightenment.

Once painted on the wall of the Young People's Social Center in Bamako Mali (it is Mali that some eight centuries ago gave us one of the world's professional statutes for the storyteller) but now almost completely worn away, was a wonderful scene. The 'griot' or traditional teller, accompanying his story with the four-stringed n'goni West African guitar, sur-rounded by wide-eyed listeners of all ages, seated about a great baobab tree.

The first thing I do upon arriving for a performance, be it a kindergarten or a castle on a mountain in Austria, is to walk around the space breathing slowly. Of course it's to take note if people will be able to see me, to make sure in makeshift situations that jackhammers will not start up their chorus in the middle of the best part, and all the other technical concerns that have become second nature. But I know that even when the space is fixed, I must impregnate myself with it, I must make friends with it or I risk floating out of the heart's reach of my listeners. Somehow the fire is burning near the tree and it's up to you to remind your audience that this too is important.

I now use weavings, rugs, batiks and embroidered sheets to capture the space when the exteriors have hidden too well the importance of where you are. After draping and arranging bookshelves, a flaking plaster wall or a splintery stage, decorating a stool and enthroning the storytelling seat, with or without lighting and microphones, I am then ready to take the first step with the audience. In African dance it is so important to take well your first step, but even before the space if swept as not to be tinged with the spirits of former happenings. Even before the "Once upon a time, an aural first step, we as human beings are preparing ourselves for the specialness.

Organizers sometimes ask me if it is necessary for matinee performances to black out the room. I answer- when I tell at night I tell 'in the dark'. When I tell during the day, I want light! I do also have a drawn year plan for what stories could/should be told in what season. But it is neither good etiquette or good politics I find to often refuse invitations that are 'out of season.' On the contrary, I insist on energizing the span of a classroom hour or evening-full performance. I rhythm and punctuate, tempo-rize and drum that time so at best one doesn't know if it's been an hour or an afternoon. And then truly, after I've packed up the last silk scarf and have placed the chair back against the wall, the fire is out or reduced to hardly perceptible embers, the tree has faded back into the wings. I may leave some scraps of paper I have thrown upon the floor just as a slight remembrance. At that moment I am often awestruck that someone passing through this space wouldn't have the slightest indication of what happened here. But I fight against the simple fact that ours is an ephemeral art, with the reassurance that we have created and shared together the specialness for a moment. Just here and not elsewhere, and that memory hopefully will be cherished and passed on to the future.

Two people

Djeli Baba Cissoko is a Mandingo storyteller, son of a Mandingo Storyteller. They say his father, whose fresco now adorns the northern wall of the Palace of Culture on the Djoli Ba, the great River Niger, could make his n'goni play without touching a string. In the thirteenth century the legendary King Soundjiata, the Lion with a Bow, whose praises are still sung today, granted to his chief balafon player the title of griot, storytelling artist, thus creating the profession for millions of listeners today in black Africa. In Bambara, the tongue of the Mandingos, the griot is called "djeli," from the root meaning blood . Because the teller lauds the bloodline, the genealogy of the royal race. But he is also 'the blood' of the culture, of his people. As Amadou Hampate Ba reminds us:

"Story told, and be told, are you true?
For children playing in the moonlight my tale is a story of wonder.
For the Women who spin cotton during the long nights of the rainy sea-
son, it is a delectable pastime.
For those with hairy chins and rough heels, it is a veritable reve-lation.
I, the story therefore am futile, useful and instructive.
Unroll it for us storyteller."
(from Kaydara)

He also posited," When a djeli dies, a library burns."

Djeli Baba Cissoko was once unraveling his story at the Kuma Ba Festival in Bamako. With his imitations of a shrewish woman he not only had the audience in stitches, but the cameraman had to take off his headset so that he could laugh full-heartedly. This is not an NBC studio in NY.

In other world cultures, apparently spontaneously to outside observers,
the listeners join in a refrain or a chant and may even get up and dance.
If constant feedback in the form of grunts and huffs doesn't continually
punctuate the stream of story the teller can simply not tell. Here in the West it is rather politeness that dictates that silence is the re-spect due the artist. And yet the listener is active in a different way.

Storytelling is, when the listener becomes the storyteller and has the teller listening. In this sense, it is an art that engages you into an active role, even if the step of externally expressing this par-ticipation is not really ever taken. It happened once that in telling a story, an African woman teller spoke of a young girl sent to fetch food for her grandmother. Then in character, she turned to a little girl in the audience and asked her why the food was not here yet. The girl was on her feet before she realized that it was simply an image from the story. Yes, to be a story, you have to be at least two. And there are different ways, be one Balinese or a Chicagoan, to invite others to walk along with you in the story. One can solicit not only the sense of hearing, but also the other senses. One might use scents to awaken people to the specialness of the here and now. Simple but conscious ways of dressing help reluctant audiences to take part. Objects can be exchanged and, of course, songs sung.

There is a tradition in Arab North Africa when recounting the 1001 Nights
that the audience is offered dates stuffed with almonds. The dates re-present the sweetness of the tales, and the almonds their bitterness. I once tasted stories in this way. I was first enchanted with this special externalized kind of participation when listening to a Haitian woman teller who began and kept her stories warm by interjecting "Cric!" to which we were to respond "Crac!" She would do this whenever she wanted to see how closely we were listening. And so we went in tandem creaking and cracking our ways through the evening. And so it is often now that I introduce traditional question-response words that the audience and I play with and exchange. Most effective when the hero has just been beheaded and you add, "And the story could have ended here couldn't it ... Cric!" Are you there my twin?

The Word

It is true that in the modern tradition of storytelling, the artist's personality plays an obvious role. He or she imposes a signature, a style. I have been guided by two story sources in the discovery and creation of my style- the trickster figure and the Three Princes of Serendip. In effect one of my performances is entitles "The Serendipity Trickster."

For some time now, anthropologists have tagged this curious creature as Jung called him/her, the Divine Trickster. Yves Coppens in his Monkey, Man and Africa observes , "One might say schematically that the first hu-man being appears as a superior primate of the dry savannas, two-legged, an omnivorous opportunist, craftsman and social, clever and prudent, con-scious and gregarious. The human being in all its characteristics is there."
(My translation)

From the Jack Tales through Leuk the hare in Senegal, across Siberia as Kuuril, mischievous Puck or Lakotan Iktome, this ambiguous figure in myth and story who sometimes spoils, sometimes completes creation, this imitator, transformer and demi-urge chameleon is none other than our own creative powers of the imagination.

I find the Trickster to be a role model for the storyteller. It is his or
her responsibility to coax and cajole, instigate and prod the listener
through the story. We have already seen how other cultures tend to physically include listeners in the story. The Trickster's role is now to convince them that they are the most essential ingredient in all of this.

A friend of mine once told me that it was Horace Walpole, the 18th cen-tury writer of Gothic novels who coined the word serendipity from an old Sri Lankan tale entitled, "The Three Princes of Serendip." And lo and behold it is true. Serendipity, "the quality of making discoveries by accident of things one was not in quest of," as Walpole first define it, could be the storyteller's motto. How can one slyly and goodhearted-ly trick the listener into discovering the magic of the tale?!

It is with the hammer of the Trickster and the anvil of the Serendipity Princes
that I work to forge my style, my Word. In one of her recent books, Anne
Pellowski relates what happens when she asks workshop participants to imagine themselves at the birth of time and so to explain by what means the first tellers recounted their adventures. She then relates that sometimes a group is so convinced of the exactitude of their point of view, which is merely supposition, that they sometimes argue vociferously and find intriguing suggestions as proof. But what interests her is the fact that this exercise helps people go beyond the false notion that the first way of telling was necessarily purely oral. She cites example after example of how Pacific peoples use string figures or how Inuit peoples use a decorated storytelling knife to draw pictures in snow or mud.

One's style then need not be confused solely with a well trained voice.
Besides using string figures, but also origami, the sign language of the
First Nation peoples, a costume of rainbows and all sorts of objects and sound instruments, I search for just the right word-style to convey a specific story. I call these gestural, visual-dynamic or tactile stories. I am not interested in novelty, but rather in necessity and creating the properly tempered tools with hammer and anvil.

And so hand in hand down the (Yellow-Brick?) road I skip with my princes and tricksters. I am convinced, as was Jung, that "if we make fun of this Serendipity Trickster of Story (sic) he looks at us giggling. Because what happens to him, happens to us as well."

Full Circle

As I was taking up this typewriting plume I also flipped to the page in my American heritage Dictionary to the entry aesthetics. From the Greek aisthenasthai,'to perceive.' And/or having a love of beauty. It derives from the Indo-european root aw-2. The find was vintage serendipity, if not an exhilarating lagniappe. (I'll let you look that one up.) Along with 'aesthetics' which also means very simply to feel, one.- finds 'anasthesia', literally the lack of feeling a kind of anti- or non-aesthetic. But there was also 'audit' and 'auditor', from 'audio-(!) originally meaning to obey. Because if we were really listening and paying attention we'd do what was being asked. There was the adjective 'audile' that describes a person who learns essentially through hearing as opposed to the visual for example and finally 'auditorium'(!!) and, ta-da, 'audience'(!!!) The very soul then of the word aesthetics is the self-same definition for listening. Storytelling IS aesthetics.

And when the teller and the told are gathered particularly in that precise space and time continuum, it is then that the special may occur, that the tale might exist. So

The presentation therefore is the common creation of the storyteller, who proposes, arouses and suggests and the story listener who, an accomplice, responds, imagines and vibrates at different moments of the narrative. Without the intimate communication of these elements, the festive ceremonial that the storyteller will bring to life, cannot take place.

-Y.R. Haddad, ibid.

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