Found this here and just had to post it!
One day a lion wakes up in a bad mood and summons the other animals in the jungle.
"I want each of you to tell a joke, but I warn you that if anyone of you fails to laugh, I'll kill the one who told it. Let's see, monkey, you will be first."
Shaking with fear the monkey begins, "Two men are in the street and..."
When he finishes, everyone bursts out laughing save the tortoise. "The tortoise didn't laugh!" roars the lion, pouncing on the monkey and ripping him to pieces. Then he orders, "Elephant, you're next."
Cursing through clenched teeth, the elephant begins, "A drunk walks into a bar and..."
When he finishes, all the animals split their sides laughing except the tortoise, who remains impassive. "The tortoise didn't think it was funny!" exclaimed the lion who, seeing that the furious elephant is about to step on the tortoise, kills the elephant with his claws.
By now, everyone wants to murder the tortoise, but nobody dares move. "Now it's your turn, tiger," orders the lion.
The scared tiger begins, "They say that Little Red Riding Hood..."
At that moment, the tortoise falls over laughing. "What's with you?" bellows the lion. "Tiger hasn't finished yet..."
To which the tortoise replies, "The monkey's joke is hilarious!"
Monday 11 January 2010
Sunday 3 January 2010
Alternative Realities: A Storyscape
What follows is an excerpt from my thesis, a description of a digitally enhanced storytelling experience.
The background noise dies down as Owen adjusts the dials on the speakers and laptop.A soft, poignant melody washes over the studio and Owen’s voice comes out of the speakers. As his words begin to fill the room, I can see the form of a traveller, walking the roads with his bag of dreams, carefree, alone. The notes of his simple tune, slightly discordant, hint at the story to come. I am aware that the students sitting around me are still, and I hope that they too can see the traveller in front of them, now resting under a hawthorn tree.The alternative reality is that of a top floor art college studio, painted white and filled with desks, swivel chairs, computers and the debris of student projects past and present. Cold January light seeps in through skylights. You may think it is perhaps not the best space from which to enter the land of stories but it does show that the doorway can be opened from anywhere. The third year design students sit gathered round the front half of the room, the lucky ones slouched on the black sofa. Owen’s storyscape comes near the end of a day-long workshop on practical storytelling techniques, part of the Re-Telling module I am running to explore how storytelling and digital technology can interact.Owen watches the laptop screen intently, making small adjustments every so often.The rich, verdant story landscape is untouched by town or traffic, devoid of even the incessant hum of electricity. The traveller man is running across the landscape, heavily, clumsily, but swiftly all the same. The green woman he chases runs just out of reach, leading him over hills and through trees, almost floating over the ground as she dances effortlessly in front of him. The timeless layers of harp notes weave through the landscape, shaping the contours as Owen’s voice shapes the story.I met Owen through the Dundee storytelling group, Blether Tay-gither, and he was an obvious choice to run a guest workshop for a number of reasons, not least because I consider him to be an excellent storyteller. Blether is a predominantly female group, with a tendency for storytellers to be older rather than younger and, in general, not eager adopters of technology. Owen is younger than most of the group in Blether and his background in sculpture along with his experimental soundscape storytelling made him the ideal person to introduce the basic concepts of storytelling to the students. Owen’s style of telling is quite traditional, in that it is clear, understated and well paced, allowing time to watch the story unfold in your mind’s eye.I smile to myself as I remember Owen telling me about Robin Williamson and how inspirational he was. ‘I listened to his work and I was blown away by it. He plays a harp and it’s quite bardic, you know. It sounds like it’s coming from a place back in time, beautiful stories, and I was really inspired by what he was doing.’It was during this interview that Owen told me about the electronic soundscapes he had created. As he explained to the students, normally the soundscapes are put together live, with the story told live too. For the purposes of this workshop and because the piece was unfinished Owen used a pre-recorded version.Days have now passed in the chase of man and woman. The man struggles on, slower now but not defeated. Yet the green lady is swifter than ever before and try as he might, it is all the traveller man can do to just keep up with her. And still the landscape rolls on relentlessly, dreamlike in its insubstantiality.On reflection, I find myself surprised by the storyscape. It was not what I was expecting when I asked Owen if he would show the students an example of a story soundscape. Yet I struggle to know what I was expecting. The style matches Owen’s normal telling, but has a more detached edge to it; the story is more elusive, almost mythic in its ephemerality.I think back to our conversation a few months earlier in the local arts centre.‘One of the things that I’m interested in doing is using modern technology, especially sound and music, combining it with storytelling so that there’s something that people can access a bit more easily.’ Owen’s interest in combining electronic sounds and stories comes from a love of electronic music and a need to bridge the worlds of bardic-inspired storytelling and modern culture.‘It’s a way of letting them know what storytelling is and then they can trace it back and hear what real, simple storytelling is if they want to. But I love electronic music and it’s a way for me to fit in with modern culture and what my friends are into, you know. And that’s electronic sounds and computers and iPods so it’s a way of bringing it to them.’Owen pauses, taking a drink of tea. The café area is getting busy and tables are being set for the evening although it’s still only late afternoon.‘There’s one particular festival that I go to called Solfest and you’ve got a big storytelling centre there, lots of storytellers and theatre groups come and do their thing. And then at night you’ve got a tent that’s playing full on electronic music and I like that balance. There’s people coming to the storytelling sessions who are going out at night to dance to the electronic music and I’d like to find that middle ground where you can bring the two together and make it work.’Owen is the only storyteller I know, and am aware of, who actively seeks to incorporate elements of storytelling and digital media into live events or performances. However, I recall a piece of performance dance, Sensational knowledge, Sensational Ethnography, which explored the connections between digital and analogue. A collaboration between composer and programmer Curtis Bahn and dancer Tomie Hahn, it created electronic sounds from Tomie’s dance movements. Tomie embodied traditional elements through her experience of Japanese traditional dance whilst the sensors capturing her movements brought ‘a contemporary expressive moment.’Owen continues, ‘There’s electronic music that I’ve heard that uses traditional folk music in it. And I know quite a few people who’ve learned a lot about folk music because they’ve heard this electronic music and heard that little folk tune and then traced it back and just discovered what folk music is all about. So I’d like to do the same with storytelling.’‘Have you done that so far?’ I ask.‘I’ve done a couple of stories where I’ve used my laptop with sound programs and I’ve mixed samples into my story live. I’ve done a storytelling live, you know, standing there telling it and used a laptop to bring in sounds at certain points in the story. It’s more been music based but I’m looking to make it more like combining storytelling and sound art, rather than just music. So that’s what I’m moving towards.’I’m intrigued by how the audience would react to such a story, trying to imagine what the rest of the Blether Tay-gither tellers would think about it. Owen tells me of the positive response from listeners, but admits that they were festival performances.‘I’d like to do the same thing to a traditional storytelling audience, people who are really into tradition, just to see how they react.’ Owen smiles. ‘But one festival I did it and somebody came up to me afterwards and he said, ‘You know, it’s really good just to see something different.’ And that was a great comment to me because that’s what I want. You know, I want them to hear something that is different, not been heard before. So, yeah, I’ve had a great reaction from it actually, really good.’Owen illustrates the potential affinity of tradition and new media. He admires the bardic style of telling, with music accompanying the tale and Celtic myths, but he also wants to ground part of that tradition in contemporary contexts, distorting sounds of the harp through electronic effects and making full use of the two seemingly separate worlds.Upon awakening beneath the original hawthorn tree, their journey come full circle, the traveller man offers a blossoming branch of hawthorn to the green-robed lady. Together, they walk into the green hills, their journey just beginning. As the last notes fade away, there is stillness in the darkening studio.
The background noise dies down as Owen adjusts the dials on the speakers and laptop.A soft, poignant melody washes over the studio and Owen’s voice comes out of the speakers. As his words begin to fill the room, I can see the form of a traveller, walking the roads with his bag of dreams, carefree, alone. The notes of his simple tune, slightly discordant, hint at the story to come. I am aware that the students sitting around me are still, and I hope that they too can see the traveller in front of them, now resting under a hawthorn tree.The alternative reality is that of a top floor art college studio, painted white and filled with desks, swivel chairs, computers and the debris of student projects past and present. Cold January light seeps in through skylights. You may think it is perhaps not the best space from which to enter the land of stories but it does show that the doorway can be opened from anywhere. The third year design students sit gathered round the front half of the room, the lucky ones slouched on the black sofa. Owen’s storyscape comes near the end of a day-long workshop on practical storytelling techniques, part of the Re-Telling module I am running to explore how storytelling and digital technology can interact.Owen watches the laptop screen intently, making small adjustments every so often.The rich, verdant story landscape is untouched by town or traffic, devoid of even the incessant hum of electricity. The traveller man is running across the landscape, heavily, clumsily, but swiftly all the same. The green woman he chases runs just out of reach, leading him over hills and through trees, almost floating over the ground as she dances effortlessly in front of him. The timeless layers of harp notes weave through the landscape, shaping the contours as Owen’s voice shapes the story.I met Owen through the Dundee storytelling group, Blether Tay-gither, and he was an obvious choice to run a guest workshop for a number of reasons, not least because I consider him to be an excellent storyteller. Blether is a predominantly female group, with a tendency for storytellers to be older rather than younger and, in general, not eager adopters of technology. Owen is younger than most of the group in Blether and his background in sculpture along with his experimental soundscape storytelling made him the ideal person to introduce the basic concepts of storytelling to the students. Owen’s style of telling is quite traditional, in that it is clear, understated and well paced, allowing time to watch the story unfold in your mind’s eye.I smile to myself as I remember Owen telling me about Robin Williamson and how inspirational he was. ‘I listened to his work and I was blown away by it. He plays a harp and it’s quite bardic, you know. It sounds like it’s coming from a place back in time, beautiful stories, and I was really inspired by what he was doing.’It was during this interview that Owen told me about the electronic soundscapes he had created. As he explained to the students, normally the soundscapes are put together live, with the story told live too. For the purposes of this workshop and because the piece was unfinished Owen used a pre-recorded version.Days have now passed in the chase of man and woman. The man struggles on, slower now but not defeated. Yet the green lady is swifter than ever before and try as he might, it is all the traveller man can do to just keep up with her. And still the landscape rolls on relentlessly, dreamlike in its insubstantiality.On reflection, I find myself surprised by the storyscape. It was not what I was expecting when I asked Owen if he would show the students an example of a story soundscape. Yet I struggle to know what I was expecting. The style matches Owen’s normal telling, but has a more detached edge to it; the story is more elusive, almost mythic in its ephemerality.I think back to our conversation a few months earlier in the local arts centre.‘One of the things that I’m interested in doing is using modern technology, especially sound and music, combining it with storytelling so that there’s something that people can access a bit more easily.’ Owen’s interest in combining electronic sounds and stories comes from a love of electronic music and a need to bridge the worlds of bardic-inspired storytelling and modern culture.‘It’s a way of letting them know what storytelling is and then they can trace it back and hear what real, simple storytelling is if they want to. But I love electronic music and it’s a way for me to fit in with modern culture and what my friends are into, you know. And that’s electronic sounds and computers and iPods so it’s a way of bringing it to them.’Owen pauses, taking a drink of tea. The café area is getting busy and tables are being set for the evening although it’s still only late afternoon.‘There’s one particular festival that I go to called Solfest and you’ve got a big storytelling centre there, lots of storytellers and theatre groups come and do their thing. And then at night you’ve got a tent that’s playing full on electronic music and I like that balance. There’s people coming to the storytelling sessions who are going out at night to dance to the electronic music and I’d like to find that middle ground where you can bring the two together and make it work.’Owen is the only storyteller I know, and am aware of, who actively seeks to incorporate elements of storytelling and digital media into live events or performances. However, I recall a piece of performance dance, Sensational knowledge, Sensational Ethnography, which explored the connections between digital and analogue. A collaboration between composer and programmer Curtis Bahn and dancer Tomie Hahn, it created electronic sounds from Tomie’s dance movements. Tomie embodied traditional elements through her experience of Japanese traditional dance whilst the sensors capturing her movements brought ‘a contemporary expressive moment.’Owen continues, ‘There’s electronic music that I’ve heard that uses traditional folk music in it. And I know quite a few people who’ve learned a lot about folk music because they’ve heard this electronic music and heard that little folk tune and then traced it back and just discovered what folk music is all about. So I’d like to do the same with storytelling.’‘Have you done that so far?’ I ask.‘I’ve done a couple of stories where I’ve used my laptop with sound programs and I’ve mixed samples into my story live. I’ve done a storytelling live, you know, standing there telling it and used a laptop to bring in sounds at certain points in the story. It’s more been music based but I’m looking to make it more like combining storytelling and sound art, rather than just music. So that’s what I’m moving towards.’I’m intrigued by how the audience would react to such a story, trying to imagine what the rest of the Blether Tay-gither tellers would think about it. Owen tells me of the positive response from listeners, but admits that they were festival performances.‘I’d like to do the same thing to a traditional storytelling audience, people who are really into tradition, just to see how they react.’ Owen smiles. ‘But one festival I did it and somebody came up to me afterwards and he said, ‘You know, it’s really good just to see something different.’ And that was a great comment to me because that’s what I want. You know, I want them to hear something that is different, not been heard before. So, yeah, I’ve had a great reaction from it actually, really good.’Owen illustrates the potential affinity of tradition and new media. He admires the bardic style of telling, with music accompanying the tale and Celtic myths, but he also wants to ground part of that tradition in contemporary contexts, distorting sounds of the harp through electronic effects and making full use of the two seemingly separate worlds.Upon awakening beneath the original hawthorn tree, their journey come full circle, the traveller man offers a blossoming branch of hawthorn to the green-robed lady. Together, they walk into the green hills, their journey just beginning. As the last notes fade away, there is stillness in the darkening studio.
Wednesday 30 December 2009
Journal extract - draft
An extract from my PhD thesis. I'm peppering it with diary extracts to illustrate aspects of the storytelling culture I've part of for the last 3 years, and my journey as a fledgling teller. Hopefully this approach will make the thesis a more interesting document to read too!
Thursday 30th July 2009
My storytelling life seems to go in cycles of intensity and the last two weeks have been the intense kind. I feel completely ‘storied-out.’ Was at Festival at the Edge (FatE) the weekend before last, which was amazing but strangely exhausting. I never thought listening to stories could be tiring, but I understand now why people say listening is a skill. Two and a half days of non-stop stories is a lot to listen to. And of course conversations with storytellers at the festival all centred around stories too. It was unlike the storytelling environments I’m used to. Whilst nearly all of the tellers I heard were excellent, the delivery mechanism was quite different. The main marquee was large, and the stage was hooked up to a PA system. The sessions I found most memorable and engaging were the ones in the smaller tents, with informal telling styles and participative elements. But this is no doubt a personal preference. Nevertheless, it was incredible to see so many tellers I had only heard about before, and I hope to return to FatE next year.
Last weekend was the Big Tent Festival in Fife where Blether Tay-gither had our own storytelling yurt (courtesy of Owen) and ran a full programme of storytelling sessions and workshops for two days. This was surprisingly less draining than FatE, partly because there was a range of different type of events at the festival but mainly because there were eight of us involved with the storytelling yurt. I didn’t really do too much in the way of storytelling, but helped out with craft stuff at the workshops and handed out flyers to folk to encourage them to come along to the yurt.
I did do a little bit of storytelling though. Our closing session each day was dubbed ‘Fairtrade stories’ and involved all the Blether ‘rainbow’ tellers. (The Big Tent weekend was the first official launch of the Blether Tay-gither logo and was proudly emblazoned onto polo-shirts, each a different colour, so that between us we were a rainbow of tellers. I was yellow.)
On Saturday we had a guest teller, Judy, who told stories throughout the day. She hosted the final ‘Fairtrade’ slot and after an opening story opened the floor to other tellers. Well, I say that, but in actual fact she asked the audience to choose the next teller. We had been expecting a range of ages in the storytelling yurt, but ended up with an audience almost exclusively composed of children. So Judy asked the children which colour storyteller they’d like to hear from next (out of red, yellow, green, pale blue, navy blue and purple). And what did they say? The brightest colour they had to choose from. Yellow.
My mind went in panic-mode. This wasn’t supposed to happen yet! The story I’d prepared was for more of an adult audience and I didn’t think would work. I drew inspiration from Blether and FatE and off-the-cuff asked Sheila if she would mind if I told a story that I’d heard her tell a couple of times and had heard Jan Blake tell at FatE the previous weekend. Jan’s version had a few rhymes and actions in it and I thought that could work well if I blended the two versions. I hadn’t read the story anywhere, nor told it before, or practised it, but figured I knew it pretty well. (I had paid particular attention to Jan’s version as I knew Sheila’s and wanted to compare the two.)
So, I got up and sat on the wooden storyteller chest at the top of the yurt and began.
The story was the one about the old woman who goes to visit her daughter at the other side of the forest. On her way through the forest she meets three animals, one-by-one, who all want to eat her but she persuades them to eat her on her return journey when she will be more plump. On the way home she climbs inside a pumpkin and rolls through the forest, past the hungry animals, all the way home.
It started well enough. (I suppose I should add that this was the first time that I’d told a story to children.) Anyway, they seemed to be into it ok. I did the whole, ‘ricky-ticky-tick, ricky-ticky-tat, here I come with my walking stick’ thing which everyone joined in with. I asked them what kind of nice food the old woman ate at her daughter’s house and got lots of suggestions.
The problem began when the old woman climbed inside the pumpkin and left her daughter’s home, rolling along the forest path.
‘And as she rolled she sang–’ I said confidently before pausing. I knew there was a little song to go with the rolling. (‘Here I come, here I come, in my pumpkin here I come.’) I remembered the words but not the tune. My mind was blank. Completely, utterly empty. I looked around helplessly. Lindsey caught my eye and started singing ‘rolling, rolling, rolling’. Robbie joined in, making up the tune with Lindsey on the spot, and soon everyone else joined in too, the tune sounding suspiciously more and more like ‘Rawhide’ as it progressed. I can only imagine that the reference was too out of date for the children. The song occurs three times, as the woman meets the three forest animals one by one again. Each time, ‘rolling, rolling, rolling’ was dutifully sung. And so the story ground its way painfully to the end. I was, well, I was a bit mortified really. But once I’d resumed my seat at the edge of the yurt, I thought how it was actually an incredibly positive experience. If I’d been in a situation like that by myself, as the only teller, I would have panicked even more. It was great to have the support of the group there, especially for an inexperienced teller like myself.
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