Alternative Realities: A Storyscape

What follows is an excerpt from my thesis, a description of a digitally enhanced storytelling experience.

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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.