Home Audience

A question came up during the recent YES StoryLab led by Priscilla Howe about things storytellers have tried in their online storytelling shows that haven't worked.

I thought of one. I wouldn't say it was a total disaster. Things just didn't go quite as expected.

First of all, we had already talked in this StoryLab, as many of us do these days, about seeing or not seeing the audience online. Do we use a platform that allows us to see everyone? Do we want to see people? Do we set up the screen to gallery view or speaker view? Do we let some or all of the audience members unmute?

What didn't come up during this StoryLab was having audience members actually in the room with you while you perform online. I have tried this.

As I admitted in one of my recent Facebook Live shows (as a relevant part of the story I was telling), although I do not get very nervous about speaking in front of people, I do get quite nervous about playing musical instruments and/or singing in front of people.

I had to get over the singing thing, kind of, when I worked in the public library doing regular preschool story times. I'll admit that I always sang in my speaking voice, not my singing voice, as this was as much as I could bring myself to do. But it was enough. And I quickly learned from the children that they really didn't care about whether I was a good singer. We had a great time singing together.

This knowledge has buoyed me and has allowed me to continue telling one of my most favorite stories, Pete Seeger's The Foolish Frog, in performances for children, even though I no longer have a job that requires me to sing. During most of the singing parts, the audience sings with me, and we all have fun.

I decided to tell The Foolish Frog during a Facebook Live performance. I also decided to attempt telling the story with guitar accompaniment, which I hadn't done for an audience before. And to try to actually use my singing voice.

I was concerned that because I wouldn't be able to see or hear my audience-- because I would't have that obvious reinforcement that we're having fun even if we're not all the most best musicians, I might find this challenge I had set for myself too challenging.

So I recruited my children to be my live audience. I could at least see and hear them participating in the story.

Great idea. But it didn't happen like that. They got shy about being on camera and participated very little. You can see for yourself.

Although my plans went agley I wasn't as nervous as I thought I would be and did okay singing by myself.

I think there are some things I could do better if I wanted to try having my kids as a live audience again. Most notably, my camera set up didn't really allow me to look at them and the camera at the same time, and the camera was hard for them to ignore. If I could set it up so they could forget the camera and feel like I was telling just to them I think they would participate more.

But, do I need my kids to be a live audience? Well, I don't think I do. I prefer having a live audience. But I tell my Facebook Live audience that I can feel their good energy when they participate at home, even though I can't see or hear them. And I honestly think I can. I find it easier to keep my energy high for Facebook Live performances than I do for performances I just record for a camera.

I feel you singing with me and we are all having fun!

Fourth Wall

"Does the actor who plays Matilda's dad really not like people who read?"

Virginia and I went to see the musical Matilda recently. Near the end of intermission, Matilda's dad and brother came on stage, while the house lights were still up. They sang a song about how smart people who watch the "telly" are and then Matilda's dad talked directly to the audience. He asked people who like to read to raise their hands. He asked for the name of one of the women in the front row and then made fun of her for being a bookworm.

I thought this was a nice way to gather the audience back to their seats for the second half of the musical. But I hadn't realized the impact this part of the show had on Virginia. She was confused about whether the man was in character or not.

During the rest of the show the "fourth wall" was up. The actors did not interact with the audience. And with the stage lights up and house lights down, they couldn't even see the audience. What happened at the end of intermission was totally different. The actors could see us and invited interaction. The fourth wall was down.

I find it especially fascinating that to Virginia, the fourth wall helped signal that what was going on on stage was acting. A lack of fourth wall, to her, signaled authenticity. She thought it might not be acting, but the actor being himself and expressing true opinions.

This is relevant to my research. In studying reality storytelling, I am very interested in how people both perform and deliver authenticity. Storytelling in general does tend to be more interactive than staged plays and musicals (although, not always). And in reality storytelling being "real" seems to be especially important. It makes sense that the fourth wall has a relationship with, at least, the appearance of authenticity.

I appreciated seeing the fourth wall from the perspective of someone for whom live theater is a more new experience.

Repeating History

They say those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I struggled with history in grade school. The entire curricular area of "Social Studies" was my worst subject. Possibly this came from the memorization of states, countries, and capitals that inevitably accompanied geography lessons. I do remember thinking that history was boring, but I can't tell you now what specific part of history I found so uninteresting.

I mostly just knew I wasn't good at Social Studies. In high school, while striving to get into the highest level Math, Science, and Language Arts classes I could, I held back on Social Studies. My Junior year I declined to take Advanced Placement (college level) American History and happily signed up for Gifted American History instead. My teacher (who taught both classes) gleefully told us on the first day that since we were gifted, she expected we could do the AP curriculum without the benefit of the extra ten points. (Ten points were added onto your final grade in AP classes, effectively bumping you up a letter grade.) I almost died when she said that. I was trying to get into a class that was easier, not harder. One of the things that probably saved me, was an assignment to read a historical fiction novel that related to what we were studying that year and then schedule a private discussion with the teacher about the book. I read The Grapes of Wrath which is my favorite book to this day. (Possible foreshadowing of my ability to access history through story.)

My senior year there was no Gifted option for the two semester-long Social Studies courses we had to take, Government and Economics. I took them both as AP courses and spent the year in the back of the class writing dirty poetry with my friends, making very little effort to learn anything. I got a good enough score on the Econ exam to get college credit. Near the beginning of our Economics text book it said that if you had a parrot who could say "supply and demand" you had an economist. I guess I was the parrot.

Me as an economist

I scored too low on the Government exam to get college credit. I answered all of the Government essay questions with (not dirty) poems.

I continued to struggle with Social Studies in college. As a Latin/English double major I had to take an American History class and Political Science. If I had taken AP American History in high school and gotten a decent score on the exam I could have gotten out of it in college. And if I had scored better on the AP Government exam I would have gotten out of PoliSci. Unfortunately my credit for Econ didn't exempt me out of anything.

I withdrew from a huge lecture hall American History class I was failing during my Freshman year. I later took PoliSci taught by a graduate student who had a smaller class, realized that format worked much better for me, and held out for American History taught by a grad student before I signed up for it again.

And then I was done with Social Studies forever!!!!

Except not really. As an English and Latin major I frequently learned about the historical context of the things I was reading. This was okay with me because it was "interesting" history, related to things I liked.

But now that I am a storyteller, history won't seem to leave me alone. When John and I moved to England, I researched and created a story about Boudica, since we were moving to the region she was from. I was rereading authors I had translated in Latin classes, so the project was well within my historical comfort zone.

Most of the volunteer work I did in England, though, was with the 2nd Air Division Memorial Library. I knew that the library was a living memorial for Americans who were stationed in Norwich during World War II, but when requesting to volunteer with them, I had focused more on the fact that they had a collection of American books. I did some programs on American culture for them - reading pictures books, telling stories. But they also wanted programs related to World War II. I taught myself quickly from their books. Soon I was telling school children about my experiences as an American in Norwich, how my experiences related to the experiences of the Americans who were stationed in Norwich during WWII, and then all about the airplanes.

After we moved back to the Atlanta area I got involved in a couple of shows that had me researching Georgia history. I portrayed Mayhayley Lancaster, a legendary south Georgia seer, at Frolona Fest, a roots music festival put on by Frolona Farm. I also researched the Battle of Atlanta to add some real Civil War history to an old ghost story I told for BATL.

Most recently I have been invited to perform at the National History Fair. I will be telling stories from mythology and ancient history as well as discussing some of the historical context surrounding the stories.

Telling stories of Trojan women at UGA's Athenaze in 2007

The middle schoolers who will be at the National History Fair are so very different from who I was in middle school - namely someone totally disinterested in history.

Students have reworded the quotation I opened with: Those who fail history class are doomed to repeat it. I never officially failed a history class, but I did a pretty good job of not learning in a few. Now history repeatedly works its way into my storytelling life. I do not see myself as doomed, though. I see myself as fortunate to have a second chance to learn it right.

Tuning to Each Other

I was in marching band in high school. We spent a lot of time tuning. We tuned in the band room. We tuned on the field at practice. We tuned at the start of the football game and then again before we took the field to perform our show. Often, we had no true pitch to tune to. We all played the same note, and tuned to each other. And once, my band instructor said that even if every single person was out of tune, you could still hear the perfect pitch hanging there in mid-air. And tune to it.

How can perfection come from a universal imperfection? One out of tune person can't tune to himself. It would be hard to get it right with two, or three, or a handful. But with the whole band, with a big crowd of people all, a little bit flawed, but all listening to each other, all trying to get it right, all adjusting, the perfect pitch emerges.

Whenever I hear a lot of wrong notes out there in the world, I like to think that if we just choose to make music together, even if we are all a little off key, eventually, together, we will get it right.

By UserB - Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1529663

Anger in Personal Stories

I've been thinking of Alice's Restaurant lately, partly because of Thanksgiving. For a while now I've also been thinking about storytelling as a form of activism, kind of like folk music can be. Reading books about folk singers, pondering the messages I have to share and the ones the world needs to hear. And I've been thinking of how broken the world seems right now and wondering how I could possibly make a difference. It seems like your best chance of making a difference is by doing what you do. So I keep doing it.

I tell a lot of personal stories. The main challenge of personal stories is that if you haven't processed the story yourself, if you haven't come out the other side of it, you can't perform it. You can tell people about it, but it won't be a performance.

Stories about things that hurt are difficult. The good thing about performing them, though, is that making them into a performance helps you heal. It forces you to process the pain and see yourself as someone full of agency who has survived and can move on.

Alice's Restaurant has helped me with stories that make me angry. You can't perform a story purely from a place of anger. It sounds like a rant. You have to process. You have to come out the other side. You have to sing and find the humor. This way of dealing with stories that make me angry has helped me to create two of the stories I'm proudest of.

One is the story I call "John's LLM," about getting a certificate of good conduct before moving to England. I have to say that now I am not nearly as angry about everything I went through to get that certificate. With time, it has actually become funny. But I started creating the story as the situation was unfolding. It was clear at the time that it was completely absurd and I didn't want to lose any of the details. But I was angry. I was frustrated by the lack of information about how to undertake this process and about the incompetence and ignorance of multiple state employees I interacted with to get it done. It sounded like a rant when I first wrote it down. Until I remembered Alice's Restaurant. With a little humor and a song (the song is mostly for me because I've never performed it for anyone) it became a story.

The other is a work in progress: "The Ballad of the Birth Certificate." I am still angry that we were kicked out of the courthouse and threatened with physical violence while trying get Virginia's birth certificate, but I think it is an important story. It is important enough that I will find some way to be brave enough to perform it with all the musical components some day. (Performing music for people makes me much more nervous than speaking in front of people.) I don't think it's a good story without the music though. I don't think it's a good story without the fantastic and farcical suggestion that Virginia went on this adventure by herself. These things make it more than just an angry rant.

I think it is clear that the anger is still present in both stories. I'm not saying anger has to be edited out. It has to be processed, like pain. You have to come out the other side. For me, this is how I do it.

There are a lot of things that make me feel angry these days. And sad and afraid and, sometimes, like giving up on the whole human race and starting that Martian colony after all. But I think I'll stay here and sing and tell it all like it's a joke.

Living in Reality

In Orality and Literacy Walter Ong says:

The highly interiorized stages of consciousness in which the individual is not so immersed unconsciously in communal structures are stages which, it appears, consciousness would never reach without writing. The interaction between the orality that all human beings are born into and the technology of writing, which no one is born into, touches the depths of the psyche. Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language, that first divides subject and predicate and then relates them to one another, and that ties human beings to one another in society. Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons. Writing is consciousness-raising.

Orality ties cultures together. The written word causes more introspective thinking, increasing individuality. Ong claims that although this is dividing it is uniting as well. Perhaps an extension of his argument that oral language awakens the self and then allows us to interact with others?

Marshal McLuhan, drawing on the work on Henri Bergson, sees even orality as a little more divisive.

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, lived and wrote in a tradition of thought in which it was and is considered that language is a human technology that has impaired and diminished the values of the collective unconscious. It is the extension of man in speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vastly wider reality. Without language, Bergson suggests, human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its attention. Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech. (Understanding Media)

This collective unconscious sounds almost idyllic. How cruel of language to have separated us from it. 

I've recently discovered the Radiolab podcasts. When I was listening to "Lucy" I got a glimpse of what McLuhan is talking about. At one point a man talks about a Bonobos making amends with him after biting him. The animal cried into his mouth. This image is so powerful. Clearly their interaction went far beyond words. Near the end of the show one of the women who works with the Bonobos says she thinks they do have a deeper connection, one that we have lost. 

I've been chasing this idea that the spoken word is closer to meaning. Both Ong and McLuhan might agree with that. Both see communication technologies as slowly separating us from each other although they make different value judgements about those separations. But maybe real meaning can't be reached through language at all. 

I've been thinking about how communication technologies distract us from the reality around us. And not just when we are using them. Our minds have been conditioned by constant exposure to communication media. We are introspective - often living in an interior world. We create elaborate daily and yearly schedules, the maintaining of which occupies a significant portion of our time. Think about that. We ignore the current reality to make sure that we'll be in the right spot at the right time at some point in the near or distant future. We don't know our way around our physical spaces thanks to sat nav (I'm sooooo guilty of this). And this is all not to mention the very obvious escapes from reality through books, television, and the Internet. 

What would it be like to live an unmediated existence? An existence in which there is nothing to take the mind away from reality?

I am a hopeless cyborg, my identity almost inextricably intertwined with technology. The loss I would experience with the collapse of google docs alone would be akin to a lobotomy. But even so, I have been trying to be aware of reality. Not reality as shown to me by my media. Not the reality inside my mind. The actual reality all around me. This is challenging, since, as a graduate student, I spend hours a day on the computer, reading and writing. Sometimes that is my reality. And I stop and tell myself: This is reality. Me, in my workspace, in front of a computer. (The computer is part of reality, not a window into it.) And then there is the reality of walking outside. A human being, breathing the air, admiring the trees, and not thinking of anything else. 

A Cautionary Tale

I heard loud (happy) noises coming from the kids' room the other day. When I went to investigate I saw blankets and pillows all over the floor. Horatio was standing on a little pink safe (piggy bank) that doubles as a door stop and it was about to fall over.

"That doesn't look like a good place to stand, Horatio." I told him.

He took one foot off, "I just stand on it little bit. Little bit, okay Momma?"

"No, not a little bit. No standing on the safe."

Then Virginia explained the game. "The blankets are poison. We can't step on the poison."

And I had this storyteller-parent moment where I knew that I had the perfect story for this situation.

"Come over here, guys. Let me tell you a story..."

One time when I was a kid, maybe a little older than Virginia, my sister, Aunt 'Manda and I were playing "alligators." That is a game where there are alligators on the floor so you can't touch it. We were in my bedroom, moving from the bed, to some pillows, to my desk, to the back of the desk chair, and then we would reach back and climb to the bed again.
Somehow we both ended up on the desk chair at the same time. We weren't in the seat of the chair. In order to reach the bed we had to put our feet on the rolling feet of the chair and hold on to the back. One person at a time on the chair had been fine, but with both of us on the back of the chair and both of us leaning to reach the bed, the chair fell over on us.
BOOM! At first we were both stunned just to be under the heavy desk chair. But then I realized that my hand was hurt. My right hand was holding onto the outside of the chair and it had been pinned between the chair and the wall. The molding at the bottom of the wall had scraped off all the skin from inside one of my fingers, which was also swollen and bruised.
Now I had a dilemma. I was hurt and I wanted my parents to comfort me. But I also had been doing something I wasn't supposed to do. To admit my injury was to admit wrongdoing.
Well, I tried to get away with it anyway. I went and told my dad, "My desk chair fell on me...somehow. And now my finger is hurt."
My dad said, "I know what you were doing and I bet it hurt."
I didn't exactly get in trouble, but I didn't get sympathy either. No kisses, no bandaid from Dad.
I sadly got my own bandaid and found something else to play.

Then I looked at my kids. "Do you understand?"

"Yes!" they said.

I left the room feeling pretty satisfied. A few minutes later they were both on the bed. "What are you doing?" I asked.

"We're playing alligators!"

Is this the reason I played "alligators" instead of "hot lava" or "poison"?