I was nominated by my good friend Stephanie Mitchell to take part in the Performance/Artist picture challenge. The rules are that every day, you select an image from a day in the life of a Performer/Artist. The aim being to raise awareness of the arts.
Well, as its the week before Christmas I thought I’d break the rules and post my pictures all at once as I reflect on 10 years as a storyteller. The pictures I have chosen show why I am still telling stories after all these years; just look at the children’s faces.
In November I have been in east London working with Waltham
Forest and the Borough of Culture in special educational needs
environments. I devised a sensory
session exploring Walthamstow High Street and its famous market; looking at
pictures from Vestry House Museum’s archive, smelling and tasting the foods of
the market, listening to music and voices of the market and touching some of
the goods and textiles on sale there. In
this way we told a story of a stroll through the town.
I worked with lots of children with a wide spectrum of
profound and complex needs taking a little time to share each item with each
audience member individually and allowing them to engage with the object (and
me) in their own ways but probably the biggest challenge was working with
children with visual impairment. How do
you show a map or a photograph to somebody who can’t see it? I tried to be imaginative, scoring the
outline of the image and cutting streets out of maps so they became a textural as
well as a visual experience. Speaking to
the staff I worked with and reflecting on the session I feel that I could have
done more to put myself in the position of the audience. What is a map if you can’t see it? Well, it’s a large piece of paper. If I had presented a picture and offered more
context that might have enhanced the audience experience. So if the picture is of a market trader
wearing a hat and a coat, shouting at passers-by from his fruit stall as the
storyteller I could have offered a fuller description of the man, his work or
had a similar hat for the audience to feel and wear so they got a better sense
the image being discussed.
I enjoy running sensory storytelling sessions and have had compliments for the sessions I have been devising and running this autumn. To this end Father Christmas has already delivered a 12ft parachute and a range of musical instruments for participants to use in my future sessions because building on what has been a fantastic year has to be my focus for the year ahead. Now that I have done it, I want to do it better.
I was invited to work at a Halloween themed birthday party for a five year old. As the guests were going to be mainly 3-6 years old this would be completely different to other Halloween storytelling events I had done before. Rather than trying to get the children to sit and listen I wanted to keep them as active and engaged as possible throughout our interaction so I decided to offer a single narrative about a School of Magic and to string a series of party games into the story. We started with a craft activity (making our own school badges), before commencing a series of magical lessons including practising loading brooms (Musical Chairs) and spell casting (Pass the Parcel). I incorporated further storytelling opportunities by using the famous Bear Hunt story; first as Follow my Leader game in which I encouraged the children to imagine and roleplay different terrains and then as a more formal storytelling (instead of a Bear in a cave we were hunting for a Spell Book in a creepy house!).
It was important to the hosts that everybody felt included. This meant trying to ensure everybody was
able to participate including a deaf child who was among the guests. I am a fairly visual storyteller and use my
face and body as well as a lot of colourful props and hats to communicate and enhance
my regular repertoire but many of the games I had chosen for the party involved
instruction and aural stimulus (starting and stopping music). In the event the age of the guests proved to
be almost as big a barrier to participation as deafness as some of the children
were so young that they didn’t recognise the games we were playing. Thankfully the adults stepped in to lend a
hand and prevented the party from faltering.
Afterwards I was praised for the structure I offered and how I got the
children involved but this was a large party and I was immensely grateful to
get help from the other adults in the room.
In my experience whilst it is possible for a facilitator to encourage a
child to participate, role modelling by a parent is invaluable even at a
birthday party.
Although the story was very simple the narrative became key to the event and at times I was more like a compere than a storyteller or facilitator. I set out to create something that the children would enjoy and whilst my games heavy approach led me to consider accessibility this delivery seemed to be a hit with everybody.
John was quick to suggest an exciting itinerary full of fun and games for the children. He asked all the right questions and adapted to children’s age and special requirements. He ensured helpful props for those who were deaf. John’s enthusiasm and professionalism was comforting. Children’s parties can feel stressful but he managed to take a lot of pressure off which was fantastic. My son and his friends had a wonderful time. John was ever so friendly and really engaged with children and adults. John made sure he arrived in good time to meet my son and go through the plans to ensure he was comfortable. I would use John’s service again and I highly recommend him. Thank you John so everything that you did. We are very grateful.
Some of the people I work with I will never hear from again.
Some I work with from time to time, others book me annually.
Some of the people I work with show me their world and make me want to be a better person.
Some make me feel so welcome that in time I have come to regard them as friends and look forward to seeing individuals almost as much as I look forward to doing the actual work.
The greetings card pictured was a daddy-daughter weekend project inspired by news that a one of a kind will be retiring when her school closes next summer (an Elementary School on a US military facility in the midlands). In the time I have known this person she has paid for my visits out of her salary and I have never managed to leave her without a goody bag full of gifts not just for me but for my family. Whilst I wish her well for the future I already miss her enthusiasm and her ability to find the best in others. To have known her and so many other inspirational people like her I am truly thankful.
This Halloween I was booked to provide entertainment at a birthday party for an 11 year old. I selected some of my favourite spooky stories giving some of them a modern twist for the young audience (a Tudor mansion became a three bed semi). I also decided to complement the more traditional storytelling with a sensory exercise based upon William Shakespeare’s spell from “Macbeth”, beginning “Double, double toil and trouble”.
On the night I was located away from the rest of the party. This not only allowed me to work with the minimum of interruption but gave me the time and space to set up a series of bowls with the different elements of the spell in each. The elements were inspired by Shakespeare’s famous verse which reads almost like a shopping list for making a really noxious potion. Even though it is famous the language is 500 years old, some of the things on the list are unfamiliar and some could be texturally similar so it took me a lot of time to think of what to use and how to differentiate between them. In the end I sourced a lot of the elements from the pic and mix at the supermarket (the Adder’s fork and blindworm’s sting became a jelly snake which had been covered in strawberry jelly). For wool of bat I used wool, for howlett’s wing I used feathers and for baboon’s blood I used strawberry jam. As this was about feeling the elements all the participants were blindfolded before the bowls were revealed and the children only saw what they’d been feeling at the end.
The effect was quite something. Even working in small groups the children were
able to terrify themselves (and each other) into overthinking what they were
touching with several children unable to complete the exercise. I had to continually remind the participants to
trust me and not to talk as any discussion could spoil the experience for the
next person.
I recently worked with a school near Chichester who were looking at stories from around the world and what we can learn from them. I found this to be an intriguing and refreshing project. It goes without saying that there are simply thousands of popular myths, legends and folktales. Often they have remained popular because they go some way to explaining something or have a deeper symbolism but this challenge was about considering the moral meaning of tales rather than deciphering their metaphors. Even before Aesop’s time storytelling has provided a mirror to the way we live as audiences have judged the choices of both heroes and villains. As a storyteller I am drawn to colourful, funny, crowd pleasing tales so this brief really got me thinking about my material differently.
Here are the three stories I opted to tell to the children…
As Much as Salt – there are hundreds of versions of the story of the girl banished for comparing her love of her father to her love of salt (Shakespeare uses it in King Lear). It has a beautiful resolution as the girl’s father learns what it is to love and what it is to forgive.
The Proud Turtle – you can’t do a session for a 5 year old and not have some animals doing silly things! This story is one of my favourites. Again there are lots of versions of the tale of the boastful know-it-all who falls from the sky because of a lack of humility. I tend to leave it as the Turtle falls – it’s for the children to decide whether he survives the drop (and whether he deserves it).
Stone Soup –
again lots of people claim this story of how a community make the tastiest
stone soup through sharing. It’s a lot
of fun to get the children to suggest ingredients and act out preparing the
soup and of these three tales has the most obvious message.
Meanwhile I was also asked to present a story set for an event celebrating the achievements of people who had volunteered at their local libraries. Rather than something frothy I wanted my audience to have something a bit more thought provoking but also be suitable for an event celebrating volunteering in libraries. I chose to tell a story about a boy who leaves his village and heads to the big city with nothing except his Mother’s wisdom. In the story as he shares his wisdom he rises from the market place to become an adviser to the King. In this instance when I’d finished I elaborated on the metaphor of shared wisdom; what if the boy had had a library card, could that have helped him to rise from the market to the Royal Palace? What then the importance of the volunteer who listens to a child as they read or discuss their reading? What role does the library play in the journey from their market place to the palace? If you offer this kind of context I think it was an appropriate choice of story.
So what do I take away from the experience of considering the values I extol in the stories that I tell? A good story will entertain but a well-chosen one can offer an insight into who we are and who we might like to be and that can be powerful.
In February 2019 we gave up east London for East Sussex and in doing so I opened a new chapter in my working life. To this point most of the storytelling and workshop work I have been doing has been in my diary since before the big move but now my focus has shifted to trying to get more work in Sussex, Kent, Surrey and Hampshire.
In a couple of weeks time I will be telling Roald Dahl’s “The Twits” in Uckfield, Hastings and Bexhill as I celebrate National Libraries Week with East Sussex Libraries and in National Nursery Rhyme Week I’m thrilled to be returning to Horsham. In between times the enquiries have begun to trickle in from across the South East from schools looking for a storyteller and in the week of World Book Day (5th March 2020) I’ll be visiting Eastbourne (Pevensey), Pulborough and Arundel but it all starts next week with my first school visit of the year in Ardingly where I will be telling 11 children(!) the story of The Three Little Pigs and with an appearance at Reading Rocks! Horsham conference where I will be talking to delegates about storytelling in the classroom. Whilst I am thinking more local I am still excited to be receiving invitations to work all over the country and will be in the North West in November and Yorkshire next March.
In the meantime September has been a quiet month (if you take out Roald Dahl week). I have very much enjoyed reading through stories about fire, diversity and things that go bump in the night for later in the autumn. Now back to finding people south of the M25 to share them with…
At present my approach to birthday party storytelling is to treat each as a bespoke presentation, tailoring my content to suit each occasion rather than the tried and tested packages I offer schools. Birthdays are the ultimate one shot deal because getting it wrong means spoiling a child’s special day. This particular party was one of my biggest challenges yet. As we were outdoors I had no power and I couldn’t rely on having any other kind of amenities (so no water for my water pistols) so everything had to be pre-prepped – if I couldn’t carry it then I couldn’t use it. The party guests were also relatively young. Whilst I have done a lot of work in nurseries and with little children generally this has been in formal settings rather than parks with all their distractions. Getting and then holding the children’s attention would be hard work if my content missed the mark.
The party was inspired by Maudie Smith’s book “Milly and the Mermaids” a story about a young girl who dreams of meeting a mermaid on a trip to the seaside. We began by creating the setting for our session using a beach towel, some golden sparkly fabric for the sand and colourful cut outs of fish, shells, crabs and starfish. We then used what was on the beach to make sandcastle hat bands (pictured). We used tape rather than glue to hold the hats together and glitter pens to decorate them. When I run birthday parties I like to play party games so I ran some parachute games and we used a picnic basket to play parcel the parcel (instead of prizes the children chose objects that led to rhymes and songs). We used a beautiful blue fabric held up by the parents and bubbles to make a sea that the children could swim through and with a little imagination, some rainbow coloured cloth and a wedge shaped leaf grabber I transformed one of the parents into a mermaid for us to meet! It was all very visual, very colourful and very low tech with a real range of things for the children to do.
If you believe (they put a man on the Moon) is a storytelling of a trio of tales including Jonathan Emmett’s Bringing Down the Moon, Simon James’ Boy from Mars and this story by Dom and is touring libraries in the North West, East Midlands, Yorkshire, the North East, London and the South East this July and August. For dates see my event calendar.
At the beginning of June I was invited to tell stories at The Dorothy Clive Garden in Staffordshire. I work regularly all over the country as a storyteller and whilst I have done outdoor storytelling in parks, playgrounds, gardens and woodland for festivals, fetes, birthday parties and events the majority of my storytelling work is in school halls, classrooms and libraries. A lot of my contemporaries run very exciting storytelling sessions in outdoor spaces across the country and whilst there are challenges to telling stories outside when I receive invitations to work in the great outdoors I get romantic notions about audiences eating their picnics under shady trees as I tell tales surrounded by butterflies dancing on borders of summer time flowers and I find it hard to say no. The other thing that appealed to me about the booking was that for this storytelling I would have to write my own set.
In the ten years that I have been working professionally as a storyteller my work has been a mix of adaptations of well-known tales or published works (Roald Dahl, Michael Morpurgo, Jeremy Strong et al), folk and traditional tales. It can be very difficult to get the necessary interest in less popular or less familiar stories to work them up into sessions so to get an opportunity to expand my repertoire and challenge myself to create bespoke materials is a big deal. In the past friends have suggested that I write stories but I am really a storyteller and not an author; in my view we live in a golden age of writing for children and my clients prefer my marquee projects to be written by more established names. It’s far from easy to write for a young audience; it takes time and patience, which with a hectic work schedule and a toddler are things I really don’t have. Saying this a deadline is a wonderful incentive and once I got started I found that there was no shortage of material; there are simply thousands of invertebrates to choose from and as I wasn’t necessarily restricted by scientific accuracy my imagination could wander within a world of creepy crawlies bugs and beetles.
Below is the set that I have come up with; in each instance my beginning point was to think about the characteristics of an insect and then think of a story that insect might suit.
The Bee who wouldn’t share – as I searched the internet for
inspiration I discovered a Brazilian folktale which when told in combination
with one of Aesop’s tales helped me create a story about a hardworking Bee who
when robbed complains to the great Magician for assistance.
The Brave Little Butterfly – this story was inspired by Beauty
and the Beast and Hans Cristian Andersen.
As a splendid butterfly sets out across the meadow to find love he soon learns
that beauty is about more than appearance.
How the Worm lost his clothes – in a recent addition of Storytime Magazine I came across a Serbian version of a Greek tale similar to The Emperor’s New Clothes. Here I use it as the basis for explaining the relationship between the Worm and the Song Thrush.
The Toad and the Centipede – I love Devil Tales in which
Beelzebub is proved to be foolish. Here
I draw inspiration from a Welsh Devil Tale as a clever Ladybird outwits a Toad
who has caught a Centipede.
When
supplemented with a classic Anansi story this set lasts 30-45 minutes.
I will be
reprising this storytelling set on a couple more occasions this summer at outdoor
venues a little closer to my base in Sussex.
They are as follows:
So if you
spot a storyteller telling tales in an English Country Garden this summer why
not stop, share your picnic and listen to a tale? I can’t think of a more blissful way to pass
the time.
