The Outlines Of Dramatic Storytelling

a handbook for the beginner

Overview

A dramatic storytelling performance, properly understood, is a play with a single actor who is also the playwright and director. As the art is practiced in America today, two things are most admired: that you give the audience a strong impression of being present with you constantly, and that you do the whole job for yourself. To advance these two ideals, certain rules are strictly applied.

If there is music, it will be performed by you yourself and it shall amount to nothing more than a helpful accompaniment for your acting. If you dance, puppeteer, prestidigitate, or et cetera, then that must likewise be a secondary supporting part of the work.

The story must be kept rather simple (to accommodate the dearth of actors) and so there is only room for humor if it will advance the plot and develop the characters, or else provide the audience with comic relief. Please note that I'm discussing drama and not actual comedy; comedy is an equal branch of storytelling but others can discuss that topic better than I.

There is very little opportunity to change your costume because you are before the audience all the time. Therefore, you will most likely choose to give the false impression of being pretty much an ordinary person instead of dressing as a character in the tale. You might likely choose either street clothes (perhaps with some extra flash of color as befits an entertainer) or else ethnic or historic garb in keeping with the period or the culture from which your material is drawn.

You will have few props, usually no more than a stool or chair, a walking stick or hat, because you must handle all your props yourself in full view in order to keep their trusting comradeship. When you bring in and then finally remove your properties, the audience will see those actions as parts of your performance just as much as when you wipe your nose. You should either avoid such distractions entirely or else contrive to make good use of them somehow.

There will be no scenery on the stage but only a neutral backdrop, if you even have a stage. You may often be expected to perform while actually surrounded by the audience at close hand without a separation from them of any kind at all. Therefore you must try to cast a spell entirely by what you say and do, and thereby set the place and time and mood.

In short, a proper storyteller depends first on the cunning composition of her script and then on every trick of oratory and mime that she can conjure up.

Performance Style

I have a few stories in which I sit or stand very casually throughout and speak to the audience in a plain familiar way as if across a dinner table or a campfire. However, these are exceptional cases where the material is so far beyond ordinary belief that it requires a very reassuring calm delivery. In most cases you should act very "big" with strong changes in voice and exaggerated facial expressions, gestures, movements and postures.

The sound of your voice is, of course, of great importance. Feel free to alternately shout, whisper, gasp and sing. If you have a talent for character voices, use that talent freely and give every character their own distinctive accents. If you recite in verse, it must be a style of verse that flows easily into the ears of the audience so that the meaning of the words is much more noticeable than its rhythms. If you whisper, you must manage nonetheless to be heard in the back of the crowd. Effects like gasping, moaning or sobbing must also be well practiced in order to be heard by everyone and yet feel real. If you want to sing, carefully limit yourself to a range that you can do well. Breathe deeply so you can speak the lines entire without interruption. Always let your voice arise from deep inside your body and imagine your whole body vibrating with the sound.

On the other hand, I have a story that begins with a single spoken line and then proceeds entirely in mime. Instinctive human body language has great expressive power if you give it free reign.

In any case, above all else, imagine yourself inside the story so that you believe what you are doing and saying.

Knowing The Story

Obviously, you should know the lines and gestures within each scene and you should know what scenes occur before and after others. This is rote memorization and it simply must be done. And beyond that, you should remember the interweavings of the piece well enough that when you drop a vital stitch you'll still be able to darn the fabric back together in some half-way graceful fashion. (Thank every god and saint you know, nowadays our pieces are expected to be rather brief, and so the intertwinings few.) And yet there's more. You must know the characters as well as if they were your friends. In fact, you must find the characters inside yourself and summon them out on cue. That is an absolute requirement for a good performance. You can drop half your lines and extemporize the rest, but if you speak and gesture just the way the characters would do, the audience will sing your praises. Why? Because human beings love to unravel the riddles of human nature and that way you'll be helping them to do it.

But how can you achieve such mastery of a story? It's true that now and then a tale will be so native and inherent to you that it will be marvelously easy, but how can you master the rest? Here there is a difficult bind. No story can ever be perfected without several actual performances in front real live audiences. Rehearse, rehearse, rewrite the script and then rehearse some more. Then go up there and while you're grinding out the thing pay close attention to the crowd. Let them tell you what you're doing right and wrong and learn from that. And when you get another chance, try the blessed thing again.

The Structure Of A Story

Most stories have this basic structure: Conflict; climax; resolution. In other words, first describe a situation, then make the situation grow more and more intense up to some kind of smash-up or breaking point, then somehow work things out. And besides that, a preface might be added at the start to ease the audience into the tale and a related postlog at the end to ease them back out to their everyday life. Alternative to that, some stories have the structure of a repeated cycle. In essence, you tell the story once, tell it again a different way, and so on until you feel you have explored it fully. You may recognize this cyclic structure from material for young children but it is also a traditional form worldwide in living myth. And of course, you might somehow combine the two.

Besides that, you should contrive a "hook" right at the very beginning. In other words, you should grab their attention, arouse their curiosity and make them want to pay attention at the very start. You need to portray a vivid image or offer a provocative idea here. Perhaps it might be a description of some lovely scenery or the enactment of a strong character. If your basic message is intrinsically intriguing, you might begin with a clear emphatic statement of the message. And after you have got their attention, you should trot on vigorously in order to hold it tight.

Also at the beginning, sometimes as part and parcel of your hook, you should also help the audience "suspend their disbelief". This is much easier in our live storytelling form than it is for other artists working with a printed page or with a canvas in a frame, but we should not neglect it. When they find a live human before them, your audience will instinctively be eager to see and hear you. They have come here hoping for a trip somewhere as if it were a railway station, and they will be very willing for you to lead. (Some of them will actually want to be your friend just because you are the person in front of the crowd.) It is important to help them step out from mundane life into the realms of imagination, but simply saying "once upon a time" might do the trick.

Here's a wonderful opening line I heard from an Indian doing his traditional lore: "A long long time ago when animals could talk . . ." Or you might say this: "When I was little, my grandmother told me about a time when she was young." Or it could be "There is a country far away from here across the ocean." Or you can even lead them into imagination at a place that seems to be next door: "Did you ever have to go into the hospital?" "Did you ever know somebody who was just mean?" "Did you ever look up into the sky?" The basic need is simply that the audience should very quickly feel as if they've left their seats, or as if the railway car is moving.

And finally, if your piece is longer than a quarter hour or so, try to convey your message clearly to the audience three times. As you go along weaving the tale, embroider three very clear examples of what you're trying to say. This seems to be the best number for this; two times might leave your meaning too obscure and four will probably seem tedious.

Using Stories From Books

You certainly can take material from books instead of composing it yourself out of the air or from your own experience, but a lot of editing is usually required. You must often remove words that describe emotions and replace them with gestures to depict those emotions. You must often replace descriptions of characters with enactments of them. Descriptions of scenery must often be simplified; the beauty or ugliness of a place can be impressed upon the audience more vividly though your manifest enchantment or disgust than though mere words alone. Also, many printed stories have more changes of scene than you can easily depict in the live storytelling form. And besides all that, you must always feel free to deviate from the script in order to interact with the audience in a thousand ways. In each performance, let them tell you what to emphasize and amplify or what to omit.

Comic Relief

Comic relief is an important and valuable thing for any real dramatic artist. Its theory was described by the ancient Greek philosophers and it was brought to a peak of mastery by Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's Scottish play, after the action has achieved the very pinnacle of monstrous horror, the characters disappear, the stage goes dark, and a drunk stumbles out to stagger around spouting dirty jokes. If the tragedy has been done well so far, the audience now erupts in gales of laughter. Why did the author do this? The purpose, as the ancient Greeks will tell you, is to let the audience regain perspective on the drama so they can accept and think about its tough hard-hitting message. It comes just before the climax of the story and without this brief respite the audience would be overwhelmed by the coming whirlwind of emotion. It lets them feel, think and absorb and therefore they can feel satisfied with the final outcome.

That's all very well, but as a beginning storyteller, can you even hope to emulate Shakespeare and Euripedes and that lot? Is this of any use to you at all? Yes, because you are perfectly free to interact with the audience on the spot. If you have composed a very dramatic tale with a tough hard-hitting message and then you are just about to start the climax and you see that the audience is raptly attentive on the edge of their seats and staring at you with open eyes, you might try grinning and tossing out some silly comment. Of course it should be some joke more or less inside the story so as not to break the spell too drastically. If they smile and laugh, play it up a little more. Then get back to business. If it works, they'll like the whole job better and understand more of your message. If it doesn't work, the worst thing that you'll likely get is a few sardonic grimaces.

Mystery

You might choose to add in details which the audience will not understand, things which are related to the scene or plot or characters or to your message in some way that you understand but which you never clearly explain. For example, you might tell a story set on board a sailing ship and use various words and mention various activities that only a sailor would correctly understand. Of course you should make sure that enough of the pertinent meaning is conveyed so that your listeners don't get lost. If it's not overdone, this can actually make the story more realistic for the audience because, after all, our real lives are full of things we scarcely comprehend.

This trick of mystery is carried to profound and powerful extremes in classic Celtic tales. The best sort of ancient Celtic storytellers were the Druids and their tales are thick with puzzling details that actually turn out to be rich philosophical and psychological symbols. For example, we can listen to the tales of King Arthur's court as simple stories of adventure and romance; but then, if we ponder on the various intriguing characters and their peculiar actions then we'll find deeper levels of meaning with large statements about human life. Have you studied Oriental philosophy or Native American religion, Greek or Australian myth, African-American traditional song or Jungian psychology? You can search the esoteric subjects you have studied for some vivid symbol of the message that you want to convey, and then add that vivid symbol to your story as an unexplained detail. You might weave in several of these to make them seem less out of place. With luck, if the images are vivid and if the audience is in an open frame of mind, some of these images will click together at a deeper level of the listener's thinking and thereby lend considerable power to your work.

How Many Characters?

Much of what I've said has sounded like there's got to be a dozen characters in every tale, or at least there must be two. How could you work up conflict, climax and resolution, or any kind of plot, with only a single person?

Well, for one thing, non-human and non-animal things can well be portrayed as characters just like they sometimes seem to us in life. One of my colleagues has a story where a foolish boy struggles to swing from a tree limb into a second-story window; the uncooperative tree is made almost as much into an active person as the boy. In Hemmingway's famous story The Old Man And The Sea the main section has a single human being in a boat. The skillful author contrives to make not only the great fish, who stumbles into battle with the man, but also the boat, the water and the sky, into active beings each with a personal existence. They definitely don't seem like humans but they definitely do seem like beings. And these two stories do not leave us with a sense of fantasy but rather with a sense that we have given close attention to the world.

And for another thing, it is sometimes possible to treat the audience like characters. If you contrive to make them feel as if they're there with you, wherever you have taken them, then you can speak and gesture to them just as if they were. This is a masterful trick indeed, for you must almost read their minds in advance in order to play against their thoughts and feelings.

So, how many characters do you need? One or two or a dozen? Each one must do or say or think something vital to the plot. You must give each character enough activity to let the audience pretend that they are present. Those considerations would lead you to have a minimum number of them; but then again, each interaction of the characters gives you a chance to embroider and enhance the tale, thus to better illustrate your message.

The Message Of The Tale

Okay, okay; all you want to do is spin some simple sentimental yarn about the time somebody fell in love. Maybe all you've got is just a little inspirational piece about a cat who saved her kittens from a house on fire, or just a moral lesson about some bully who ended up with a bloody nose. Maybe all you want to do is share with an audience the pride you felt at some victory you achieved, or the dreadful sorrow that you felt when a loved one died. Well, why don't you dig a little deeper? Why don't you speak a little larger? Surely you learned some bit of wisdom that an audience would like to hear concerning death or victory. Surely even a simple hero's tale can highlight some abiding fact about courage. Telling about a villain's end can let you tell the people what you think of justice. And if you speak of love, why don't you strive your best to join the poets who have always hymned the great immortal mystery of love?

You can be a philosopher and you should be. That is a storyteller's proper role by the very nature of human consciousness and hence the nature of the art. You need not strive to be a great philosopher, nor even a very good one with original ideas, nor even a proper scholar of other people's ideas; if that doesn't sound like something that you want to do, don't bother. But when you go up in front of people and tell a serious story, people want the story to have some worthwhile point and they want you to take a try at showing them what it is. It really will not satisfy them if you merely share the joys and sorrows and hopes and terrors of this life. Speech and body language penetrate so deeply and immediately into the human mind that the members of your audience become philosophers while they watch and listen, duly feeling, weighing and considering the waves and ripples in themselves that your performance stirs up. And what they want to share with you is a worthwhile philosophical conversation. They want you to tell them what the story is about, as best you can, so that they can consider that along with all the rest. And they definitely do want this because now, after tens of thousands of years of human life, that art of listening to a tale has grown into the very structure our brains.

Strive to draw some lesson from the tale yourself before you begin, and also later as you go along. Demonstrate that lesson through the characters and dialog and situations. Reveal the lesson to your listeners both subtly and forthrightly. Beat them on the head with it, if that seems to be effective, or whisper it tenderly into their ears. I'm sure you'll learn a thing or two concerning life yourself. I'm sure you'll find the extra effort is worthwhile.