Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Storytelling
I have found out that stories are more interesting if you make them come alive. You kick it up a notch by becoming those characters and changing your tone of voice. You make me use my imagination. I sometimes close my eyes and start forming pictures of who those characters look like, what they are wearing, and I picture an out of this world scenery. Very interesting, I might say. I definately need to polish those skills that are hidden somewhere, I think. If I don't find those skills, that means I never had them. That is bad, truly bad.
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You do. We all have the ability to tell stories, so long as we can hear stories. Since you clearly have the ability to imagine a story when someone is telling it, you just have to do that backwards.
ReplyDeleteImagine the story, then tell it.
You'll get worked out.
:)
The skills are only hard to find because we use them so often and they are us, so we don't notice them. We use the skills everyday when we communicate with people.
ReplyDeleteIn everyday communication we implicitly know our goals and then our body and mind work toward those goals so that whatever words we say are pushing toward our goal and people understand what we want even if we jumble our words.
When "telling a story" in a performance situation we often
have negative goals: don't turn red, don't talk too loud, don't say something stupid,
or irrelevant goals: make people laugh, make people be quiet, be loud and angry etc.
These things make it hard to stay "natural."
Instead, if we are narrating a character, we should adapt the character's goal as our own. A storyteller can allow themself more freedom by only being responsible for fulfilling the needs of the character or story and worrying less about self or audience attitudes which are harder to control.
I think that sums it up, I have more power over the story I tell than the audience or even myself as a person, and that is where I should focus my time and effort.
When I was reading the Bob Dylan song I was getting very nervous because I found that I was unable to control my voice or even the way I was standing. It felt so uncomfortable and I started trembling all the down through my legs and feeling like I could start crying at any minute. Lee did not want to cry. But the song did not have any compulsions about it. I had to stop thinking about myself and let the song work its way through me.
relinquish negativity and fight the good fight.
Wow, Lee...that was a really beautiful, insightful comment!
ReplyDeleteNow onto my simplistic, less insightful comment:
You TOTALLY have it in you, Maria Elena! You did a wonderful job of explaining the story of "La Llorona" (as it was to you as a child) to us in class last week, so I am quite sure you can grow into yourself as a storyteller before this class ends!
I look forward to hearing more from you :)