Story is as old
as speech
We learned to listen to story a long time before we learned to write and read.
We are hardwired to engage with this ancient way of sharing ideas and learning. It is said that when a story is told, as many different versions of a story exist in the room as there are listeners (plus the one in the storyteller’s imagination!).
Let me introduce you to the art of oral storytelling … the telling of a story from memory.
Fundamentally, storytelling is an oral art, involving the transmission of tales that have been handed down ‘from mouth to ear’, sometimes mediated by written forms.
Nicola Grove; Using Storytelling to Support Children and Adults with Special Needs: Transforming lives through telling tales.
Tales – folk tales, fairy tales, wonder tales, traditional tales from different cultures or tales of real events. Old stories passed down or newly crafted stories, oral storytelling happens in person, one-to-one or one-to-many.
[Oral storytelling] happens face to face, eye to eye, gesture to gesture, voice to ear, heart to heart, and mind to mind in one location by one person to one or more others.
Alida Gersie, Anthony Nanson, and Edward Schieffelin; Storytelling for a Greener World: Environment, Community and Story-Based Learning.
The medium through which the story is told is the storyteller, who stands before you and takes you on a flight through imagination through the use of words, gesture and narrative.
In live storytelling the imagination of the teller is opened so that the words can come from a deeper place within their psyche. Telling stories rather than reading them develops the imagination of both teller and listener, forming a close connection between them.
Josie Felce, Storytelling for Life: Why Stories Matter and Ways of Telling Them.
We first encounter stories as entertainment. But they touch us much more deeply than that. A well-told story can capture us heart and soul, children and adults alike.
Stories are the infinite seeds that we have brought with us through the millennia of walking the dust of the earth. They are our celestial pods. They are our alchemical cauldrons. If we listen to them right, if we read them deeply, they will guide us through the confusion of our lives, and the diffusion of our times.
Ben Okri; The Mystery Feast: Thoughts on Storytelling
A story is a place of safety. Often set in the past with metaphorical characters, stories create realms where we can explore ideas, feelings and experiences that we might not want to address directly in our real lives. They are places, then, of learning and exploration, whether we know it at the time or not.
Stories can make us more aware of ourselves as part of feeling, creating, laughing, crying, curious, courageous humanity. Together they have a cumulative effect, broadening our inner knowing, our compassion, and our sense of self.
Nancy Mellon with Ashley Ramsden; Body Eloquence: The Power of Myth and Story to Awaken the Body’s Energies.
Many traditional stories were also a means for teaching, with the storyteller guiding the listeners to points of learning.
These Stories were meant to be told, not written. In this way the Teachers, whether speaking verbally or in sign language, were able to give inflection to particular words to reflect their symbolic content.
Hyemeyohsts Storm, Seven Arrows.
The listener can let the story run through them, landing where it may. Or they, like the teller, can delve into the story to unpick and understand its message. But here’s the thing … the message is particular to the listener, even when the themes of the story are universal and timeless.
The storytelling listener’s role is to actively create the vivid, multi-sensory images, actions, characters, and events—the reality—of the story in his or her mind, based on the performance by the teller and on the listener’s own past experiences, beliefs, and understandings. The completed story happens in the mind of the listener, a unique and personalized individual. The listener becomes, therefore, a co-creator of the story as experienced.
National Storytelling Network (https://storynet.org/what-is-storytelling/)
Stories can be healing, for an individual or for a group. Sharing stories can bring people together, as a simple sharing of an experience or as a more profound way of understanding one another.
Working with storytelling and creative imagination is a way of coming together, which is not based on political viewpoint, gender, status or nationality. In the weaving of speaking and listening, we access a common ground of humanity, sharing the earth and our stories in a universal language. This creates openings for the future, building relationship and trust.
Inger Lisa Oelrich; The New Story: Storytelling as a Pathway to Peace.
An examination of sources of the quotes included here shows some of the many applications of storytelling: entertainment, teaching, supporting, healing, connecting us with each other and with the worlds in which we live. These aspects of storytelling are ancient. We are hardwired to listen to story.
… recent studies in anthropology, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience consistently tell us, we are storytelling animals; to be human is to tell stories.
Geoff Mead; Telling the Story: The Heart & Soul of Successful Leadership.
Stories and storytelling are who we are!
Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation.
Joseph Campbell; The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Let me tell you a story from long ago, in a land far away… or maybe close by …
Sue Povall, February 2019