Good Food * Good Listening * Good Company
in Northern Bruce Peninsula
519-795-7477 or mail@voyageurstorytelling.ca or return to home page
In which we talk about
Canadian Storytelling (a very large subject)
Introduction
| We plan to set up a resource bank about Canadian Storytelling. Our own concert repertoire is presented elsewhere (see Repertoire pages). Here we will encourage other Canadian storytellers to do the same. We will encourage discussion of the characteristics and ethos of Canadian stories and storytelling that make them distinctive. We have our own ideas, and know that others do too. We want to include a diversity of views.
This section is actively under development in December 2011.
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The Performing Art of Storytelling
We begin by acknowledging the definition of "oral storytelling" suggested by Storytellers of Canada ~ Conteurs du Canada (SCCC -- web site):
This is a bit awkward, but then so is any other formulation that does the job correctly. All arts worthy of the name are complex; their definitions, if definitions are required, must be so too. Unfortunately, definitions are required in storytelling, because the art is not well known, and the term is used in diverse ways for activities that are not the performing art that we practise.
The only incorrect, or at least unnecessarily limited, part of the SCCC definition is the implication that the audience inevitably relies on "specific visual imagery and detail to complete and co-create the story". That is certainly one way to listen to a story, but not the only way. Spoken or or chanted or sung words are complex sounds; they can be received and processed in many ways, in storytelling as in many other pursuits. The listener does not need to translate them into pictures in order to achieve understanding, whatever that means in the specific context. We might also quibble about the word "unique". We ourselves do not make any claim for the uniqueness of our relationship with the audience. All live performing arts require some form of collaboration with the audience.
Getting back to the definition: in other words, the art we are talking about is "narrative", that is, it deals in:
"stories" — which are, in general, dynamic representations or images of characters in events that happen, or could happen, or can be imagined as happening, usually but not necessarily in temporal sequence;
"verbal" — it uses words and arrangements of words;
"sonorous" — the verbal elements are communicated primarily as sounds, and as visual images, if at all, only through sound;
"vocal" or "oral" — the sound is produced by mind, voice and tongue working together; and
"aural"or "auditory" — it is received by the ear and processed for both sound and sense.
To accommodate the reality that a story remains untold if no one is present to hear it, we prefer to call the art "Oralaural Storytelling". Its logo might plausibly look like this, which we call the Flowering Oralaurel:
Some storytellers rebel apparently against the idea that the telling of a story is a "performance". They think that performing means adding embellishments that are inappropriate to the pure art they are trying to achieve. Richard Bauman (in "Verbal Art as Performance, 1977") asserts, correctly we believe, that: "Performance is a mode of communication that consists in the assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence." Every storyteller does that, regardless of style. Performance, and its responsibility, is built right into the act of storytelling itself, and cannot be denied.
We therefore rise and give you Oralaural Performing Art, richly rooted in elemental matrices of Oralauralore, breathed into life by the oralauralairs of the relevant Muses, crowning those who scale their heights with garlands of oralauralaurels, speaking in Canada the language of Boreal Oralauralese in all the wondrous variety of its diverse vocabularies.
A story can be easily identified as Canadian if it originates in Canada, or has been adapted by a Canadian teller, even if the story is culturally specific. Beyond these common-sense ideas lie forms of Canadian story that speak more deeply to our shared national realities:
—> a place of wild, northern, sparsely populated, breathtakingly beautiful Nature;
—> people living with that Nature, comfortably or uncomfortably, amiably or with hostility or fear;
—> a heterogeneous North American Culture (now largely urban) with three primordial stems (each diverse in itself) — Aboriginal, Francophone and Anglophone — and with a rich and growing set of fellow voyagers;
—> people living within that Culture, comfortably or uncomfortably, amiably or with hostitiliy or fear.
Our common vision is the celebration of our lack of common vision, our lack of need for conformity to a common vision. We live a national life of quiet disparation.
Other ideas, quite possibly contradictory, are on our Voyageur Storytelling Experience page.
We'll have a lot more to say on this subject as this page evolves.
