Storytelling Starters ~ Attitude
Our local cinema, the Ritzy in Brixton, has a giant noticeboard above the entrance with names of the films it’s currently showing. Occasionally this noticeboard shows a birthday greeting, presumably to someone local. At the start of this week, there was a quite different message. It was:
IF YOU’RE GONNA TELL A STORY, COME WITH SOME ATTITUDE, MAN.’
Of course, that message caught my attention. I wondered if it could be a quote, perhaps from the great jazz artist, Miles Davis. A documentary film about him was due to be shown with a Q and A session to follow. Then the message persisted in getting my attention whenever I thought about it during the week. Attitude is a word with so many connotations. Often, it’s used with ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to convey a suitable or unsuitable approach, especially from pupils, students or persons at work. It can be feisty, even threatening. ‘Don’t give me that attitude.’
Attitude: a theatrical form
That word ‘attitude’ also reminded me of a past theatrical form I’ve only ever read about, never seen in practice myself, where a performer on stage or in a hall would strike different postures to suggest different emotions or known characters or moments from scenes in a play. These postures were known as attitudes and if I remember aright, the performer would be suitably robed, maybe changing garb between different scenes in his or her display. Sometimes there’d be multiple performers who would create tableaux.
Interestingly, looking up Tableaux on the web, I was interested to see that the idea of a living tableau is now being used in education, especially to recreate with physical bodies the scene of famous paintings. It reminded me of something Karen and I used to get people to do at our Drill Hall workshops of yesteryear, namely physically create a tableau of a scene in a story we were working on.
Attitude in storytelling:
Mind moves on. Not surprisingly, the Ritzy noticeboard also made me think about storytellers themselves. Is a particular style of dress – a sheepskin casually thrown over a shoulder? a cap with gleaming moon and stars? – a kind of attitude in itself? And what about posture, standing or sitting, still or moving about?
Besides, the different ways of approaching an audience are also attitudes in their way. A relaxed posture and confiding tone of voice suggests that, in your mind, you’re regarding the audience as your friend. In contrast, there can be a stance which states that you’re very much the performer and therefore, in this instance, different from and maybe even superior to your listeners.
Nothing has no meaning in this world of ours. Every bit of us conveys attitude. I suppose that, as time goes by and experience builds, we storytellers establish whatever attitude we feels works for us. Still, I think that what we usually do bears examination from time to time. ‘If you’re gonna tell a story, come with attitude, woman or man.’
Talking about what usually works reminds me of a wonderful snippet of conversation I heard one year at the Festival at the Edge. This year’s festival comes up in Much Wenlock as usual on 15 to 17 July. On this past occasion, two folk musicians were standing together on the field. As I passed, I heard one say to the other, ‘They said to us to do something traditional. So what’re we going to do?’ ‘Oh I don’t know, just what we usually do, I suppose.’
PS: My illustrations this week come from a great website called Tableaux Vivants.
Tags: attitude, Drill Hall, Festival at the Edge, posture, Ritzy, voice