Storytelling Starters ~ Good experience
Saturday, January 2nd, 2016
Sometime between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day this week, I watched a film called Ten Canoes. The film was made in 2006 among an Aboriginal people of the Northern Territories of Australia. It tells two stories, one of which – the story within the story – is presented as a very old, true story from the time of the ancestors. In its content and the way it was told, it made me feel conscious once again of the power and effects of storytelling.:
In Ten Canoes, a young Aboriginal man fancies a beautiful young woman. Unfortunately, she is already one of the three wives of the young man’s brother. To alert the young man to the dangers and folly of what his fancy could unleash, he is told the story – and this becomes the story within the story – that comes from the ancient time of the ancestors. Of course, the story that he is told is one that exactly matches the situation he is in. It shows how the similar desires of the young man in the earlier story resulted in suspicion, warfare and death. I found all of this quite fascinating – and for several different reasons, not least that storytellers so often try to find a story to tell that has relevance to now.
The storytelling:
The first fascinating thing about Ten Canoes for me was the slowness and stillness of the storytelling. The ancestral story within the more recent story was compared by its narrator with a small tree which slowly reveals itself as it grows and as more and more branches are seen. As this happens, it is pointed out, everything becomes more complex. You want to understand exactly what happens, you want to follow every branch. This feeling struck a chord witme. I too believe that storytelling has a slowness and inner stillness to it from which comes its power. And that’s not all … (more…)