Two different ventures are my subject this week. One involves one of the readers of this blog – Swati Kakodkar.

Becoming a storyteller:

Swati lives in Bangalore in India. She became interested in storytelling when she lived in America and started taking her young son along to her local library. She loved seeing and hearing the storytelling sessions that were held there and she loved how they involved her son.

So when Swati moved to Bangalore, she took up storytelling herself. She enrolled at an institute in Bangalore which gives training and knowledge in storytelling. She also arranged to go regularly to tell stories to a children’s group.  (more…)

Without response, where would we storytellers be? I’d probably shrivel like the dried-up brown leaf that was on my doorstep the other morning, blown there no doubt by the winds of the previous night.

On Wednesday this week, I was at St Peter’s C of E Primary School in Ravenscourt Park. This was a new school for me except that its new head teacher used to book me at St Stephen’s School in Shepherd’s Bush where she previously worked. Some responses occurred in the course of the day which have stayed in my mind.

Identification

In my session for the Years 3 and 4 classes, I brought out my Rainbow Cloth (I often do). It brought some lovely responses, for instance that, if it transformed, it could become butterfly wings. I also told the story of how and where I’d bought it. ‘It comes from Africa,’ I began and in the small pause that followed, my eyes were drawn to two boys, both black, who were sitting together near the back. During my pause, one boy turned to the other, nodding slightly as if to say, ‘That’s like you.’ And at once, the other boy smiled with a look of such affirmation that I don’t want to forget it.

Questions (more…)

How did it go? Most storytellers, I guess, look back at any event they’ve been involved with, formal or informal, and consider if it lived up to how they’d have liked it to be. For me, that process happened twice yesterday. The morning held a long interview on Skype with a storyteller in Bangalore in India. I’ve never been a great aficionado of Skype but this conversation was really magic. My interviewer’s list of questions was very much to the point and during it, she asked what advice I’d have for a new storyteller. My answer included what long ago became a motto I gave to myself: forgive yourself if you feel your storytelling didn’t go as well as you’d have hoped. There is always a next time and you have to learn from your mistakes.

The afternoon involved the birthday party I spoke briefly about in last week’s blog.  In the event, 14 girls turned up, one or two of them rather quiet, the rest of them very excited. An initial activity involved them thinking up a magic power, a magic food and a magic creature. Then it was over to the storytelling. After a name game to help all  feel included and an introductory story about a frog that happily made them all laugh, we went immediately into that story from Grimms’ Other Tales, the story of Catharinella.  The children settled into it quickly, though I realised from the looks on one or two faces that even at 7 years old, the idea of an ogre that might eat you up can feel a tad alarming. Where necessary, you have to go easy.  Then as we went on, I felt really glad that, in my advance preparations, I’d  become aware of some unresolved features in the story as written. My thoughts about how to resolve them proved very productive and that felt nice.

The story in brief: (more…)

Report-back sessions can be real eye-openers. A vital part of any storytelling course I’ve ever run, they’re times when people can say what they’ve been making of stories and techniques that have come up in the course and also, just as importantly, what new directions they’ve prompted in their thinking.

A blog is by no means a course. Yet it’s beginning to feel to me as if it can act in a similar way. Might it even help create a new community of people with a common interest in storytelling however far afield they live?

From Bangalore to Brisbane:

On one single day this week, I opened my computer to find messages from two such far-flung places as Bangalore and Brisbane in Australia. I was amazed and delighted. The person in Bangalore does storytelling with children and is working on a dissertation as part of a Diploma in Storytelling. Meg in Brisbane had not only recognised the story I’d told in this blog last week. She’d herself heard it told by Maureen Watson, the Aboriginal storyteller who created it. Maureen is a great community leader, says Meg, and she’d created the story to encourage children to work together. (more…)