First week of storytelling!

First week of storytelling!

Throughout this week we have been working on storytelling, how to tell a successful story to keep an audience engaged, interested and entertained. At the start of the week we learnt about the skeleton of stories and how important it is to make/pick certain points out of whatever story you are telling so as to not forget the story while you are telling it. This I feel is very useful and I personally used this loosely later on in the week where we had to learn a folk tale/story of our own. My folk story was quite long so decided to use the “skeleton” to help me remember it all successfully which really helped. We all on this day had to tell both a folk tale and a personal story of our own. This was really fun and interesting to see how different people told there tales in their own unique different ways. I found them all engaging but found the ones with humour most entertaining with both the folk and the personal tales.

Folk tales and Personal story's-

How did the quality of your listening change as an audience?-All the tales where told in completely different unique ways. I felt my listening changed a lot between the personal and folk tales. With the folk tales I felt like I was on an almost journey throughout the stories that could never happen in real life which made you use your imagination. All these tales where all told in completely different ways but I liked it best when the stories included humour or demanded your attention to it I think it could work well if we went for a “scary” theme maybe and told a story using shadows we learnt about later on in the week and could help pull this off (if we decide to do this). I feel I didn’t have to work as hard when listening to the personal stories. They have all happened to people before so I personally didn’t have to imagine what it would be like (even though they have never happened to me). I felt like when listening to the personal stories I could relax and just listen and enjoy the memories of others. I felt like I was sitting listening to a friend telling me personal stories that have happened. I think the personal stories could work really well in a performance if you told them like you are telling the audience a secret like you are letting them into it maybe around a camp fire or something like that. I also think it might be interesting to try telling the personal tales also like a well known fairytale making it magical as well and seeing how that effects the delivery of it?.

What can this teach you about acting- I feel this exercise taught me that as an actor when storytelling you have to commit to it and believe it in a way? And look like you know what you are doing. I think whatever way we choose to tell our storytelling performance we have to totally commit to it and make sure we grab people’s attention straight away because if you don’t get it straight away I feel it would be hard to get?. All the tales in conclusion where great and I loved listening to them and telling my own and would love to hear more. I also think it has given us a lot to think about in terms of how to portray and tell our story when we do the performance. (I’m not sure if I’ve explained this answer very well or even answered it right but hopefully you understand).

At the end of the week we started to experiment with different ways to tell stories such as with shadows or paper or your hands etc. This was very fun and we found many different ways to tell and show a story that I feel I may not have thought of if not for this workshop. I personally liked it best when we made shadows on the walls and pieces of paper and I liked the idea of using the paper as a sort of map in a way mapping out the story. I think this could be very atmospheric and would create a good atmosphere for an audience. The only thing I slightly think didn’t work as well was when we tried telling the stories with our hands. I thought it looked quite messy but saying this I think it could look good if we had more time to work on it to create more with it. With the paper ideas I loved the idea of having drawings on it and lights shining through it taking an audience on a journey I think this is so interesting and would love to try and do a performance incorporating some of this.

At the beginning of this lesson we tried to tell one story with different little stories thrown in to it just for an idea so we could see if it worked or not, this seemed to work really well linking in some different story’s into one as a whole. I think this could work well and maybe add comedy to a piece?. I thought before we initially tried this idea that it would distract people from the main story so wouldn’t work very well but it didn’t at all just gave more for you to think about. I like the fact that it done this. It made the story’s more interesting I feel because you didn’t know where we were going to next which was nice added a little twist of excitement almost and mystery to it.

This week has been a week for ideas and by the end of this week I now feel like we have a sense and image of how our piece may and may not be performed. Incorporating lots of these ideas we have found this week which will  be fun to play around with more to see what works well solely as a performance.