Video Documentary: the Culture of the National Storytelling Festival

First weekend in October, it must be storytelling time in East Tennessee.

The National Storytelling Festival, in Jonesborough, Tennessee, now in its 36th year, has, since its inception cultivated a mystique and body of lore around itself.

Joseph Sobol has an excellent folklorist's perspective in The Storyteller's Journey, University of Illinois Press, 1999. (Just noticed a preview of the book is available at Google: link)

Back in 2001, Arizona storyteller Layne Gneiting created a video documentary about the Festival's culture, as part of his ethnographic research for his doctoral dissertation. entitled "Brigadoon Returns: Culture Formed and Reformed at the National Storytelling Festival." You can read about the dissertation over on his blog at Professional Storyteller. Layne has made the video available on YouTube... FYI, this isn't about storytelling, it's about the culture that surrounds this annual storytelling event:

Part I:


Part II:


Part III:

Storytellers: Who Speaks for You?

Most of the storytellers I know consider themselves performing artists (identifying as one is helpful come tax time). However, most of the same storytellers don't consider themselves as part of the larger cultural ecosystem of performing arts.

Partly that's historical: the storytelling revival of the last thirty five years didn't blossom from the performing arts community. If I recall my Sobol correctly, it springboarded off of the traditions carried forward by librarians, folk artists, and the entrepreneurial ambitions of an Eastern Tennessee high school teacher.

But every performing artist starts out focused on their art and craft, their technique and their inspiration. Hopefully, as they mature, they realize the need to broaden their perspective to learn where their art form came from-- and its current state in the cultural milieu.

Scott Walters, a noted theatre blogger (and a professor of drama at University of North Carolina Asheville) had this to say in a recent followup to his visit to the NPAC gathering:

There is another conference in a few days at Americans for the Arts, another organization that can open your mind. But like NPAC last week, the conference at Americans for the Arts will most likely have few artists in attendance. Conferences are expensive, and if you are an artist you may not have the wherewithal to attend one. But I would also venture that, for many artists, there is a lack of interest, a sense that such concerns are "academic" (by which is meant, in our anti-intellectual society, "irrelevant"), and that thinking about the larger issues surrounding the arts is unproductive.

I would argue the opposite. I would argue that action without thought is chaos, and production without purpose is empty. I would argue that the present without a sense of the past is shallow, and intuition without reason is random.

If, as so many people say, theatre has become irrelevant (and I don't think it has; I think it's relevance has gone underground during the tornado of triviality that has swept through the last 25 years) it may be because theatre artists, in the desperate need to simply survive, have lost an awareness of the larger world and their place in it. And what is best about a conference such as NPAC or Americans for the Arts or AlternateROOTs is that you are reminded of your own potential and your own importance.

(As with all my quotes from theatre blogs, replace "theatre" with "storytelling" and read it again.)

All this to say: we performing artists can't wait for someone else to step up to the national conversation on the arts. We're it. Precisely because there are not robust institutions that support storytelling on a national or regional level (key word: robust), it's definitely up to individual artists to step up and join in the national conversation on the arts. In a perfect world, I'd want the administrators, the executive directors, and the university professors who bolster the storytelling community to be leading this charge-- but that's, what, maybe 8 people nationally?

(I confirmed that none of NSN's board attended NPAC. Too bad, since this is precisely the time when NSN is struggling to come up with a viable organizational model.)

American for the Arts Conference link

Reclaiming "Storyteller" as a Label

Over at Ning, the perennial question of how to define storytelling came up around one corner of the virtual water cooler, as Katie Knudsen asked whether we need to expand our definition of storytelling or hold fast to our tradition. I responded with an answer that goes on and on and on, but focused on the role of the event producer, not the performer, as the one who holds the key to definition. Here's an excerpt:

My point is: storytelling is bigger than "roots storytelling" represented by the festival circuit, and its bigger than "personal storytelling" represented by the Moth. And you certainly can segment your audience and produce events that showcase one sliver of storytelling.... nothing wrong with that.

What doesn't make sense is trying to claim an umbrella term as your own.

Imagine if Milton Berle had tried to claim "television" as the genre for the Texaco Star Theater show, and got all the other comedian hosted variety shows to claim "well, what we do is television." Those soap operas, those news shows, they're not "television."

Imagine if track and field competitors tried to claim that basketball players weren't "athletes" because they used a ball, and had to use teammates.

I'd like to see an event producer create a series or even a festival that is truly open to all forms of storytelling.

You can read my entire post and discussion here.

Why Memoir? Part 2

Copyright.

When Sean mentioned in his Roadblock #10 post that storytellers might be wary of violating the copyright of another author or storyteller, I was dubious.

Sure, I get the common sense logic. You can't be accused of violating another person's copyright if you're telling your own story.

Apparently this is an ongoing issue of concern in the storytelling movement, but it raised its head in the 1980s at national conferences.

But seriously, folks. Were storytellers accusing each other of "stealing" each other's repertoires? Were storytellers "stealing" folktales from other tellers?

From my own anecdotal evidence, I can see it might have happened. I learn stories better if I hear them, instead of find them in a book. Visualizing a story from a book is easy, but visualizing the story from book to stage is an added step, which requires more effort. Path of least resistance: tell the story you heard from someone else.

If everyone started telling the same Jack tale, or the same ghost story, sure, that's going to turn audiences off.

But in the analogous realm of traditional music, it's not at all uncommon to hear three or more different versions of "Sally Goodin," "Muleskinner Blues," and "Cripple Creek" in one weekend, both on the mainstages and around the campfires. That's the whole point of tradition. To carry it on. Sure, there are original bluegrass tunes being made all the time and post-punk old-timey revival re-imaginings of standards, but if you go a whole weekend without hearing a Bill Monroe arrangement of a tune, it's not a bluegrass festival.

So... back to storytelling. Traditional art form. Material hundreds if not thousands of years old. Material, therefore, in the public domain.

Artists are surprised that others are appropriating the same material?

Sure, you can call it unethical. Rude. Lazy. But like the story goes, "you knew it was a snake when you picked me up."

"Screw you all and the folktales you tell-- I'm switching to stories from my own life."

From what I hear, the change in material did not stop unethical performers from appropriating the personal memoirs of others for their own repertoire.

I live in a major metropolitan hub filled with theatre festivals in the summer. Several of them just do Shakespeare. Several just do musicals. Do they end up programming the same shows, opposite each other? Hey, it happens. Two, sometimes three "The Tempest"s in one summer. A handful of "South Pacific"s. They manage. They don't throw the classics out the window and start creating their own new scripts.

(Hmm. Bad analogy. --the perils of thinking in the blogging moment-- If these theatres ran themselves like the storytelling world, they would punt the classics, start creating their own new scripts, audiences would eat it up, and we'd never see "Midsummer Night's Dream" or "Hamlet" again.)


Copyright isn't the whole answer.

Stay tuned for more, on audience preferences, and on an academic's look at the movement.