Story Swapping Between Cultures, Part 2

On the second day of our visits to Irula villages, tour organizer Robert asked me about the experience, both to check in with me but also to get feedback on the tour itself. (It had been a primary goal of Robert and Nancy to get us out to a rural setting and to sit and swap stories in a non-performance platform context).

I told Robert that to listen to stories while sitting in the shade of a tree in a rural village in India was, in one sense, exactly why I had come on the trip. That very morning, in fact, as we were being served coconut water (a young coconut with a straw in it) and listening to stories, I nudged the person next to me. "We're listening to stories under a banyan tree. In India. Can you believe it?"

Banyan tree storyswapping venue,
Irula village near Chengalpettu,
photo by Jeff Byers.

After all the hassle of arranging travel, the long trip itself, the jet lag, the crash course in narrative arts of Tamil Nadu (including epic songs, the Mahabharata, bharatanatyam, and kattaikkuttu), sightseeing, living out of a suitcase, language barriers, and the media frenzy leading up to the November 4th election-- after all that, the story swapping in villages was a chance to experience life in the present.

A chance to pause... not just to enjoy stories, but to live life in real time.

Granted, it's not necessary to travel 9,000 miles away from home to grab a respite from the hustle and bustle of a modern lifestyle. And certainly to make a such a journey for the purposes of experiencing storytelling was a gamble of expectations. None of us, including the tour organizers, knew how the story swapping would work out.

(I can imagine the conversation at the tourism bureau: "The Americans want to go where?... They're coming all this way and want to visit the tribes... just to listen to stories?... What on earth for?")

So there we were. After brief tours of the villages, we'd gather in a group. We would sit and listen. Our village hosts graciously served us tea, and snacks. We whiled away the hours listening to stories, and some of our group had the chance to tell stories to the villagers.

In contrast to the epic stories of the Hindu religion we'd experienced in Chennai and the kattaikkuttu school, here we heard animal fables and local sacred stories, mostly from the women. One notable exception was when the village headman condensed a four hour sacred story into a 45 minute telling for us... despite the editing, he still found the story so powerful that he went into a trance state at the emotional peak of the story (We followed the lead of his wife and just waited patiently for him to return to us).

In the village with the banyan tree, locals sheepishly admitted they didn't know any traditional stories. Oakland storyteller Liz Nichols then asked them, through a translator, if they might share any stories about their grandparents. We quickly got two fascinating local legends about relatives who could go into trance states: one story about a woman who could predict epidemics in this way, and another about a man who could summon tigers.

We didn't speak their language, we could barely fathom their way of life. We got only a quick overview of their recent history: The Irula are a tribal community with thousands of years of indigenous knowledge of the forest, but the villages we visited were government resettlement projects. In recent decades, forest conservation laws made extraction of forest resources illegal, and apart from a few worthy efforts of non-governmental organizations to develop traditional knowledge into economic engines (snake venom extraction labs, herbal plant nurseries), most of the Irula are agricultural day laborers. Some of the women told us that they never took visited the nearest town (just a few kilometers away), because they could not read the numbers on the buses or the signs in the shops. If they braved the journey, they required their school-educated children to guide them.

But we sat down with them and listened. Sometimes life in real time doesn't provide the ideal venue for swapping stories. Real life can mean heat, humidity, dust, mud, goat droppings, snakes (the Irula are known as snake-catchers, and several men were happy to show off their recent finds), cell phones (in rural communities, it's easier to leapfrog landlines), children coming home from school. I recently played back video from one swapping session and what you can hear most clearly is the bleating of the village goats and clucking of chickens. Some of the younger children wanted to touch us white folks, or engage in various versions of peek-a-boo. During one swap, a group of boys realized the grown ups were otherwise engaged and began throwing rocks at each other just outside the storytelling circle. In another, the village alcoholic, attentive to the stories, felt compelled to make the session an interactive one. His outbursts were deftly and good-naturedly handled by our translator.

Sitting under the trees in rural India was picturesque, but it's also far from luxurious. Some of our group had health issues, which meant sitting cross-legged on a straw mat on the ground for two hours was far from ideal (chairs had to be hauled in from homes and schoolrooms).

But despite the challenges... of culture, of language, of lifestyle, of venue... such an experience really drove home the essential elements of what it means to be a human being. Because despite all the differences, were able to find common ground simply by being willing to listen to and share stories.

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

Oh I Wish I Were An Oscar Mayer Weiner

"An Angry White Guy in Chicago" is the blog of Chicago producer/writer/director/performer Don Hall. It should be required reading for any small theatre producer in this country. That includes storytelling event producers, and storytellers who perform for adult audiences.

Recently, he posted a video from Weird America of a man obsessed with hot dogs. A guy who devotes all of his creative energy to hot dogs. Don writes:

With our esoteric devotion to what has become, like opera or ballet or jazz, the province of a small, SMALL portion of American society (more people have webbed toes than see live theater monthly in this country) and our deep belief that other people will care if we only could reach them, aren't we much the same as Hot Dog J. Frank - The Willy Wonka of Meat?

Watch the hot dog video, then read Don's post.

Then read it again with the following substitutions:
Replace "Fringe theater" with "storytelling."
Replace "live theater" with "storytelling."
Replace "theatre artist" with "storyteller."