Shout Out: Morgan Taylor, Musician (and Picture Storyteller)

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to attend a house concert in Oakland, California, to see singer/ songwriter Morgan Taylor. He introduced me and my children to a live version of the Gustafer Yellowgold experience.

Morgan sang and played guitar live, with tunes bringing to mind the songwriting of David Bowie and the Beatles, as if arranged for Seals and Croft, England Dan and John Ford Coley, and Al Stewart). Of course I fell under his spell: I'm exactly his demographic.

But there was a difference from a typical house concert featuring a musician: Morgan stands next to a screen, and from his laptop produces not only backing tracks (bass, keyboards, drums) but animated illustrations of the characters that he sings about or sings as.


The music is well-crafted (great hooks, thoughtful arrangements) and the animated illustrations bring the songs to life, aiding in the visualization of the strange and wonderful denizens of the mythology Taylor has created. But here's the key, for me: the content of the songs are Alice-in-Wonderland strange, and the illustrations help to make that accessible. So music and image work together, but the flow of the evening... the connective tissue of the world Taylor has created... is story. Songs seemed to inspire characters, character inspires songs, but in fact the evening worked because Taylor, in between songs, gave us matter-of-fact-ly delivered explanations of the details of Gustafer Yellowgold narrative: how he came to Earth, where he landed, what his brother does, how he spends his time. Each detail accumulates to build a story.

I'm late to the party on this one (hat tip to my brother): AlternaDads, librarians, and kindie rock aficionados have known about him for years, but here's what struck me the most, while watching the performance: Taylor is actually a traditional picture-storyteller, continuing on a tradition like the picture storytellers of India (a tradition dating back 27 centuries), Pardehdari in Iran, and the art of kamishibai in Japan. He's part of a small group of modern day performers whose live performances depend on a lively interplay between visual images and the told story (in this group I'd include performance artist Laurie Anderson, cartoonist Ben Katchor, and Fringe Festival favorite Barry Smith).

Catch up on Taylor's touring schedule on the Gustafer Yellowgold website.

One more thought: I am reminded of my trip to India, where our storytelling tour kept encountering references in song and in image to the Ramayana... which most of us had not read from beginning to end... and so we learned the story by accretion of details. In the same way, the story of Gustafer Yellowgold, is pieced together through songs and videos. As far as I know, there is no definitive Gustafer text (i.e. you can't read his story from A to Z, though obsessed fans could, I'm sure, put the songs on a timeline)... but here's my wish: that someday Taylor gives us Gustafer's monomyth--the hero's journey--because I would love to follow Gustafer on a sequenced narrative (and, hey, the younger kids... sequential patterning... not a bad conceptual ride for the pre-reading crowd to go on). I suspect the care and attention that Taylor has put into the "color" of his mythos has left me hungry for more plot.

So, how about it Morgan? Any plans for Gustafer's Odyssey?

Process: Color and Advance

I'm in the process of adding some new stories to my repertoire. So, taking a page from the playbook of storyteller Priscilla Howe, I set up some informal backyard storytelling sessions, to give myself a live audience to whom I could tell these stories.

Two of the three stories are wonder tales, involving quests, with various tasks which tangle the plot, and familiar fairy tale motifs. But in this early stage, when I'm just getting to know the story, the main challenge for me is to simply hit all the plot points. And for my first run in my backyard, I managed to include most of them in my telling. Even got them in the right order.

Afterwards, reflecting on how these "first tellings" went, I realized that I was so concerned about the plot, that I left out pretty much any description that might help my listeners create the images of the story. Luckily, these stories are archetypal enough (and my audience young enough) that just saying "forest," "cave," "lion," or "giant" is enough of a prompt to get their imaginations going. But to me the story felt dry. Bare bones.

This feeling reminded me of an instructive game I learned when I was studying improvisation. The game, Color/Advance, involved two people: a storyteller and a director. One person would start telling a story, and the director could say only one of two directions:
"Advance," and the storyteller would have to keep the action of the story moving forward.
The other direction, "Color," when spoken aloud, meant that the storyteller had to stop the forward momentum of the story and stay in the moment, but embellish--go deeper--with description of the environment, the characters, or the emotion. The game was designed to get us thinking about key components of narrative.

So here was my thought about the bare bones: too much advance, not enough color.

It will come, with more tellings. The color is already there; I just need to bring it out. As I tell a story, I have visual images in my head of everything that's going on. In one sense, I'm simply describing what I see.

(Not all storytellers work that way, though many do, but I found this is a fairly useful description to explain to people how it is that I can tell a story without memorizing a text)

The trick is to translate those images into oral language, fluidly. With more tellings, it will happen. I'll begin to associate certain phrases with certain images. Over time, the language may become more and more set (but for me, never rigid).

This was a helpful revelation, as, at the same time, I was working on a new story for a local adult storytelling series, and for a change of pace, I was developing a monologue... which meant that the story was not simply plot and image strung together. I was working on giving voice to a character, and so I was considering sound, movement, attitude, and emotion in a way that I don't typically do in my "regular storytelling" (Thank goodness for all those years working towards a degree in Theatre).

All of these qualities in a character monologue are part of the "color." But this backyard lab helped me (wearing my playwright hat) by reminding me that my character could tell his story more effectively if he went beyond "this happened then this happened" to include details like "she was the kind of girl who..." and "two ogres? two ogres are stupider than one."

The Color/Advance game was an exercise to build awareness. We never came up with a formula for the proper ratio of each, and we never tried. It's been a helpful way, for me, to think about oral performance. I've noticed some storytellers tipping the scales toward too much color (taking a two minute story and stretching it into five, or ten, with description of time and place and character)-- I think the personal memoir genre encourages this. I really admire those storytellers who are economical with their color-- the details really matter to the story, they are there because they need to be. They're part of the meat, not the fat.

How about you? Which part of the storytelling process appeals to you, as a listener, or as a teller?

Color? or Advance?