Recently, Sean Buvala (@storyteller on Twitter) tweeted,
Sean has been a storytelling professional for over two decades. He lives this stuff. He created the website Storyteller.net before the web ever thought about storytelling. I respect and value his work immensely. However, I disagree with his stance.
He’s not alone. I have encountered many storytellers—all live performing stand-up-in-front-of-an-audience type storytellers—who share the sentiment that performative storytelling is the only true storytelling. (I once met a famous performance storyteller with the initials DW who told me that the Moth brand of first person storytelling was not real storytelling.)
If it’s not live, people to people, it’s not storytelling. It’s one of many other amazing and equal arts that use story.
I am a bass player. When I was in my 20s I played with a band and we got a gig in New York City. The band that went on before us played super intense heavy metal music. They stood in place staring at their hands with their speakers shaking the walls behind them. Not only did they play their songs with precision, they also brought with them their own giant light show. However, despite all the hoopla, they failed to win the audience.
After their set, one of the members said to his band mates, “What’s wrong with this audience? These people don’t know real music when they hear it.”
Whenever someone says that something outside of their mindset is not the real deal, they are usually a purveyor of, or practitioner of, what they consider real. I’m no different. I think that having an open standpoint is more advantageous than compartmentalizing. There are amazing insights to learn when we look at disparate topics (or just about everything) as forms of storytelling.
Live storytelling is only one of many storytelling forms.
This raises another interesting question, which is: “What are the live storytelling forms?” I believe there are many. And should we learn to call these forms by specific names, or leave them lumped as “storytelling”.
DavidVanadia
Sep 01, 2011
Perhaps the distinction is saying “live storytelling” vs. just “storytelling.”
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Eric La Brecque
Sep 01, 2011