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At the Telling Tales Festival, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

On Saturday 30th July, I ran “Shakespearean Story Madness” at the Globe Theatre in Southwark as part of their “Telling Tales Festival.” My brief was to create a workshop suitable for visually-impaired children where they could create a new story together which related to Shakespeare’s work. I spent days thinking my way through the plots of MacBeth, Hamlet, Othello, Lear trying to pick out the common elements. I don’t mean the stylistic elements but rather the ways in which those plays are built.

I arrived at The Globe. The Globe have partnered up with RNIB in a committed effort to make great literature exciting to blind young people. Accordingly, my assistant and I were invited to explore the RNIB Reading Forest. This was a multi-sensory environment with great “Reading Trees” spaced within. These trees had Braille for bark and each tree had a recorded voice on a permanent loop sharing works of childrens’ literature. We stood beneath one as our Globe guide explained the installation, while above us, a voice read from Michael Rosen’s classic Early Years poem We’re Going On A Bear Hunt.

“Hang on a minute!” I said, interrupting our guide, “that’s me!”

Telling Tales FestivalAnd it was! The poem was a recording I made for RNIB a few years ago! Minutes later I was hailed by Chris, the recording engineer with whom I made the recording. Naturally, we posed for a picture together and here it is. So it’s official – I have performed at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre! Ahem. Claim To Fame, thy name is Tenuous, as Shakespeare might have written…..

And then the workshop. The children were all 12 and below. Allow me to summarise what they created together with my help:

Lord Dragon lived in a castle on an island. He was so big that some said he was a giant. He was so strong that some said he was a hero. He was so beautiful that some said he was like a god.

One day, a mysterious robed and hooded person came to Lord Dragon and told him that someone, somewhere, was boasting that they were stronger than Lord Dragon. Lord Dragon was amused. They said that this person bragged they could take Lord Dragon easy, any day. Lord Dragon was not amused. He demanded to know who? King Henry, he was told. Now King Henry VIII when young was strong and you don’t just challenge a King to single combat but Lord Dragon did. King Henry would be a tough opponent, the robed figure told Lord Dragon, but Lord Dragon could not lose if he fought using this spear. Lord Dragon took the spear, issued the challenge, crossed the sea to England. He noticed, when he took the spear, that the robed figure was missing a thumb.

For days Lord Dragon practised with the spear. On the morning of the fight he wasn’t feeling himself. Actually, he was feeling ill. He was approached by a white haired old lady. She told him that the spear had been poisoned, its shaft soaked in the spit of leeches and the blood of anacondas. The woman could see the veins of his arm had turned a funny colour and if the poison reached his heart he would die. She could give him the antidote. But Lord Dragon ignored the advice and soon the fight was on.

Lord Dragon and King Henry were well-matched and they fought hard but eventually Lord Dragon had King Henry at his mercy. But something distracted him. Looking up he saw the white-haired woman again. He saw she was missing a thumb. He saw her rubbing her head in anxiety as she watched the fight, hovering with a bottle of antidote. He saw her hair slip back – it was a wig! Beneath the wig was dark hair and, Lord Dragon saw, she was missing an ear! Lord Dragon realised that he recognised her, that she was in fact his estranged brother with whom he had quarrelled years ago!

The distraction proved fatal. King Henry threw Lord Dragon and wrested the spear from him then drove its point into Lord Dragon’s chest. Dying, Lord Dragon asked “why did you do this?”  His brother answered that was his plan was to create a situation in which he could save Lord Dragon’s life and earn his forgiveness. “But you have been my death!” said Lord Dragon. “And mine!” said King Henry, realising the poison was in his blood now. With that, King Henry struck the brother with the spear and so they all died.

A magical, cross-dressing tragedy in the finest of traditions that left all the kids beaming! And this took a little less than an hour to create together and relate together. Not bad, huh?

G ;{~

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The Storyteller of Bath (and Bristol)

So, the first week of March and I travelled down to Bath to stay with my friend Harry. Next day, Wednesday, I worked in a school in Bristol, running Poetry workshops for KS2 children. Wonderful fun. I used a structure-based approach similar to the work I do with StoryMaking, and the staff were amazed at how the right level of limitation liberated the children’s imagination. After my first class there was a break and, as she entered the staff room, my class’s teacher smiled broadly at a colleague.

“If only all learning could be like that!” she said.

And I sincerely believe that more of it can. The children created complex poems in which an everyday object tells their own story. Some poems were riddles and you had to guess what the object was, and some were metaphorically very rich. Everyone wrote something and now the staff will take these beginnings on further. Proper job satisfaction for me.

On Thursday, Harry and I did our best to destroy the best that Bath had to offer in the matter of ales and pies (very good at The Griffin). I saw a moving play at Bristol Old Vic called Pink Mist. Actually, it was very storytellery as all the characters narrated the story straight to the audience. There was no set and minimal props and actors created scenes with movement and posture. I’ve got so much to learn there. I happened to be seated amongst a clump of 6th Formers, A Level drama students. Kid next to me was all scorn at the end of first act, so above it all, telling everyone how he’d worked out the impending twist in Act 2. He had and he hadn’t. As Act 2 progressed, I noticed him stop fidgeting, start leaning forward listening intently. At the end he spun to his friends;

“Excellent!!!” he said.

He’d dropped into the story. So much better than being above it.

On Friday I worked in a different Bristol school and, at day’s end, boarded a train not to home, but to Manchester. Word Of Mouth Storytelling Club was celebrating its 21st Birthday. I cut my teeth there 17 years ago. I wasn’t going to miss their birthday for the world…

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Imagine Children’s Festival, Royal Festival Hall, London

On Monday morning, 15th Feb, at the Royal Festival Hall in London, I ran an hour long session for blind children and their siblings at the Imagine Festival. My brief was to involve the children in a highly interactive storymaking session. This would draw on previous work I’ve done in Norfolk with blind children on behalf of the County Council’s Sensory Impairment Services. I started by telling a couple of very ‘joiny-inny’ stories and got the children singing, clapping, beating drums and shaking tambourines and maracas. In order to take the interactivity to another level I began to tell them a story, asking them to choose for themselves the elements that I could weave into the story as it happened. The result was a story about a knight who lacked courage, rode on a small steam-breathing dragon, and was armed only with an ordinary wooden stick. I told this new story back to them and asked “Who made up that story?” “WE DID!!” they chorused. By the time we’d told two interactive stories and co-devised a third, we had only seven minutes left. “Right,” I said, “let’s make up a complete story from scratch, only using your ideas….” Using Story Structure, we did. I was able to tell the them the tale they’d invented (to be honest, we told it together). Elements included: a giant horn-lacking unicorn! Quacking like a duck! International travel! Blackbirds! Lots of them! Struggles! Danger! Love, and, of course, a very happy ending.

Bloody good story, I reckon, given the time constraints, but this is one of the key things about the StoryMaking work I do. Speed helps. I found it fascinating that this group of blind children created a story about an animal born lacking something everyone else around him possessed.

I was speaking afterwards to one of the dads and an idea popped up – what about setting up a storytelling club for blind children in London, where they could develop their creativity, explore and express their articulacy as well as developing their confidence? What do you reckon – should I do it?

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StoryMaking and Voice Workshops, Chandigarh

So, I taught the last of five workshops, one each in Kolkata, Delhi, and two in Chandigarh. These are the kind of workshops I would love to do more often with teachers in UK. Essentially, it puts staff in touch with their memory, their imagination and with the natural storyteller in all of them. It is so rewarding to teach.

Children always sound excited when I tell them there are going to be no written notes. Grown-ups sound alarmed. I have to explain that, when you say “I’m writing it down so I can remember,” in fact, you are writing it down so you can forget. And of course staff were much more able to remember things than they thought and, at the end, were all confident they could replicate the workshop I taught them with their pupils, and were excited to do so.

So I taught them a Memory Technique from Ancient Rome (Cicero, if you’re interested in provenance) and then used that to get them to memorise a content-free story structure. Then, in just over five minutes (I kid you not) staff, in groups, were able to create new stories, each different from those of other groups, which are guaranteed to hang together and maintain listener attention because they are based on the same Story Structure as Star Wars (the first ever and the most recent) and, for that matter, the Ramayana. Having  used this structure to devise the story we were then able to spend the rest of the workshop exploring the language used to develop the story and the voice used to deliver the story. All staff said they were amazed by the  way that a little limitation of choice actually liberates, rather than kills, imagination, and agreed that nothing kills inventiveness more than absolute freedom of choice. A strange paradox, but something I’ve found again and again.

Best of all, I got to hear them tell stories! It never ceases to give me joy. I can remember, when I was 11ish, some friends and I were all discussing telepathy, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could put thoughts inside someone else’s head? I now know we can – use language to name things, describe things, narrate things, and a whole world can burst into life inside somebody else’s head.  You put it there.

Here are some pictures of the lovely people I worked with in Chandigarh…..

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hard at work on their stories
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and happy with their achievements after