How I started to be a Storyteller
I knew about Storytellers when I was a child, though I had never seen one in real life, I thought they were from the olden days when an old man would sit in the market place to entertain the people, I had no idea there were still Storytellers about.
I first found out about Storytelling from Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, in which the late Jon Hurt played the Storyteller telling Stories with the help of puppets and actors, it was a show I always loved and remembered so whilst studying my BA Illustration at University I found it on DVD and watched it all over again and it left me wanting more.
At University I studied Animation and enjoyed bringing the characters to life, seeing them move and hearing a story being told really inspired me, I also enjoyed doing PowerPoint presentations about Artists. The interactive element was something more interesting than sitting on your own drawing and painting, seeing the reactions on people’s faces was quite magical.
After University I wanted to create more animation, as I really liked the interaction with people, but animating is a lot of work and I didn’t particularly want to go in to animation. I thought for a while and realised I could use the same things that I had learnt combined with Storytelling.
I wrote a story about a Hamster, along with creating the Illustrations which were partly animated with sound effects and I bought a projector and tried it out at a local nursery. It was lovely seeing the Children’s reactions to my Illustrations and myself telling the story.
I then looked in to Storytelling on the internet and found that there were storytellers all over the country, and I found some training provided by Graham Langley and the Traditional Arts Team in Birmingham. So in 2013 I started training, learning the Art and being introduced to a world of traditional stories and folk tales.