Storytelling

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The art of performance Storytelling is simply a Storyteller telling you or an audience a story. It’s using particular oral language, body language and engaging with the audience. It is different from simply reading a book, as the story can change with each telling, depending on the audience and the environment where the story is being told. It is not scripted, but the Storyteller owning the story as if it were their own.  

The stories are mainly folk tales, fairy tales, myths and legends which are traditional stories; they have been passed down by mouth (not books) for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. We do not know who first told them, so they belong to everyone.

 Storytellers have travelled around the world telling stories, as this has happened the stories have changed, so there is different versions of stories such as “Cinderella” and “Beauty and the Beast” from different countries, though they may not have the same title they are in essence the same story. For example “Beauty and the Beast”, “Hans my Hedgehog” and “East of the sun and west of the moon” though each different are pretty much the same story. 

Over the years people such as the Brothers Grimm and Joseph Jacobs have collected these stories and have written them down in books, as sadly some oral traditions are not as popular as they once were due to things such as technology being the main entertainment in households. 

So though some are collected and written down in books, they are still passed down orally keeping up with the tradition that Storytellers keep alive to this day.

A perfect example of this is a bird’s song, there is no reference from a book, and the birds listen to their parents singing. They learn the song themselves and when they have their own babies they pass it on to them to learn, keeping the song alive for generations to come.