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The following notes, written in response to frequently asked questions, represent a particular approach to, and understanding of, the art of storytelling that guides the artistic policy of the Crick Crack Club.
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What does the Crick Crack Club mean by ‘storytelling?’ We take storytelling to refer very specifically to the oral re-telling of traditional tales. ‘Tell’, ‘talk’ and ‘tale’ are terms from the vocabulary surrounding orality and the spoken word. The spoken word is something far, far older than writing and is guided by very different principles from those established by literacy. When the Crick Crack Club speaks of ‘storytelling’ we are not referring to the reading of texts aloud, nor to the recitation of memorised text - and indeed (while some storytellers may use writing as a tool within their compositional process) there are generally no tangible ‘scripts’ in storytelling. |
From our perspective, storytelling is the re-telling of a narrative through the spoken word for a specific audience in a specific context. It is an immediate, living, ‘mantic’, performance art demanding the re-creation of the story for each new audience. This creative act of improvisation can accommodate all the myriad variables of an event, ranging from the mood of the teller to the number, age and social composition of the audience; the décor, temperature and acoustics of the venue; the weather outside; events in the news; the time of day or season, etc.The inclusion of the physical co-presence of an audience clearly distinguishes the work of a storyteller from that of a writer. It is a communal, rather than solitary, art. The act of storytelling can only occur when a story, storyteller and audience come together. The relationship between the storyteller and the audience is constantly reaffirmed and renewed by what is known as, ‘Crick? Crack!’ - a call and response. The call and response is by no means always verbalised as directly as this, but is nevertheless subtly maintained in terms of interrogative remarks and gestures that ensure the complicity of the audience in the performance. The stance of the storyteller is one of poise between two worlds - the world of the story and the ‘here and now’ world of the event. The storyteller is a mediator between the story and the audience. 
It is important to grasp that the 'story'being told is separate from the 'words' used by the storyteller. Form exists to serve content. The story exists as a series of events, ideas, metaphors and images. The storyteller knows the narrative sequence and translates this into words to tell the story. The audience translates the words back into images and ideas so that the story is understood. The absence of a fixed text allows freedom, spontaneity and the possibility of fresh insight to enter the telling of the story. A story can be told to thirty 5-year old children sitting on a mat, using an appropriate language and energy. When the same story is told to seventy 12-year olds, a different language, energy and emphasis is required, and when the same story is told once more, but this time to adults, it will demand yet another language and energy, because their response to the content of the story is being measured against a much greater degree of life experience, different knowledge and different humour. 
Consequently, in storytelling, stories are rarely told in exactly the same way twice. However it is inevitable that stories which are told very often by a single storyteller, will gradually establish repeated phrasing - though, even then, the delivery, in terms of performance and play, will always remain variable. The dynamic power and appeal of storytelling lies in this constant renewal.The Crick Crack Club can therefore never guarantee two audiences an identical experience, because no two audiences are the same; but we do try to guarantee each audience a high quality experience of storytelling. Storytelling is intangible and challenges many of the conventions and safeguards established by literacy (such as rote learning, scripted drama and set form). There is an inbuilt riskiness to storytelling. It exists only in performance, demanding intensely sustained creativity from the storyteller, and intense participation on behalf of the listener. 
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What are the aims of the Crick Crack Club? The club was founded in 1988 to both give the public access to the best storytellers telling the best stories, and to develop storytelling as a performance art by supporting new talent and encouraging creative experimentation. The Club aims to:-
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What are ‘stories’ and what stories are told in storytelling?
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Where do the stories come from?
Traditional stories are folktales, fairytales, myths, epics, jokes, riddles, tall tales, legends, urban legends, proverbs and so on. These are stories that have been created and authored by entire societies, communities and cultures. They are stories which have been shaped by thousands of tellings across space and time. Some artists also use personal stories, reminiscence and true life tales, in combination with traditional material. Whatever the source of a story, the role of the professional storyteller is to find a way to make the story their own - through their choice of language and the nature of their performance, by researching and combining other versions of the same story, finding variations which appeal to their own sense of creativity, and patching up stories where they find pieces missing or dissatisfying. This is the compositional work of a storyteller. We consider performance storytellers to be artists, for whom composition is a key area of artistic practice. Traditional narratives, as found in books of folklore and mythology, are their raw material - the emphasis being on the word 'raw'. 
There are thousands of traditional stories from every imaginable culture across the world, many of which have been recorded in books of folklore. Many collections of stories are now also published on the internet, and numerous storytellers have made audio CDs of the material they themselves have shaped and performed. Story collection projects have taken place across the UK, and further afield, and the Crick Crack Club holds a major and unique audio archive of recordings of performance storytelling collected since 1981 in the UK.Storytellers also talk, and listen, to other storytellers - gathering stories from one another. This sharing of stories involves a certain etiquette - an honour amongst thieves - as while the no-one owns these traditional stories, many artist work very hard to rebuild, recreate, combine and adapt a story for their own performance, and some stories are the signature pieces of particular storytellers. It is the responisblity of all professional storytellers to ensure that they do not simply steal one anothers artistic compositions.
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Do ancient stories have contemporary relevance?
‘Past and present are related, advice is passed along
The particular aspect of a traditional tale’s relevance will vary depending on the genre of story. But generally stories address issues and ideas that have always been contemporary - in other words they confront the difficulties and questions that have always surrounded human kind. For example, stories explore justice, crime and punishment, desire and greed; they question the use and abuse of authority, the relationships between people, trust and betrayal, fate, destiny and accident, death, responsibility, etc. In current educational terms most stories ‘socialise’. Folktales and fables, for example, do this directly by exploring ethics and morals: some are cautionary; others exemplary and others are intentionally, delightfully, or shockingly ambivalent - so that they provoke discussion and thought.
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Many (though not all) traditional tales are set in the past. This means that the imagination is immediately called into play when listening to them. In trying to conceive unfamiliar landscapes, geographies, architectures and costumes etc, fresh synaptic pathways through the brain are activated enabling the story to challenge habitual patterns of thought. Past settings also liberate the teller to use a broad descriptive brush so that the story can move swiftly to its vital business without being delayed by incidental detail. The vital business of wonder tales, epics and mythology is emotional truth: though the stories may evoke fantastical phenomena, the losses, sufferings and joys of the human characters correspond to those that we may have already faced or are yet to face. Such stories exercise and feed our emotions. To give just one example of the relevance of wonder tales: many of the stories (set in the context of the English speaking world) concern the adventures of ‘Jack-the-Widow’s-Son’. This is immediately interesting, as Jack is, by implication, a boy who has grown up without a father. Setting off ‘to seek one’s fortune’ clearly marks the rite of passage from childhood dependency, to adult independence. On his way, Jack-the-Widow’s-Son encounters various benevolent or malevolent male figures and through the subsequent adventures is initiated into the responsibilities of manhood. Boys and young men who have no father in the home find themselves listening intently to such tales.
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What is ‘orality’? Just as ‘literacy’ refers to reading and writing, so ‘orality’ refers to speaking and listening. Orality is everything to do with the spoken word as distinct from the written word. The authority of literacy is so dominant that we rarely pause to consider whether its development and the growth of printing technologies may have changed not only the nature of narrative, but also the experience of receiving narrative. In fact some would go further and argue that the hegemony of literacy has probably changed the nature of the functioning of the mind. Those interested in this question may find it profitable to read 'Orality and Literacy', by Walter J. Ong and also ‘The Other Side of Eden’ by Hugh Brody. An immediate difference between the world of orality and the world of literacy is the presence of the speaker’s physical body and the physical presence of the responsive listener. Anthropologists call this physical co-presence. The body can colour a sequence of words through the qualities of the voice - tempo, tone, pitch, inflection, volume, accent, elongation etc, - and through supportive gestural, postural and facial expression. The body is organically rhythmic, powered by breath and pulse, thus true orality revels in meaning that is supported by the rhythmic play of the physicality of words - alliteration and rhyme are clear examples of this and belonged to the world of orality long before they were absorbed into the world of literacy. A global wide study of playground chants, clapping and skipping rhymes etc, rapidly reveals the building blocks of orality. In the long history of the growth of literature, first the advent of the printing press and then mass literacy, lead to the spread of silent reading and the subsequent emergence of more intimate literary styles. This meant that the properties of physicality had increasingly to be suggested entirely by the words on paper resulting, for example, in written narratives that are far more dependent on adverbs and adjectives than spoken narratives. It can be argued that as a model for spoken language development, purely literate language risks triggering a divorce between the mind and corporal reality. Traditionally, professional storytellers are also praise singers, called to formally honour people and to mark rituals and events with spontaneously composed oratory and verse. Storytellers are expected to know riddles, proverbs, axioms and epithets; again, all linguistic genres with a primary emergence in orality.
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Who are ‘storytellers’? All of us tell stories in the course of our daily lives, but a professional storyteller is a performance artist who has chosen to develop an expertise that enables him or her to stand before the paying public (i.e. strangers) and entertain and interest them for a sustained period of time. The impulses behind the desire to become a professional storyteller are of course varied. |
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The storytelling of our daily intercourse is not self-conscious, however the work of professional storytellers is conscious: they will knowingly use language and the physicality of their communicative skills to transmit their stories. The results may seem very natural, but none of it is haphazard. A professional storyteller will have the performance skills to ‘wear’ a stage and to engage an audience. They will be able to adapt their material in response to the needs and moods of the audience. They will have rapid access to language selection and spontaneous composition. A professional storyteller will be equipped with a working repertoire that has been garnered over time, in some cases numbering several hundreds of stories ranging from 30 second jokes to three hour long epics. To take an analogy from the world of literacy: storytellers are living libraries. They should be able to select appropriate stories for a great variety of situations and audiences. Some contemporary storytellers choose a repertoire that reflects the distinctiveness of their cultural background, others choose to roam the globe in terms of geography and of historical epoch, seeking stories that reflect essential commonalities of human experience. Stories, like people, have always migrated, meaning that many stories have readily translocated from one culture to another. Some storytellers specialise in one genre, say comedic folk tales, others explore the full continuum of genres. Many storytellers have specific ‘pieces’ or ‘shows’. These are usually sequences of narratives arranged to explore a theme, or they are substantial epic or mythological extracts. The Crick Crack Club works with storytellers who have proven their competencies as performers: artists who have mastered the secrets of expressing their individuality whilst respecting the disciplines demanded by tradition; artists whose work is entertaining, full of vitality and intelligence; artists whose presence can command both stage and audience; artists with quick and ready wit.
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What is Performance Storytelling and how does it relate to the fireside tradition and community storytelling?
There are, and always have been, two distinct storytelling traditions, existing in parallel and each feeding the other: ‘The Fireside Tradition’ and ‘The Professional Tradition’.The ‘Fireside Tradition’ can be defined as ‘the telling of traditional tales within a given community for entertainment and instruction’. The spectrum ranges from storytelling between generations within a family; storytelling as a public house pastime; travellers telling tales ‘to shorten the road’; ‘yarning’ at work and the moral instruction of the less experienced by the more experienced. The fireside tradition is largely casual, though there can be events which occasion something more formal, for example during calendar festivals and to mark rites of passage such as weddings, namings and funerals. In other words it is the storytelling of ‘the folk’. The Fireside Tradition seldom involves any financial gain for the storytellers and though it is thus amateur in the true meaning of the word, that is, ‘done for love’, it can certainly involve skill and status. Within communities and families certain individuals can gain powerful reputations for their storytelling skills and their role as ‘word-keepers’. By contrast, the ‘professional tradition’ of storytelling is immediately distinguished by an element of financial or life-supporting gain. Professional storytellers work in two sets of circumstances that can be called, ‘The Court’ - i.e. for private patrons - and 'The Market’, where any member of the public can listen to the teller but is expected to pay for the privilege. The repertoire of the professional tradition is also significantly different, containing, for example, epics - extended and highly dramatic narratives designed for large scale (or formal) performance. The fireside tradition is essentially sedentary and the professional tradition, itinerant. Itinerant peoples such as the Roma or the various British travellers are strikingly positioned on the cusp between a rural fireside and a professional tradition: storytelling, singing and music making was/is counted amongst their many traditional sources of income. In diverse global and historical terms professional storytellers lie behind such titles as Scop, Skald, Bard, Minstrel, Trouvere, Troubadour, Griot, Ashik, Akyn, etc. In contemporary ‘western’ society, the professional tradition is now represented by ‘performance storytellers’ and the folk/fireside tradition is being resuscitated and encouraged by professional ‘community storytellers’ working alongside genuine amateur storytellers. Community or ‘folk’ storytelling aims to empower others to have the confidence to stand before their peers and speak. It also aims to build community cohesion by sharing stories and experience. Community storytelling has modest but profound ambitions and has many different therapeutic benefits. Many contemporary Performance Storytellers also work as community storytellers for a portion of their time. There is a continuum between the storyteller who tells to members of his or her family, the storyteller who is a community ‘animateur’ and the storyteller who proposes to hold the attention of a paying audience of strangers for several hours. At various stages along this continuum, thresholds are crossed: each threshold makes different demands upon the competencies of the storyteller and raises different expectations in the audience. For example, when both a stage and a payment are involved, it is important that the promoter is aware of the clear distinctions between the amateur storyteller, the professional ‘community’ storyteller and the professional ‘performance’ storyteller - their abilities to command the stage will be very different. 
In this light, a major historical difference between the ‘fireside’ and ‘professional’ storytelling traditions is clearly the degree of self-consciousness about the artistry involved (this is also paralleled as a difference between the ‘community/folk’ and ‘performance’ neo-traditions). Generally speaking, in the fireside tradition technique is instinctively applied, modelled on the manner of previous generations and very ‘natural’. In the professional tradition it is possible for technique to be studied, developed and consciously applied. The results may appear as natural as in the fireside tradition but they may equally - and impressively - appear stylised, because of the supra-natural physical and vocal energies required to entertain large audiences.
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What is the difference between storytelling and acting? Storytelling is the primal progenitor of theatre. A myth is first told, then ritualised, then dramatised. In the transition from ‘story told’ to ‘play performed’, the narrative journeys from an imagined event in the inner world to a manifestation in the external world. The crucial difference between theatre and storytelling that needs to be understood is that, with a theatrical performance, the drama is observed unfolding on the stage and with a storytelling performance the drama is observed unfolding in the imagination. Theatre needs spectators; storytelling needs an audience. Theatre requires eyes turned outwards; storytelling requires eyes turned inwards. There is certainly plenty to watch in the work of a storyteller, but although the storyteller is suggesting characters, objects, space, size, direction with his or her physicality, it is a physicality that indicates rather than demonstrates: the viewer is invited to marry these gestures with the words being spoken and complete the scene in their own imaginations. The storytelling audience experiences the story through the individual subjectivity of their imaginations, whereas spectators, watching a play collectively, experience an objectified event. To watch the storyteller as one watches an actor’s carefully considered, crafted (and then often fixed) performance is to risk missing the point. In performance storytelling, it is the story that needs to be watched. That is where the most interesting craftwork lies - in what the 12th Century Irish bards called ‘the harmonising and synchronising’ of the tale. A storytelling performance is not the same as a repeatable ‘one man show’, the inclusion of the audience through improvisation means that no two audiences experience the same event. So, although the story is well known to the performer in advance, the story is given its form in the moment of its retelling, as the great French Storyteller, Abbi Patrix once said: ‘I cannot possibly tell all that I see: I have to make choices.’ This means the storyteller must be three-persons-in-one working immediately and simultaneously; mastering three different sets of skills and making decisions at great speed. The storyteller is: |
| a) | The author/adaptor/composer of the language in which the story is being told. |
| b) | The performer of the story. |
| c) | The director of both the stage performance - and the way the story is unfolding in the listener’s imagination (rather like the director of a film). |
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Therefore, whilst the storyteller has to draw on some of the skills of the poet and some of the skills of the actor, storytelling is actually an entirely different art from either of these two. Another significant difference between a storyteller and an actor is the question of repertoire. A storyteller is almost defined by the permanent repertoire of stories he or she carries - and the sign of a professional storyteller is that they are so alive with stories to pass on, that the stories leap out, not only in the ‘professional’ context of the stage, but also in the ‘fireside’ context - that is, all the rest of the time too! Some actors are fantastic raconteurs (David Niven and Peter Ustinov for example), with a repertoire of incidental tales from their own lives, bringing to mind the saying that ‘stories happen to storytellers’, but anecdotes and reminiscences are only two narrative genres amongst a multitude in the continuum that forms the ocean of stories.
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What is the creative process of a storyteller? At one level, the storyteller’s work is probably closer to that of an author than an actor in that the storyteller is composing the words through which the story is communicated. Both storytellers and writers create worlds with words, inside the listener’s or reader’s mind. The pen however buys the writer crafting time that a storyteller simply has not got. The storyteller needs to be a master of spontaneous verbal composition - composition that is shaped and polished. The storyteller needs to be adept at using all forms of narrative and descriptive language, not just the direct speech and characterisation of drama. Storytelling gives the artist an opportunity to incorporate audience response immediately into his or her work in a way that is denied to an author. |
The storyteller is placed between the world of the story and the world of the audience; in fact the storyteller is in two worlds at once. The role of a storyteller is therefore one of mediation, translating into words and gesture the information that will help the audience to access the story world in the way the performer intends. The storyteller needs to know the story extremely intimately. Some storytellers live with their stories for years before beginning to tell them, and, once a story has entered a storyteller's repertoire, it will stay there, evolving with each telling over years. The storyteller needs also to know his or her 'self' well, because through the story something very personal will always be expressed.It has often been said that storytelling is like Jazz, or perhaps even more like the many classical, improvised musics of Asia. A structure, pattern, theme or form is given as a discipline, but from that starting point there is freedom to embellish and interpret in as many ways as there are artists capable of engaging with it. In fact storytelling has much more in common with pre-renaissance approaches to art than with the many conventions that now surround contemporary art; paradoxically, this renders storytelling a provocative and challenging art form. |
Working in the neo-tradition of performance storytelling, and with the assistance of 32 students over a three year period, Ben Haggarty was able to draw up a list of at least 93 definite techniques and strategies which a storyteller can study and master in order to have them available in the moment of improvisation. The techniques range from compositional work on the selection of imagery with an awareness of its semiotic significance, to language work such as the effect of the use of different tenses, to vocal work such as the effect of monotone and the use of pitch, to performance work such as the shifting of the centre of gravity and the effects of contra-movement, etc. When funding becomes available this work will be developed and published. |
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To summarise, the greatest skill of a professional storyteller is the swift accessing of communicative language to convey the story as it is revealing itself in the moment and to combine this with all the dynamic energies of the body to make the story heard by the listeners. All this can only happen if the storyteller is deeply familiar with the stories, their levels of meanings and their patterns. The Crick Crack Club holds that it takes between seven and ten years of constant practical experience before the emergence of a storyteller’s real mastery of their art.
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How does the Crick Crack Club choose its storytellers? The most important quality a storyteller can possess is their relationship with the material. Storytelling is a 'content-lead' art form and the Crick Crack Club is interested in supporting storytellers within whom stories are really alive. Colleagues in Britain and overseas are constantly scouting for performers who they recognise as having a certain fire in their eyes: performers whose love of the material they have chosen to transmit is evident in their bearing and in their speech. The Crick Crack Club works with storytellers in a range of contexts (theatres, literature festivals, schools, museums, community projects etc), but its real specialism is performance storytelling, and performance storytellers. It therefore has a particular interest in artists who have the skills to work on stages and perform crafted storytelling 'pieces' for audiences of between 80 and 200 people who are paying members of the public.
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What is the history of the Crick Crack Club?
The Crick Crack Club was the first Performance Storytelling club to be established in the UK. The formation of the club was a significant milestone in the revival of storytelling in Britain. Having run 'clubnight' open-floor storytelling events since 1981, Ben Haggarty organised Britain's first storytelling festival at Battersea Arts Centre in 1985. The success of this and a second festival at Watermans Art Centre in 1987 prompted an invitation to stage a third, 16 day long, international storytelling festival at London's South Bank Centre in 1989. This third festival remains the largest international storytelling festival to have ever been held in the UK, and is recognised as a significant event by UNESCO in relation to their work on intangible cultural heritage. When the programme for the third festival was being considered, a list of international artists was drawn up, including Louise Bennett, Vi Hilbert, Abbi Patrix, Eamon Kelly, Seref Tasliova and Punaram Nishad - however questions arose as to whether there would actually be enough performance storytellers in the UK with the stage presence to hold large adult audiences for a whole evening with appropriate material. This concern led Ben Haggarty to found the Crick Crack Club, Britain’s first dedicated storytelling club, programming performers on a weekly basis. In the autumn of 1987 the first season of 26 weekly events was launched in a pub theatre in Ladbrook Grove, with the expressed aim of trying out new artists and providing an opportunity for established artists to develop their skills and repertoire for adults. Many of today’s leading British storytellers first cut their teeth on adult audiences at the Crick Crack Club. The Crick Crack Club promoted weekly events in various venues in London between 1988 and 1995, and then monthly events at the Spitz from 1995 to 2001. During this time it also organised numerous monthly events and mini-festivals in regional arts venues throughout England, including at the South Bank Centre, The Green Room in Manchester, Peterborough Arts Centre, Leicester Phoenix, and Hugh Lupton ran a Norwich branch of the Crick Crack Club at the King of Hearts Art Centre.
From 1993 to 2005, the Crack Crack Club worked in partnership with St Donats Arts Centre to programme and present Beyond The Border International Festival of Storytelling and Epic-Singing, set in the magnificent grounds of St. Donats Castle on the South coast of Wales. The festival rapidly grew into an annual, weekend-long event with a worldwide reputation, attracting an audience of around 2,500 each year, on the first weekend of July. As an international festival, it gave voice to storytellers, epic singers and musicians not only from across the UK, but from across the globe, and it continues to this day.
Today the Crick Crack Club works collaboratively with a number of high profile organisations to programme high quality performance storytelling, both in London and nationally, and also programmes and runs its own events in the capital. The work of the Crick Crack Club focuses on providing public audiences access to high quality performances, and on making strategic interventions which assist the re-visioning of storytelling as contemporary performance art.
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Who is the audience? The audience for performance storytelling is extremely diverse. Storytelling is often perceived as a branch of ‘literature-in-performance’ (indeed it is the original ‘live-literature’), but its appeal extends far beyond the circuit of literature festivals. Audiences for performance storytelling are drawn from theatre, performing arts, fringe theatre and so on. Oral ‘literature’, that is, fairytales, folktales, myths and epics, are historically, and effectively, truly popular literature. It is not an art form whose appeal is restricted to those who have ‘had an education’. It speaks to all: old, young, male, female, rich, poor, wise, foolish and it is also able, in the words of the Natya Shastra, to ‘comfort the drunkard and the lonely man’. Storytelling appeals to the huge audience of those interested in the humanities, in history, anthropology, the development of literature, comparative religion, popular folk culture, etc. Those who have met storytelling before and love the material recognise that traditional narratives are most vividly encountered when being renewed by an inspired artist in the presence of a community of listeners.
In Britain, given that most evening performances are considered ‘adult’ shows - as opposed to family or children’s shows - a lower age limit is often set (usually 12 or 15). These adult performances appeal to all generations from the late teens to far beyond the grandparent generation. The demography of the storytelling audience indicates it consists of about 60% women and 40% men. As the style of each individual performer is unique - many performance storytellers have a fan club following. In addition some people are attracted by the nature of the material being told, the cultural background of either the storyteller or the story, or the themes to be explored in the programme. A proportion of the audience might have a professional interest in storytelling - teachers, psychotherapists and other health professionals, writers and librarians, film and theatre people, etc.
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What are the technical requirements for Performance Storytelling events? ‘Theatre exists to reopen all comfortable convictions. It has the best weapons for breaking taboos and smashing barriers. These are scandal, violence and ridicule. But not today. Not any longer. The ‘shock-effect’ cannot shock us any more, it is so close to daily life that it has become quite ordinary. Today, our urgent need is elsewhere. It is to catch glimpses of what our lives have lost. The theatre can give us a fleeting taste of qualities long forgotten.’ Peter Brook, Paris (2004)
Performance Storytelling is quite different from theatre in that the artist’s aim and work is to make everything happen in the audience’s imagination. The experience of communally activated imagination has become one of the qualities lost from our lives that Peter Brook suggests theatre can house.
‘Beware of Storytellers. | ||||||
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