©2020 Judith Heineman

Judith will be presenting her workshop Bringing Your Audience onto the Stage, Into Your Story and Beyond

 at Sharing the Fire 2020.

Register today at https://www.nestorytelling.org/conference-details/

1. Comedian W.C. Fields (1880 - 1946) was famous for saying, “Never work with animals or children” – although, according to his IMDb biography, he secretly admired children. He was warning theater actors that they might often be upstaged. 

   Despite that warning, if you want to shine a spotlight on your story and have keen attention paid, I strongly urge you to bring children onto the stage with you! When you physically bring children into your story, you evoke hyper-focus from family and friends in the audience who want to see what they are doing. The audience is sitting on the edge of their chairs -- snapping pictures, of course. It is also exciting and fun for the teller to have a bit of unpredictability in the performance; it keeps the retelling fresh. If you have always stood on stage alone, speaking the words of various characters, delineating them by shifting body language, tone, pacing, etc., this technique might be an enjoyable change of pace.

    

   To select these living “characters,” you can simply ask for volunteers in the moment, or if you want a bit more control in a school setting, ask teachers to identify cooperative students in advance. On some occasions, when I have needed only one character and have pointed to one child in the audience, two children have come up to the stage. I never send one back, but just make two of that character work as in “The Magic Pot!”

    

   Once these strangers are standing next to you, populating your story, how can you seamlessly make them part of the tale? Preparation is all. Know your story so well that you have planned numerous places where you can feed volunteers lines from the story quickly and easily, shifting the microphone back and forth between you. I have found that this technique works particularly well in outdoor festivals when there are more distractions and concentration is harder. You can give audible stage directions, such as, “Use a deep voice”; “Whisper”; or, if you want more than one person to speak simultaneously (perhaps as animal characters), “Say these lines together.” You can also turn to the general audience and ask them to speak words or phrases in unison, expanding the story even more.

    

   Not only did that W. C. Fields quote resonate with me, but I also kept hearing the snarky lyrics to the clever 1930’s Noel Coward patter song, “Don’t put your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington”:  “I’m on my knees, Mrs. Worthington, please, Mrs. Worthington, don’t put your daughter on the stage!” I am proposing just the opposite, but nevertheless, try to find that song and give it a listen.

About Judith: Judith is an international award winning storyteller. She is a Chicago Moth winner and NSN Oracle Award winner for Service and Leadership. Her CDs: Grimm’s Grimmest: The Darker Side of Fairytales and The Magic Carpet: Songs and Stories from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt have won numerous awards.  www.judithanddan.com