“Once Upon a Time,” “Mukashi, Mukashi,” “It was or it was not,” “Si lo creo, o no,” are words that bring us to the other side of the Looking Glass. These beginnings open doors to realms that sharpen our imaginations and invite us in a more heightened way to suspend reality. To find the personal in the story, and if possible to frame it with an authentic experience, is my approach to telling the fairytale or folktale.
“Wild Swans,” by Hans Christian Andersen was a tale I had always wanted to tell, for very personal reasons. When I was invited to tell a story by his statue in Central Park, New York, I decided to learn “Wild Swans,” with all its challenging complex and convoluted details. I could feel the story in my hands and fingers. When I was eight I spent the summer in a sleepaway camp in Connecticut. I accidentally walked through a tall stand of nettles. My fingers blistered and stung. I have never forgotten the pain. So when I came upon the part where the sister has to crush, spin, and knit sweaters made of stinging nettles to bring her brothers back to human form, I could literally feel the story under my skin. The sense memory of my burning hands viscerally connected my whole body to the story. I was transported to a deeper truth that helped me unravel the tale.
After School Matters, today, is a very successful program engaging over 16,000 high school students in almost every high school in Chicago. Between the hours of 3-5, they learn from skilled professionals in the Arts, Communication and Leadership, Sports instruction and management, advanced apprenticeships across disciplines combined with entrepreneurial and jobs skills training. Not all students are accepted. They have to fill out an application, go to an interview or to an audition. However, when it began, it was in only three schools and my musician partner, John Bergquist and I were among these first pilot teams of teachers. We taught Storytelling with music for three years, introducing the program at the Benito Juares Academy HS in Pilsen.
Three weeks into the program Mayor Daley invited my students to present their stories to the funders at an evening dinner event! They were mostly bi-lingual Spanish speaking students. They had never used a microphone before, nor had they performed in front of an adult audience let alone for the mayor and his wife. In preparation, they read many stories and variants to select the ones they wanted to tell. Three students were chosen and attended with their parents. It was a school night.
Lupe, chose to tell La Llarona, the classic cautionary Mexican legend of the haunting wailing woman. I encouraged her to include some Spanish as well. We spent time in the workshop on bi-lingual techniques regardless of the languages one spoke. She told me her grandmother had seen La Llarona and everyone she knew believed in the legend. I asked Lupe to get her grandmother’s story even though she lived in Mexico. Lupe described how her grandmother heard barking dogs one night. She looked out the window, parting lace curtains to see what was the matter. There, before her was a woman floating horizontally, all dressed in white with long black hair, very pale face, red lips and – I’ll never forget her next line – “And her feet weren’t even dangling!” After she told the traditional tale she brought it back to the personal.
I wanted the audience to experience the students telling both personal stories and folktales. The personal frame -tale was a perfect combination to showcase both genres in the limited time we had. The students did very well and the guests were most impressed with what they achieved in such a short time. A lovely coda to the evening was when Mayor Daley, at his wife Maggie’s urging, wrote the girls a note for their teachers to excuse them for not doing their homework. There is more to this sweet story, but for another time . . .
Beyond the Traditional Tale: Finding Your Authentic Voice, the workshop I am offering at Sharing the Fire will be highly interactive and focus on many of the above techniques. Though it is suggested for new tellers, anyone at any level can apply these ideas to their own tellings and develop the aspect that works best for them.
Want to learn more about developing personal stories? Take Judith’s workshop
(Saturday, March 24 from 10:30 am – noon) – part of Sharing the Fire 2018. Visit the STF Conference Details page to register for the conference. Want to share your own experiences on this topic? Leave a comment.
About Judith: Judith Heineman is an award winning international storyteller, Chicago Moth winner and recording artist. Her CDs: Grimm’s Grimmest: The Darker Side of Fairytales and The Magic Carpet: Songs and Stories from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt won a Parents’ Choice Gold and Silver award respectively. She is an Illinois Humanities Road Scholar. www.judithanddan.com
