Remembering Helen Wise

by Julie Pasqual

Helen with students

One of the reasons I love storytelling is that there is such a respect for the past – for the stories that our forefathers told around fires to explain, entertain, and build community.  And also for the tellers of these tales.  Storytelling is one profession where elders are not pushed aside – there is a respect for those who have come before us, a knowledge that we are, as they say, standing on the shoulders of those who have come before us. 

         When I first came to Storytelling Arts, I was a new teller.  I had been a professional performer from the age of 17, so I knew how to stand before an audience and tell a tale, but what I didn’t know was how to make a story less about my “performance”, and more about the shared experience that storytelling is.  And I certainly had no idea how to tell stories to children as young as 3 or 4.  But luckily I had some wonderful shoulders to stand upon. One of those people that helped me find my way passed away today – her name was Helen Wise.

         I remember the first time I saw Helen tell – I will be honest here, as someone coming from musical theatre and clown – I was all about big, loud – and as the song says, “Give them the old razzle dazzle!”  So, Helen’s slow, gentle, intimate style left me skeptical.  “The kids are not going to like this!”, my inside voice my screamed.  But soon, I saw the wisdom in her work.  Instead of my instinct to “go after the children’s attention” – I watched as they came to her – they pulled closer – feeling safe in her presence, filling in the words that she masterfully left space for.  There was no separation between performer and audience – it was a joint effort, a communion, if you will.

      While I don’t tell anything like Helen, really, what I learned from her was that storytelling, especially for the littlest listeners was not about trying to control them, but to ride their wave. Throw the bait out to them, see what they take, encourage them, empower them to be participants in the story, and make it about them, as opposed to me.

          I am forever grateful to Helen, and to all the wonderful tellers upon whose shoulders I place my size 7 wides on every time I tell a tale,  and peak into the magic that storytelling can be.   

Hey There, Little Red Riding Hood!

by Paula Davidoff

Julie Della Torre and I resumed our work with teen girls at Oasis this month. We worked there with a teen girl group for six weeks last winter and it was a blast. This year we have funding for an eight-week program. In the group are some girls who participated last year, others whom we met when we worked with them as sixth graders two or three years ago, and still others who are completely new to storytelling. We meet on Friday afternoons for two hours after school. The girls, between 14 and 18 years old, are open-minded, enthusiastic learners. They listen to us and to each other. They engage in deep discussion about issues raised by our stories, issues which they can often relate to their own life experiences. They also write in every workshop and share their writing with the group. 

Because Julie and I want the content of our workshops to be as relevant as possible to the girls, we let them choose the direction of post-story discussions. We open talk with a question and allow the girls to take it where they will. Then, we make story choices for the next week based on the topics the girls were most interested in discussing and writing about. This year we began our program by telling three variants of Little Red Riding Hood: a 17^th Century French folktale, and the Perrault and Grimm versions of the story. Before telling any of these variants, we asked the girls to tell us the story of Little Red as they knew it. There were sixteen girls in the group that afternoon and most of them had heard some version of the story. They enjoyed starting, stopping, and contradicting each other. 

“Wait, what happened to the grandmother?”

“The wolf ate her.”

“No, I think the grandmother hid in the closet!”

“The way I heard it, she gets eaten.”

“And Little Red Riding Hood got eaten, too.” 

“I thought she was rescued by a hunter or something.”

And so it went. 

Then the girls listened to our stories. We gave them the opportunity to talk in between each tale. We also gave them some social and historical context for each variant. At first, conversation focused on the “lessons” they found in the stories: Don’t talk to strangers, Don’t let your daughters go walking alone in the woods… But as the discussion continued, the girls began to question some of the story motifs.

“He (Perrault) makes it seem like it’s the girl’s fault that she got killed.”

“Why does Little Red Cap have to be rescued by a man? Girls always need a man to rescue them in fairy tales.” 

“But in the first story, the girl got herself away from the wolf.” 

“And in the second part of the last (Grimm) story, she learned from experience that wolves can be dangerous.”

In the end, their conversation focused on two main themes: Little Red’s naivety and consequent helplessness in the face of danger, and the wolf’s indifference to the girl’s suffering in the face of his own desire.

As, Tiffany wrote: 

All I wanna know is, in what world are those wolves raised in where they’re just out her trynna eat up little girls? Like what had to happen in this wolf’s life where he’s at the point where he could see a li’l girl minding her business and automatically think, “ Damnnn, y’all, wha that? That look like lunch to me.”

To further explore the wolf’s motivation, Jayceleen, Ashley, and Catherine rewrote the story from his point of view. Here is part of Catherine’s story:

So, I was in the woods with my homies and all of a sudden a girl dressed all in red with thick curves, curly hair, pale pink skin I don’t know why, but I felt the need to hook up with this girl. 

So I go up to her and I’m like, “Ayy yo, Shortface. You looking real fine and nice. Where you think you going.”

She responds to me, “I’m headed to my Grandma’s house… why?”

I said to her, “Cause I wanna get to know you.”  

I’m guessing that made her sort of like me cause the next thing you know she out here communicating telling all about her Grandma and where she live.

And in Yadary’s version, Little Red’s mother recognizes her daughter’s inability to survive alone in the woods and rushes out to protect her. 

“Mom, what are you doin here?”

“I forgot to give you the soup for your granny.”

“So you make me walk through all that… just for you to end up going, too?”

“Don’t whine!”

We finally made it to grandma’s house. But the door was open. Oh Heck hah! This is a sign from God telling me to get out of here.  “Mom, let’s get out of here. Let’s call dad to check this out. I don’t think it’s safe.”

“No. We ain’t need no man.”

Mom literally went in and I trailed behind her.

Oasis teen girls creating a story tableaux

Every girl wrote something inspired by the stories or their discussion of the stories. Afterwards, they all shared their writing with the group. As Julie and I packed up to leave at the end of the session, the girls were still talking about Little Red. I think it’s going to be another good year at Oasis. 

STEM to STEAM

by Gerald First

Steve Jobs said, “I didn’t invent anything.  I looked and saw what was there that no one else could see.”  As I work in schools, I have noticed that the difference between elite 21st century educational curricula and run of the mill 21st Century educational curricula is not STEM, but STEAM -  Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics.  In order to be a creator and  innovator, in order to use the tools of problem solving, in order to gather and evaluate evidence to make sense of information and make decisions, one must think like an artist, not just analytically, but also synectically, creatively joining disparate pieces of information to discover what is there that no one else can see.

A Glenfield Middle School student at work in the STEAM lab.

At Glenfield School in Montclair, NJ, I am collaborating with Delia Malloy-Furer, the STEAM teacher to incorporate storytelling into her 6th, 7th, and 8th grade classes.  Stories of UFO’s, the Jersey Devil, and Buried Treasure, became the trigger for discussions of astrophysics, ecology, evolution, and geology.  An updated performance version of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” triggered a lesson on biology and brain activity.  Drawing, performing and writing follow ups, reinforced the academic information and led to further discussions of philosophy and ethics as the students considered the difference between, truth, legend, and propaganda, as well as the legal and moral definitions of life and death.

I am also collaborating with Ms. Malloy-Furer on a project in the seventy-eight seat Sky Scan Planetarium that is housed in the school.  Based on my book Imagine the Moon, the show’s script  combines a storytelling performance of myth, music, astroscience, and history, with astronomical displays and digital art as well as rod and shadow puppets designed by Terry Burnett.

The role of the teaching artist is often misunderstood. Too often it is characterized as entertainment. We are asked to perform at an assembly, create a performance, give the students an experience, and “Oh yes, you can visit a classroom,”  but the real reason to have artists working with teachers is to inspire both student and teacher to look further than the test, consider more than the right answers. Artists inspire, as in the Latin “to breathe.”  When an artist works in a school, learning becomes a common breath, a communal connection that has a physical and psychological reality. We become as one and draw upon and appreciate the depth of humanity’s multiple intelligences. Recently, while working with a STEAM concept, in a special-needs classroom, the students wrote this poem that expresses their feeling about coming to school to work with a teaching artist.

Frozen in time, Stuck in traffic,

Creeping to school along the same week-day path,

Emerging from the vehicle as if it were a cocoon

Woven from a caterpillar, 

We, ready to change, with

Fluttering wings of chaotic laughter, 

Make greetings of good morning 

As we drag our feet.

Hundreds of stairs rise up.

Our wings once curled are ready to open.

With a slow steady pace we march

Down the hall and into our room,

Where our wings, now dry, emerge 

To show our bright colors. 

One could not ask for a better recommendation to have teaching artist in the schools.

  

Kids Say the Darndest Things

by Maria LoBiondo

Luray Gross at Princeton Arts Council summer camp

Paula Davidoff stood before our mixed-age audience sizing up whether the youngsters could handle the story she wanted to tell. Paula, Luray Gross, and I were deep into the recent Storytelling Arts event at the Arts Council of Princeton, and Paula had a classic — but potentially scary — story in mind to share. 

“Do you know what happened when there were too many mouths to feed in the old days, what happened to children?” 

A boy of about 10 piped up, “They killed them?” 

“With a comment like that, I guess this story won’t be too scary to tell,” Paula said, and launched into “Molly Whuppie,” in which the heroine saves her sisters at the expense of a cannibal giant’s own daughters. 

I was too young to catch Art Linkletter’s show “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” Linkletter interviewed youngsters whose honest, innocent answers brought shock or peals of laughter from adults. But I’ve nonetheless had a few occasions like the one at the Arts Council when a response caught me by utter surprise. 

One instance occurred, also at the Arts Council, this summer at a camp Luray and I taught to 10- to 12-year-olds. The underlying theme we played with was developing characters. On the second day Luray and I set out different animals, stuffed or plastic, and asked our campers to choose one that “spoke” to them. Then we took time to have that animal character “tell” the camper its name and something about itself. 

V.’s bear “Gris” said he had been “kicked out of the house”; L.’s walrus could “look into another's soul”; N. held “Piglet” whose “dumb sisters” left her computer open so that she was drawn into “a portal” and had to escape. 

Later in the week, Luray shared a Korean poem by Song Sam-mun and “If the Owl Calls Again” by John Haines, then asked the campers to consider what they would transform into if they had the chance. One striking offering was A.’s poem about becoming money and giving herself to the poor. 

My sessions with younger children also have led to surprising moments. In a class of 4-year-olds, we were dramatizing a story that we had shared together several times before, the Mende story from Liberia, “Kanji-jo and the Nestlings” (found in Margaret Read MacDonald’s Look Back and See). In the tale, a group of baby birds go looking for their mother, encountering several other mama birds along the way who do not sing their mama’s distinctive lullaby. 

As a volunteer, K. came forward to be a Mama Robin. When it came time for the Mama Robin to sing, instead of the expected “Chirp, Chirp,” K. belted out “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” 

The opposite surprise came in a session with another group of similar age in a version of “The Singing Turtle” (also from Read MacDonald’s Look Back and See). 

Most times when I’ve shared this story the children suggest the turtle “sing” farm and zoo animal sounds with lots of dog and cat woofs and meows in-between. But in a recent session we had a string of stumpers: giraffe, rabbit, zebra, fish, unicorn! We finally settled on dinosaur and all gave a tremendous roar. 

As storytellers, we’ve learned to expect the unexpected — and lively imaginative responses during story times. 

The Goddess in Bulgaria

I’m back from Bulgaria.  Here is some of what I learned.

We all know that storks bring babies.  This is one reason why when storks return to their nesting places in Bulgaria in the spring, it is a sign of renewed fertility and growth.  The beginning of March used to be the beginning of the year in old Bulgaria, a somewhat more sensible seasonal event than beginning the year in the snows of January.

There is a Bulgarian folk tale about Baba Marta, Granny March, and her two older brothers, January, Big Chill, and February, Little Chill.  During the summer they all provide a barrel of wine for themselves.  The two older brothers consume theirs and when they pursue their wintry functions and develop a thirst, they slake it with their little sister’s wine.  When Baba Marta finally has her turn, and finds her barrels empty, and her brothers possibly drunk, she alternatively smiles and rails, giving us the changing March weather, sunshine and cold showers.  There is also a story about how, as part of her spring cleaning, she shakes up her feather bed, releasing a flurry of feathers upon the earth, the last of the winter snows.  

This is very similar to what Frau Holle does in the Grimms’ tale of the same name, and like Frau Holle, Baba Marta is a folk manifestation of the ancient fertility mother goddess. In celebration of Baba Marta, even today, it is traditional for people to tie white and red ribbons, martenitsa, around their wrists, present white and red ribbon gifts to each other or tie these ribbons around trees.  The colors have different explanations, but seem to represent red for female, blood and life, and white for male, spirit.  The ideal of renewed life is a face of pale white skin with red cheeks.  (The red and white have an interesting association with the blood dripping on snow that initiates the desire of the mother in “The Juniper Tree”, another story of fertility and renewal, for a child of similar colors).  The mother goddess, and her relationship with male figures and heroes, has a long, long history in Bulgaria, going back at least to neolithic times in the 5th millennium BCE.  Marija Gimbutas in The Living Goddesses references the Balkans and Bulgaria in particular as a rich source of ceramic goddess figurines.  The city of Varna on the Black Sea coast  (where I waded in the water) was once the site of the earliest culture in Europe, 1500 years before the pyramids in Egypt, and a source of the earliest gold work ever discovered, 1000 years before any similar discovery.  The pieces were found in burial sites along with ceramic masks that Gimbutas claims are Medusa-like snake figures or images of the fierce aspect of the goddess.  In any case, she declares, they indicate rituals of regeneration.

Around the second millennium BCE, Indo-European nomadic tribes invaded Bulgaria and, eventually, collectively, became known as the Thracians.  They were patriarchal and horse herding people (they sided with Troy in the Trojan War).  One of the most consistent images to appear in their art is of a horseman defending the tree of life and its protective serpent from an attack of a wild boar, apparently protecting life and regeneration.  However, the goddess was still strong and appears in many guises, some as huntress protector of animals like Artemis or as the Earth Mother Cybele.  Mythologist Ivan Marazov suggests that the Hero on horseback plays the role of son of the goddess and her, or her daughter’s, lover, ensuring the successful revival of the cycle of life.  The goddess and her dying and resurrected son and consort is a common motif in goddess worship (“The Juniper Tree”, again, maybe).

The Thracians were also devotees of the cult of Dionysus who is at one level a vegetative god who descends to the underworld to rescue his mother Semele and rises with her again, renewing life.  He is also, obviously, the god of wine and intoxication.  The Thracians were noted for their intoxication and scorned by the Greeks because they did not water their wine.  Bulgarian wine is delicious and plentiful.  We passed acres of vineyards and drank glasses of wine.  Nearly every house, big or small, has its own grape arbor.  Bulgarian wine is not easy to find in this country because, as one of our guides suggested, “we drink it all.”  Baba Marta’s anger at her drunken brothers seems to reflect a long history.

Orpheus was born in Bulgaria and became an important Thracian religious figure.  He, also, at one level can be seen as a vegetation deity. Like Dionysus, he was torn limb from limb (Dionysus by the Titans, Orpheus by Dionysus’ followers, the Maenads), and the earth remained barren until his head was found and buried.  Orpheus lived in The Rhodope Mountains in southwestern Bulgaria.  We didn’t get there, but came close at the Rila Monastery in the Rila Mountains just to the west.  We did cross the river Maritsa in Plovdiv, known as the Hebros in ancient times, which flows south into the Rhodope mountains and then out to sea.  It was into this river that the head of Orpheus was thrown, carried to the sea and to the island of Lesbos.  (There is a story about a Thracian king, Haemus, son of the North wind Boreas, and his wife Rhodope - rose-faced - daughter of the river god Hebros.  In their pride and arrogance, they compared themselves to Zeus and Hera, earning the wrath of those deities.  As punishment they were transformed into two mountain ranges in Bulgaria, the Rhodope mountains in the south and the Balkan range in the north.) It was suggested by Marazov that it was Orpheus who introduced Dionysus to the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, making him part of the seasonal cycle those two goddesses represent, before he abandoned the earth-centered cult for the sun worship of Apollo.

Ares was originally a Thracian god, of war since the Thracians were a war-like people. Robert Graves, in The Greek Myths, talks about a peculiar ritual.  In March when the ivy (chewing ivy leaves intoxicates the Maenads) begins to grow, if the stem is punctured it releases “a gummy liquid which, when mixed with urine and boiled, turns a blood color…red dye was used to color the faces of male fertility images…In Rome this custom survived in the reddening of the triumphant general’s face. The general represents the god Mars, who was a Spring-Dionysus before he specialized as the Roman god of war.”  So we are using the sap from the Maenads’ ivy to redden, perhaps for reasons of life and fertility, the cheeks of the representative of Mars who gives his name to March, the month of Baba Marta and the martenitsa.  Minor details, but with head-scratching associations.

During subsequent domination by the Hellenistic culture and by the Romans, the names may change but the influence of the gods and goddesses remain the same. The incursions of the Old Bulgars in the 7th century CE, brought pagan nature deities, though perhaps no goddess, and the conversion of the Bulgars to Christianity in the 9th century would seem to have brought all this to an end. In the Eastern Orthodox churches we visited, however, the ubiquitous presence of icons and frescoes of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus, attest, as it does in Western Europe, to the popularity and lasting power of The Mother.  In any case, it is clear from present-day custom, that the earth mother, the female figure of fertility and life, still has its place in popular culture. 

Last year when I visited Russia, I searched almost in vain for signs of folklore and fairy tale.  They appeared, at best, in commercialized versions of popular figures like Baba Yaga.  Bulgaria is a different story altogether.  It unfolds in layer upon layer of history, art and mythology going back to the earliest paleolithic evidence of human habitation.  Indeed, it may be true that when homo sapiens made its way out of Africa, the route it took towards the North ran across the Bulgarian plains.  Bulgarian culture is deep and rich, like its soil.Great trip.

Why Andersen Tales

by Julie Della Torre

Why tell the tales of Andersen? Are they relevant today?

HCA

I love telling some of Andersen stories and do so frequently in classrooms. I’m able to show many illustrated versions demonstrating the popularity of the tales. Vibrant discussions follow many of the stories. There is always laughter and delight and often some quiet reflection.

The first reason to tell Andersen stories is the man himself and the genre of the fairy tale. Many, including Andersen, have called him ‘The Father of the Fairytale.’ The Grimm’s brothers and others before HCA gathered folktales and the folklore of cultures. In France, Beaumont, Perrault, and others told and wrote courtly, satirical romances. But Andersen invented stories.

Diana and Jeffrey Frank write in the introduction of their anthology (*)

“He had appropriated a traditional form but seemed simultaneously to invent a new one that accommodated itself to flights of fancy and humor, social attire, and literary revenge.”

Another reason to tell these tales is for the language. He was the first to write in colloquial Danish. Andersen wanted to write as people spoke. He wrote as a storyteller. It was shocking to reviewers, but the common people loved it. Marc Brown describes it perfectly in his 1990 article in Horn Book (‘The Artist at Work: The Importance of Humor’),

“A sentence from one of Hans Andersen’s Tales is utterly different from a sentence by anyone else. Perrault or Grimm would have written, “The children got into the coach and drove off,” but Hans Andersen wrote, “Up they go on the coach. Goodbye Mum. Goodbye Dad. Crack went the whip, whick, whack and away they dashed. Gee up! Gee up!”

It was talking. This language makes it difficult for translators. Many editions of the tales are dry and lack humor, for most translations go through the German first. The Franks’ translation is a rare example of the tales being directly translated from Danish into English. 

Then there are the themes and subjects of Andersen’s tales. He was the first to have talking toys, darning needles and tin soldiers, and Moroccan leather balls falling in love with tops. He wrote of humanity in all its joys and disappointments, betrayals, silliness, pomposity, greed, and heartbreaks. He wrote of truth and falseness, of beauty and artifice. Hans Andersen experienced all of these emotions and painful experiences in his own life and struggled greatly.  He put these feelings and struggles into the mouths and actions of common everyday objects allowing us all to see ourselves in these stories.

Hans Christian Andersen published 156 tales, enough to find every emotion and foible experienced by humankind. Because of this the stories resonate to this day. I’ve been asking people, “Do you think it’s still important to tell Hans Christian Andersen stories?” My favorite response came from my husband who just rolled his eyes and without hesitation responded, “Really? With the world today? The Emperor’s New Clothes says it all. What other story do you need?”

The influence of Hans Andersen is vast. Authors such as Yolen, Philip, Rowling, and many more have taken the fairy tale form and made it their own. Illustrators over the years have been inspired to bring these tales to life visually. Storytellers have been inspired to bring the language, the characters and stories to life through the oral art form.

Go find a translation you like, read through some of the tales and start telling Andersen. Enjoy!

*The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen translated by Dianna and Jeffery Frank. Houghton Mifflin. 2003.

Learning to Tell at the Feet of Andersen

by Julie Della Torre

HCA Statue in Central Park

June 1, opening day of the 2019 season of storytelling at the Hans Christian Andersen Statue in Central Park. It was a beautiful day and the storytelling was superb.

Sheila Arnold told ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ by Andersen and Laura Simms told ‘The Nightingale’ also by HCA. Salieu Suso accompanied Laura on the kora and Valentina Ortiz, from Mexico, kept us all safe and comfortable as monitor.

Sheila Arnold, an African American from Virginia, had such fun telling Andersen. True to the story she delighted in language such as ‘rouges and scallywags.’ Though the story is Danish, the way she told it, you could just see people from her community populating the story. Andersen coming alive in Virginia.

Laura Simms is an internationally known storyteller and current Artistic Director of the Hans Christian Andersen Storytelling Center’s summer series. She tells ‘The Nightingale’ frequently and, on this day, she told it without elaboration. The words, the language, her voice, intensity and focus brought magic to the space as well as the story.

It was clear that Hans Christian Andersen tales withstand diversity of place and of time. The stories were so fresh and fun.

Storytelling has been ongoing at the Statue every summer for over 60 years. Every Saturday morning, from the beginning of June through September, crowds gather at the feet of Andersen for an hour of free storytelling. Storytellers from all over the world are scheduled and often there are surprises when a storyteller visiting NYC shows up and shares a story.

I have been going to the Statue for over 20 years. For several years, I was monitor and attended storytelling every Saturday. I’ve been privileged to tell stories with wonderful tellers. I consider this time at the Statue my prime education in learning to tell stories. What a beautiful outdoor classroom in which to learn.

And what have I learned? First and foremost, to be my own storyteller. I believe the main way we learn is by observation and I have been able to observe many of the storytellers I’ve read about and many more. Laura Simms and Diane Wolkstein before her, have scheduled friends and colleagues they have known through their years of storytelling. These are professional storytellers who have honed their craft. The first thing I noticed was how different every teller is. Some tellers move around a lot, some are still. Some use funny voices to great effect, others do not. Some tellers are boisterous, some more restrained. But all are inspiring as they bring their tales to life. There are so many storytellers, so many artistic styles, so many types of stories. Often beginning tellers will mimic an established teller, taking on her or his persona. Observing and talking to a wide variety of tellers was liberating.  It gave me the freedom and confidence to develop my own style.

But in this outdoor classroom I also learned many mundane, yet important, skills: 

·      how to use a microphone 

·      how to project in the open air

·       stage presence

·      audience control 

·      how to handle disruptions 

·      how to engage the audience

·      how to pause for a laugh

·      how to put a program together

I also observed techniques I wanted to add to my storytelling:

·      how to teach the audience a song or chant

·      how to invite the audience to join in

·      how to ask the audience for suggestions and then incorporate them into the story

·      how to bring the audience up on stage to help tell the story

·      how to play and have fun with a story

I have had a number of mentors and a few real teachers, but almost everything I have learned about storytelling has been in Central Park at the feet of Hans Christian Andersen.

Storytelling throughout September.

Click http://hcastorycenter.org/for schedule