The Second Oldest Profession ~ Storytelling and Relationships

Ellen Musikant is a performer, teaching artist, workshop facilitator and story coach. As such she has been a storyteller in residence in schools throughout New Jersey including preschools, elementary, and middle schools. When working with the very young, Ellen plays within the story landscape and narrative, giving the children new worlds and new words. For older students, she inspires self-expression by enlivening folktales with creative dramatics. As a story coach, Ellen helps children custom and adults find their storytelling voices. Each residency and workshop she offers is designed to meet the needs of the client. In addition to her work with Storytelling Arts, Inc., Ellen enjoys performing in festivals, museums, libraries and a host of other venues. She is Storyteller-in-Residence at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

More and more I’ve been touting storytelling as a powerful medium in which to build relationships. A good story is good. But the relationships it builds are even better. Way better. That’s it. That’s the whole elevator speech.

This year I took a semi-sabbatical from storytelling. But, several times each week, I tell stories in my role as Storyteller-in-Residence at the Zimmerli Art Museum. I tell the same two stories each time. They are terrific little stories. They are perfect for the early childhood learners who are brought to the museum to hear them. “The Gunniwolf” and “The Big Enormous Turnip.” Both are old folktales told many different ways and appear in lots of different books.

Sometimes I feel sheepish about telling the same stories again and again. The guards have heard them so often they can tell them “by heart.” Really! But these stories, as simple as they are, provide the perfect soil in which to grow and nurture relationships -- between me and the kids, the kids and the story, the kids and the art, the art and the story, the teachers and the kids, the teachers and the story, and so on.

I think of a story as built up energy. It is inert. It has the potential to be powerful. When a story is given voice, it has impact. At Storytelling Arts, Inc., we talk about an oral and very much alive “voice” for the stories we tell. We are not keeping our tales to ourselves, like dandelion wine bottled away and put in the cellar. We are uncorking them and pouring them into our listeners, who (if we do our job well) will in turn tell them to others. No doubt, when the story is released and exchanges “hands,” it will change and grow. That’s the nature of a told tale. Each teller/listener bond is different and each listener receives a story in her own way.

As professionals we craft a story each and every time we tell it so it is just right for the people who are listening. That’s been the challenge for me at the museum.

This crafting of the telling of a story is ancient. Storytelling is probably the second oldest profession! A primal need is satisfied by shaping our experiences (real and imagined) and then sharing them with someone else. Why? Isn’t the experience just as valid and exciting if kept to ourselves? Generally, I think it is safe to say, when something happens in our lives we have an itch to tell about it. We want to engage others in our experience. We want others to share the adventure. The experience itself becomes richer each time we do.

But, even more important, the relationships grow richer. We wander through a storyscape together and share a vivid and perhaps fanciful experience. Even if we never see each other again, we have formed an indivisible bond.

Luray Gross and I will be facilitating a Storytelling Arts Institute at the Moorestown Friends School in southern New Jersey June 28-30, 2011. I look forward to the many relationships that will be formed there.

Notes from the Field

March 31, 2011, Luray Gross

LURAY GROSS works extensively in schools and the community presenting workshops and performances for all ages. Luray is the author of three collections of poetry: Forenoon was published in 1990 by The Attic Press in Westfield, NJ, and Elegant Reprieve won the 1995-96 Still Waters Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. The Perfection of Zeros, was published by Word Press in 2004. She was the recipient of a Fellowship in Poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. In 2000, she was named a Distinguished Teaching Artist by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was the recipient of the Robert Fraser Open Poetry Competition Award from Bucks County(PA) Community College. She was the 2002 Poet Laureate of Bucks County and resident faculty at the 2006 Frost Place Festival and Conference on Poetry in Franconia, New Hampshire.

“Is this going to be a true story?” Jake asks as soon as I announce that I have another story for his class of second graders.

“It’s true that it’s a story,” I answer, but of course that’s not what he means and I know it. I go on: “Have you ever heard that a story is a golden lie that hides the truth? See what you think when you hear it.”

“Once there was a boy who decided to fool his father.”

“What day is tomorrow?” I ask, interrupting myself in that way a story can tolerate.

“April 1st. April Fool’s!” I have only 50 minutes for this session which will include poetry writing and reading aloud as well as storytelling, so I don’t mention the image of my mother that suddenly surfaces - Mother first thing each April 1st she somehow managed to trick us with a silly remark. Instead, I go on with the story telling how the boy decides to hide from his father, and while he is looking for a hiding place, sees a peanut on the ground.

“Wouldn’t it be great to hide in a peanut?” he thinks.

No sooner thought, than done; he is in the peanut shell, which gets swallowed by a chicken, who gets swallowed by a bush cat, and so forth. For each animal I add a characteristic call and gesture. The more outrageous the story becomes, the more obvious it is that the question of truth has fallen away before the forces of delight and anticipation: What creature will be next? How will the boy get out of the peanut? Will his father find him?

When the story comes to an end, boy and father reunited, we immediately begin a collaborative retelling of the story.

“I bet you could tell that story to someone,” I say. How does it begin?”

Of course the class, working together, is able to retell the whole story, with everyone participating in the “Buk, buk, buk” of the chicken, the “Yowl, miaow” of bush cat, the “sszzzz” of python.

It’s time for my transition: I tell them about Dr. William Carlos Williams, a poet very good at finding poems wherever he was, who was prone to jotting lines down on prescription pads during his forty years of medical practice in West Rutherford, NJ and how sometimes between patients, he would tap out lines of poetry on his office typewriter.

I have two brief image-based Williams’ poems in mind for sharing today: “Between Walls” and “The Great Figure.” I introduce each with a story - first the story of the doctor doing his rounds at the hospital and noticing between the building’s wings something green among the cinders from the coal furnace. Not a thing can grow there; what is that bit of green shining? A piece of a broken bottle, the poem tells us, a beautiful thing for anyone who has the eyes and the temperament to notice.

Another story: I invite the children to imagine Dr. Williams walking down the street at night. It’s raining, and suddenly - all at once it seems - the sounds of sirens. Out of the darkness a firetruck comes rushing, the big golden 5 painted on it, gleaming in the city lights. I speak “The Great Figure,” once and again, the second time inviting the children to close their eyes and see the scene, hear the sounds he mentions and others they know might be there. When we speak our images, one the students lightly clenches her fists and shakes them, “I heard the wheels rumbling! and I felt it!”

It happens that Williams’ friend, Charles Demuth, made a painting in response to “The Great Figure,” and I’m lucky enough to have a poster featuring the painting. Now we look at its somewhat abstracted image of the poem, noticing all the visual elements of the scene, from the bold gold “5’s” to the poet’s name partially hidden in the geometry of the painting. The children are looking closely, excited about their discoveries. We’re ready to leap into our own poetry talk and thinking.

“So, I’ve been thinking, where do our poems hide?” I allow a bit of quiet before improvising a line or two: “Sometimes mine hide in a wave that rises up and crashes down.....sometimes they’re hiding in the wrinkles on an old, old lady’s face...sometimes...”

The hands come up: "Mine hide in my brother’s smile.” “Mine hide in the sun!” “You could find them at the baseball stadium.”

We must make the move to individual writing soon, while the images are being born. “Okay, let’s go to desks and each write a poem describing some of the wonderful, exciting, beautiful, or silly places your poems could hide.” Fortunately the teacher has already placed fresh writing paper on each desk. I write the governing question on the board: Where do poems hide? and give them two possible beginnings: “I find poems in/on/under....” or “My poems hide inside...”

Inside a peanut? I ask? It’s a little joke, but Ryan goes on to write a funny informative poem about peanuts, which begins, “You could find a poem in a peanut, a very tasty legume.” It turns out that he has just finished a report on George Washington Carver. One of the glorious things about the creative imagination is that anything, virtually anything the child knows or wonders about can be material for his or her creations. After all, the story with which the class began has reminded us that anything can happen.

The class settles into writing and after a few minutes their teacher and I circulate, gently asking permission to “eaves-read,” reassuring a reluctant child, encouraging them to sound out words, inviting children to whisper read what they have so far. I am delighted and wish we had more than 8 minutes left for reading aloud. But that is what we have, so we invite the new poems or parts of them be heard! One boy has his hand up. This is the fourth day I’ve worked with these students, and I’m pretty sure that he has various special needs. Generally shy, he has volunteered to read first each day. Today he writes of delicious places for poems to hide: donuts and pies and M&M pancakes.

We hear short poems, long poems, virtuosic lyrical poems and bare bones matter of fact poems. Here are a few of their lines:

“Poems hide inside the video games I play with my dad.”

“Poems hide inside a flower taking a shower.”

“The mysterious dark follows me like a spy.”

“Poems hide under tables and chairs, under stairs and beds.”

“Poems hide inside a smile of a little child smiling at a bunny with fur as bright as snow...”

“I find poems in an apple tree, a fire gleaming bright as can be....”

As one girl wrote, “They hide inside anybody.”

Yes, poems and stories and music, dances and paintings. They are all there waiting to be found and to satisfy and delight their makers as they experience the truth that we are all capable of making something new and powerful out of our words, thoughts, and feelings.

Note: For one version of “The Boy Who Tried To Fool His Father,” see Judy Sierra and Stefano Vitale’s Nursery Tales from Around the World. The Williams’ poems can be found at www.poetryfoundation.org. Search by the poet’s name.

HEY PRINCESS!

Hello, I am Julie Della Torre, Master Storyteller with Storytelling Arts, Inc. I have been working as a Professional Storyteller since 1985 and have 9 years of elementary school teaching experience along with the study of child development and curriculum. More information about our work in storytelling and education can be found on the Storytelling Arts website http://www.storytellingarts.net/

An interesting debate on princesses has been brought to my attention on the Motherlode blog of the NYTimes. My son, father of a 2yr old son and uncle to a 3 yr. old niece, follows the blog and sent me the following. Some great reading, discussion and debate commenced.

‘The Princess Wears Plaid’ By Lisa Belkin (February 3, 2011)

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/the-princess-wears-plaid/ discusses an article by Peggy Orenstein that led to the book "Cinderella Ate my Daughter"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/magazine/24princess.t.html?scp=1&sq=orenstein%20cinderella&st=cse

Ms. Orenstein in 2006 takes on the Disney corporation as a feminist and a manipulated consumer. All quotes below come from this article.

The discussion on Motherlode revolves around reading children’s books that show a more balanced view of girls, books that offer a healthy prototype of heroines. We as storytellers should feel obligated to do the same. There are hundreds of stories from around the world that offer strong, enterprising, loving, clever, and smart heroines who end up happily ever after. We should search for these stories and add them to our repertoire.

I am tired of corporations (in truth corporate owners) forcing their own views -- of beauty, of appropriate language, of appropriate behavior, of appropriate values, of appropriate skin color -- and telling us what is important in a good life. Imagination and thinking is taken from us.

“Playing princess is not the issue,” argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of “Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes.” “The issue is 25,000 Princess products,” says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. “When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.”

Walt Disney and his studio follow a long tradition of changing oral folktales. Each time a tale is told it is changed. The problem comes when it is written down, or immortalized in film. Ownership is then possible. Jane Yolen (storyteller, author and folklorist) says in many articles that the old tales are always changing depending in part on who tells them and why. The old nanny who is putting the children to bed may soften the tales, shorten them, or change them so nightmares don’t ensue. Parents, or preachers, or dictators, may change them to teach a moralistic or nationalistic lesson. Entertainers change the tales to please each audience and thus ensure ample reward.

Walt Disney’s Cinderella is now the ‘real’ Cinderella story, and it is American. It’s told as a rags-to-riches story where anyone can wish on a star and dreams can come true with no effort at all. In Cinderella tales from around the world this is NEVER the story. In Grimm’s it’s a riches-to-rags-to-riches story in which Cinderella has to be clever, respectful, resourceful, and hard-working to regain her rightful place in society. Cuteness and idle waiting and wishing have little to do with this story. When I ask classes to visualize the princess in a story told (no matter where the story comes from) everyone, even teachers, see Disney’s Cinderella. This film version of a princess is now ‘the Princess’ in all parts of the world.

One can easily look up and track the changes made as the Grimm’s brothers collected their tales in many editions. By the time Disney got hold of the tales they had already been changed. Like the Grimms, Disney changed the tales to fit his own moralistic view of the nation and women’s place in it. Disney had strong views on America, the nation’s dream and of women’s place in American society. To hone his message, Disney took all the strength out of our heroines. The company infantilized these princesses and gave them no redeeming values. Then Walt Disney stamped his name all over everything associated with the films. Disney took complete control and ownership of our heroines. Walt Disney and the studio became one. The studio learned its lesson well and continues to control the message and the product.

Today the merchandizing of the Princess ideal helps girls and women believe that wearing the Cinderella panties or carrying the Princess Lunchbox, will help their dreams come true, their dreams of being a princess, marrying a prince and living happily ever after. ‘Princess’ is no longer about a story, it is a product:

There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items.

“Princess,” as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the planet.

As a student of folklore I have issues with Disney and the old tales that differ yet overlap with the issues which concern Ms. Orenstein and the mothers on the Motherlode blog.

My strongest aversion comes with the fact that Disney has chosen one princess, his princess, for us and is now selling her to us all on everything imaginable.

Some further reading/background that I found illuminating on the topic:

Jane Yolen tackles Disney in ‘America’s Cinderella’ in Cinderella: A Casebook by Alan Dundes, and in Mirror, Mirror, ed. By Jane Yolen and Heidi Stemple. Jack Zipes takes on the issue in ‘Breaking the Disney Spell’ in his book Fairy Tale as Myth: Myth as Fairy Tale.

I went to Surlalune and read the discussions that had taken place over the years. http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/ (see FAQ: Disney and Fairy Tales and FAQ Women and Fairy Tales)

My Heros!!

JULIE PASQUAL is a self proclaimed “creativity junky” whose first art form was dance. After graduating from New York City’s High School of Performing Arts, she danced and sang in numerous musicals across the country and Off Broadway. She has acted in everything from Shakespeare to the work of young playwrights in NYC high schools. Along the way she learned stilt walking, clowning, American Sign Language, and how to tell stories. Her storytelling work encompasses all her skills as a performing artist, as she brings every aspect of a story to life. Her stories have been heard in such venues as the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the New Jersey Storytelling Festival, and in schools, libraries, bookstores, hospitals, radio and private events across the tri-state area. As an artist for Hospital Audiences Incorporated, Julie performs in halfway houses, drug rehabilitation centers and senior citizen homes. She is also the voice for several children’s and young adult audio books for the Andrew Heiskill Library for the Blind and Handicapped in NYC. When not telling tales she can be found performing as a dancer in shows across the country and as a clown doctor for the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit, entertaining children in NYC hospitals.

To really understand how ironic what I’m about to write is, you have to understand this about me – when I was a kid, I HATED school. Not disliked, not “I’d rather be watching TV” – we are talking full on LOATHING!!! It wasn’t that I was incapable of doing well, it wasn’t that I was bullied, and didn’t have friends, it wasn’t even that I didn’t want to learn – no, it was just that I was the proverbial square peg being cramped into that round hole. I am, and have always been, a person that NEEDS to dance to their own drummer – schedules, too much structure, make me buck like a horse in the wild west. School, with all it’s rules, and requirements felt like a prison to me, so much so that as a child on Sunday nights, I would stay up as long as I could, hoping to extend my weekend that much longer. But always sleep would take me, and Monday, dreaded back to school Monday, always arrived.

So, in my mind, if school was a prison, than the teachers, were the guards. Like an inmate who knows who holds the power, and the keys to their cells, I eyed them with wariness. I was obedient, and dependable – always afraid of their power of me, over what my parents thought of me, over my life. It was only when I got to high school, and had a teacher, who really SAW me, encouraged me, and in a way adopted me, that I began to see that teachers were actual humans. Mr. Andros, my teacher/mentor/second dad showed me that teachers are heroes who day after day sometimes literally go into battle in their classrooms. They work for little money, and even less respect, it seems, but they have the most important jobs in the world. And now, years after many a school day spend eyeing educators with fear and suspicion, I find myself totally OVERJOYED to offer them whatever I can in my role as a storyteller.

In folktales there are often magical helpers that appear along the way as the hero or heroine makes their way on their journey. Often times they’ll give the hero something that, on the surface at least, looks to be simple, of little relevance to the task at hand. But time and time again in these stories, it is that little object that enables the hero to succeed. I like to think of the tales I tell like little presents, like Jack’s magical beans, that once planted in the minds of a teacher, might just help them in their heroic work of educating our future. I try with each visit to a classroom, not just to introduce the wonderful world of stories to the students, but also to their teachers, knowing I don’t even know a quarter of what they know, but hoping, beyond hope that I have served the story well enough so that it’s wisdom, and timelessness, can be seen by the classroom teacher, and, if they want to, use it in a lesson plan, or a discussion.

Oddly enough, given my history with teachers, it is that aspect that often gives me the most joy in my work with Storytelling Arts. I get to repay all those people, those heroes, who watched me looking at them like they were monsters, but taught me anyway. Who saw my gaze of distrust and fear, and kept offering all they had –day after day. Sr. Ann Robin, Mrs. Franklin, Mr. Manchester – I don’t know where you are today, but believe me - I GET IT NOW!!! I understand what incredible work you do, and while I still live outside, around, and on top of “the box” rather than in it, and too much scheduling still makes my stomach clench – I am trying to repay the debt I owe you, and every teacher whose classroom, my reluctant younger self ever entered! It’s the most I can do, as all you teachers – you hero and heroines go on your daily quests to open the minds of the world.

Harbingers of Spring

Myth is not merely a story, but a reality lived.

Bronislav Malinowsky

The sun is shining today. Melting snow is dripping from the eaves, sparrows are chattering at the feeder and the chick-a-dees are whistling their “swee-tie” song. It’s early February, the middle of winter, but the light and the sounds today are a reminder that spring is around the corner. It really is. Last week, when the Cailleach, the hag of winter, went out to gather the firewood she needs to keep her through the rest of the season, she had a hard time finding any under all that snow and ice. That’s a good thing. If she can’t keep her fire burning, she has to relinquish her rule to Brigid, the goddess of spring and fertility. In fact, Brigid is already among us. The first day of February is St. Brigid’s day. Storytellers know that long before she was a saint, Brigid was a goddess, the daughter of the Dagda who was the foremost of the Celtic gods. Brigid is a healer as well as a muse to poets and artisans. She created the first tin whistle and it was she who gave us beer!

The myth of Brigid and the Cailleach helps me understand the feeling I get at this time of year. February is, by reputation, a dreary time. It’s the month we need a midwinter break from school because we just can’t take it any more, the month for get-a-ways to the sunny Caribbean. However, February has never seemed so bad to me. On the contrary, there is something about the mid-day light at this time of year that holds a promise of green. The animals feel it, too. The birds, like the chick-a-dee, sing less of their flocking song and more of their mating song in February. Small mammals, like the groundhog, come out of their burrows, the ewes become pregnant. Hence the spring lambs!

Once you recognize these natural phenomena, the strange February holidays begin to make sense. And they are strange. Prognosticating rodents and match making martyrs? What have they to do with this short winter month? February 1^st is a cross-quarter holiday. It is the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, another one of those days when the veil between this world and the next becomes more transparent. (The root of the Celtic word cailleach means veil.) February sets the stage for the burgeoning of spring. In ancient Rome, a festival of purification was held on February 15^th. Some sources say that it coincided with the seasonal rains that washed and melted the earth – a kind of ancient Spring Cleaning. In later times, Romans celebrated the Lupercal on this date. Some of the rituals associated with that holiday were directly related to human love and fertility. No one seems to know how the day came to be associated with a Christian martyr, but in researching the connection, I came across this fact: there is a flower-crowned skull purported to be St. Valentine’s on display in the basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome.

The flower-crowned skull, an image familiar to fans of the Grateful Dead, is also a motif in one of my favorite stories, Fitcher’s Feathered Bird, collected by the Brothers Grimm. In this story, the crowned skull is a token left by the heroine for her evil ex-lover when she departs his house after designing his well-deserved fate. By this time in the story, the heroine has transcended her human existence and transformed herself into a honey-feathered goddess who proceeds to purify her corner of the world with fire. A connection to St. Valentine? Probably not, but the existence of the relic is evocative.

We go through our lives accepting these February traditions without feeling any connection to them because they are remnants of an age when the rhythm of the earth played an essential role in the lives of men and women. It was a much harder life than the lives of most people who are likely to read this blog, and the rituals that acknowledged the seasonal changes were often matters of life and death, both, literally, in their enactment and in the consequences of the phenomena they recreated. Even so, I can’t help but think that an acute awareness of the week-by-week changes in the natural world added a richness to life.

Familiarity with myth can restore some of that richness to our lives. Myth allows us to personify the natural forces and to make them part of the story of our own lives. Myth gives a human reality to the earth’s rhythms, and reminds us that they are inseparable from the rhythm of our heart, the rise and fall of our breath, and the coursing of our blood. Myth tells us that the earth begins fade in October as Demeter anticipates Persephone’s journey to the underworld and reminds us that now, in February, the goddess is beginning to make the world ready for her daughter’s return. She is awakening the animals, opening the wombs of the cattle, swelling the buds on the trees, sterilizing the ground with ice, then rinsing it clean with rain. Myth reminds us that no matter how much wood the Cailleach gathers on February 2^nd, Brigid is already with us to make sure that the old woman’s fire won’t last forever. There is hope in the stories of February. Read them and rejoice!

My life as an M.O.

The words “motivational speaker” jumped off the page at me. I have been called A LOT of things in my life -– everything from creative to hyper to short – but never in my whole entire life had I ever been called a “motivational speaker,” and yet, that’s what I was being asked to be in a project I began this month for Storytelling Arts.

In my brain, a “motivational speaker” is someone like Tony Robbins -– particularly in that Jack Black movie from a few years ago “Shallow Hal.” Kind of tall, in a dark business suit, sprouting phrases like “Think outside the box!” or “Follow your bliss!” while running power point presentations in large ballrooms. And, while I have trouble even finding the proverbial “box”, and, if becoming a storytelling dancer clown who teaches yoga isn’t following ones bliss, I don’t know what the heck is –- I just couldn’t cozy up to the label “motivational speaker” (hereto referred to as M.O.) But, like we outside the box bliss followers sometimes have to do –- I had to make it work. Lucky for me, folktales saved my un-Tony Robbins-like rear end!

I don’t know where real M.O.’s get material that will at once teach life lessons, while keeping a crowd interested and hanging on their every word. But, all I had to do was go to my friends and teachers -- my folktale anthologies. Within the world of folktales are a great many stories that teach us things we all need to learn. Like the Jewish story “Feathers,” that tells of a woman who, after spreading rumors about everyone, is sent before the judge. To teach her a lesson about the dangers of gossiping, he instructs her to take a feather pillow outdoors, shake out all the feathers, and then try to get them back in again. When she finds that the feathers blow away, and that she can’t get them back inside the pillow, the judge informs her that it is the same things for words. Once they leave our lips, we can never get them back again.

It was “Feathers” that I told a group of 5^th and 6^th graders in my role of M.O., and the “Ooooh, I get it!” that came at the end of the story made me smile. The discussion we had after that story, told me that there was no better entry into this topic than the wisdom of the ancients who had created this gem of a tale. Back then, they didn’t have power points – they had stories. Stories that spoke, and continue to speak in a language we all can understand. Stories that don’t hit us over the head with a point, but rather, offer themselves up so that everyone can discover the lessons wrapped in them on their own.

Whenever I’m asked what I do for a living, I always joke and say, “I’m a storyteller/dancer/clown/yoga instructor/chimney sweep –- just kidding about the last one!” But, maybe I’ve got a better, and perhaps truer, punch line, maybe, thanks to my pals, the folktales, I can say I’m a storyteller/dancer/clown/yoga instructor/motivational speaker/chimney sweep – hey, the chimney sweep part is too funny to lose!!

I Saw a Young Man Fall in Love With Language

JULIE PASQUAL is a self proclaimed “creativity junky” whose first art form was dance. After graduating from New York City’s High School of Performing Arts, she danced and sang in numerous musicals across the country and Off Broadway. She has acted in everything from Shakespeare to the work of young playwrights in NYC high schools. Along the way she learned stilt walking, clowning, American Sign Language, and how to tell stories. Her storytelling work encompasses all her skills as a performing artist, as she brings every aspect of a story to life. Her stories have been heard in such venues as the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the New Jersey Storytelling Festival, and in schools, libraries, bookstores, hospitals, radio and private events across the tri-state area. As an artist for Hospital Audiences Incorporated, Julie performs in halfway houses, drug rehabilitation centers and senior citizen homes. She is also the voice for several children’s and young adult audio books for the Andrew Heiskill Library for the Blind and Handicapped in NYC. When not telling tales she can be found performing as a dancer in shows across the country and as a clown doctor for the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit, entertaining children in NYC hospitals.

I saw a young man fall in love with language this month. While that sight would always be a

gratifying thing, always make me do my happy dance just a little

bit, this was even more remarkable, because this event took place in a small

classroom, not in a school, but in a prison.

Over the last year and a half, my work with Storytelling Arts has led me into three Youth Detention Centers. And, each time I speak to people about this work, they are dumbfounded. “Are you nuts??? Aren’t you scared?? Do they listen??” – are some of the questions I hear from concerned and confused friends and family. I smile, because, frankly, I have asked myself the exact same things. So, as much for myself, as for anyone who might be reading this, I’ll answer those very sensible queries.

1) Are you nuts?? Of course, I am, but that doesn’t have anything to do with this!

2) Aren’t you scared?? Yes, but not in the way you might think. I’m not scared because I think I will be in any danger. I don’t envision burly men charging across the table trying to “shiv” me. No, I’m scared – well, nervous, actually, that I will not have the goods to reach through to these

young people – these kids. Because that is what they are – kids. They are children – even if they would never call themselves that – children who have made a bad choice. And who amongst us, has not? They are human, and the one thing I know “for sure” – as Oprah likes to say - is that humans are more alike than different. We all feel emotions, we all, in one way or another seek connection. The art of storytelling is all about connecting with the audience. A tale simply isn’t a tale until it has been told, shared with other human beings.

That is my worry -- that I will not be committed enough, articulate enough, interesting enough to touch these youths. Because folktales have the goods to inspire, teach, and move EVERYONE. With their archetypical characters, intriguing plots, they leave behind them a wake of interesting points to mull over, and to learn from. And, when I see audiences – be they five year olds, or the inmates in the Detention Centers, respond to storytelling, I know it’s not me, It’s the story. All I did was put it out there in a way they could hear. So, that’s my fear, that I won’t find the “way in” with my telling. Because if I can…well, let’s move onto the next question, shall we?

3) Do they listen?? YES, THEY DO!! I have seen a young man, who I was told was a double murderer, follow my every word like his life depended on it. I have seen another young man, whom I thought was asleep; lift his head, and his voice, to defend a character in a story. And, this past month, I saw that young man fall in love with language right before my eyes. He, and his “pod” had been told a wonderful story, by a wonderful storyteller – Paula Davidoff -- the day before, and he and two other fellows stood in front of their peers to retell it. LET’S JUST STOP AND ACKNOWLEDGE HOW AWESOME THAT WAS!

While the other two young men were more confident and outgoing, this fellow – I’ll call him J, was shy, stiff, and self conscious. With his hands tightly clasped behind his back, and his eyes lowered, he only spoke when his two companions “threw” him the story. But, then, half way through the story or so – he began to describe a horse as “strong and bold.” As he said those words, he too, became strong and bold. His body came alive, his eyes afire, and anyone could see his relish in saying that combination of words “strong and bold”. The little group then told another tale – this one they invented, and this time J was animated right from the start, interjecting wonderfully fluid language and body gestures throughout the piece. It was like seeing a flower blossom – the entire energy of the room had shifted and changed.

One could say this was a moment of victory, because that story, those words “strong and bold,” had reached into J, and touched on something that had lay dormant within him. He forged a true connection with that tale. And, connection is not only what storytelling is about, but what life is about as well. For to quote a book I just finished reading, “When you practice mindful connection, your life feels meaningful, and so it is.”

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Masks like those below were produced as part of a Storytelling Arts residency at the Mercer County Youth Detention Center in 2009. Students created these to depict character traits of people in stories as well as in real life -- including themselves.