At best, the word “storytelling” conjures up images of a wizened old man intoning fireside tales to gawping tinies. At worst, it’s dogs on a string, illegal camp fires and a dancing crusty, gyrating red-eyed to a demonic beat only he can hear. So it comes as a bit of a shock that for three years the Barbican Centre in London has been selling out seasons of performance storytelling. The tenth season is approaching and tickets are going fast. And not a whiff of cheap cider anywhere.
Jillian Barker, the Barbican’s head of education, introduced storytelling as part of the family and schools programme. After a while, won over by it, she felt confident enough in its appeal to try it on regular Barbican audiences. “The Barbican prides itself in having all the arts under one roof and the gap in the storytelling tradition stood out,” she says. “It seemed sensible to respond to the need for a professional venue.”
The appeal is not easy to convey to the uninitiated. “Is that, sort of, people sitting around with someone telling them a story then?” one particularly bright spark asked. Well, yes, that’s exactly what it is. And it’s that simplicity that people find hard to comprehend. “I never write anything down,” explains Ben Haggarty, a founding member of the Company of Storytellers and president of the Crick Crack Club, with which the Barbican programmes the season. “Every day I’ll take a book of stories, open it at random and read it. Occasionally I find one I like, then I read maybe ten versions of it — you can find the same story told all over the world. Then you fit together the mechanics of it in your head, bring it into your own imagination and then you tell it. It grows in the telling.”
Haggarty estimates that his head is home to around 300 stories, from one minute to three hours long. And every time he tells a story, it’s different. Each member of the audience becomes part of the performance. “Theatre requires spectators, storytelling requires an audience,” he says.
In a world where we are bombarded with visual stimulation, storytelling renders the technological jiggery-pokery of theatre redundant — the best stage designer can’t come close to the world you can create in your head. It can be pretty disconcerting the first time. Haggarty tells of a colleague performing in a New York school. “One of the kids was hanging back at the end,” he recalls, “and came up to her, quite aggressively, and said: ‘What did you do to my head? You put something in my head, what did you do?’ She realised this girl had never experienced imagination before.”
The stories Haggarty and his colleagues recount are largely set in the past: folk tales, epics, myths and legends. But it’s not just dreamy escapism. Stories can survive for thousands of years — the 5,000-year-old Sumerian epic Gilgamesh is one of Haggarty’s turns — because they hold up a mirror to the perennial concerns of humanity. They are the common language between cultures. Jan Blake, a teller whose parents came to Britain from Jamaica, tells West African and Caribbean tales, “but they tell everything about the human condition”, she says. “Anything with stupid women, aggressive men, ungrateful children, I’m going to tell it because it speaks to everyone!”
The result can be hugely affecting. More than a year ago I saw the outstanding Hugh Lupton and Daniel Morden tell Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Even now, every time I recall the story of Baucis and Philemon, who chose, of all the things in the world offered by the Gods, to die at the same instant, in each other’s arms, a lump climbs to my throat and my eyes fill with tears.
So why isn’t there more live storytelling? The profession is no longer taken seriously here, post-industrial revolution, explains writer Alan Garner. In most cultures, he says, storytellers are spotted as a child and have a long apprenticeship — as long as 20 years — under the tutelage of a master. Here the itinerant troubadour of old has all but died out — bar some suspect examples touting themselves as “traditional”, whose storytelling skills are as bad as their tights. Of the 420-plus tellers working in the UK “only 10 per cent are any good”, reckons Haggarty.
But there is also a deeply ingrained snobbery to contend with. “We’re fighting against layers of prejudice. People have so many preconceived ideas about storytelling — that it’s reading aloud, that it’s for children, that it’s done by hippies.”
In 1989 the South Bank held a 15-day storytelling festival, which then toured 12 other UK cities to 60-100 per cent capacity houses. One change of management later, the foothold was lost. The Arts Council Literature department, within whose jurisdiction storytelling uncomfortably sits, is curiously unforthcoming with funding. The biggest grant is around £42,000, for Shropshire’s annual, three-day Festival at the Edge. By contrast, regularly funded poetry organisations will receive grants totalling more than £1m this year, with Apples & Snakes alone receiving more than £250,000.
A spokeswoman from the Arts Council explained that “as a specific art form, storytelling is not funded. We have to define things in a finite number of ways. It does fall between literature and theatre.” This doesn’t seem to have been a problem for The Scottish Arts Council, however, whose lottery fund has contributed £1.3 million to the new Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh.
There are a few other encouraging signs. Jillian Barker is full of plans to commission new work from storytellers and to expand the programme into schools. Beyond the Border, a superb annual international storytelling festival in South Wales that ran into financial problems last year (they had the misfortune to pick the same weekend as Live 8), is seeking sponsors to make a bigger splash in 2007. It sounds a bit precarious, but storytelling has been around since we first started to communicate; it will be around until we have nothing left to learn.
Feasting in the House of Stories, Barbican EC2 (www.barbican.org.uk 020-7638 8891) May 30-Jun 2; Festival at the Edge, Stokes Barn, Much Wenlock, Shropshire (www.festivalattheedge.org
01939 236626), Jul 14-16; West Country Storytelling Festival, KEVICC, Totnes, Devon (www.weststoryfest. co.uk 01803 863790), Aug 25-27; the Scottish Storytelling Centre, 43-45 High Street, Edinburgh (www.scottishstorytellingcentre.co.uk 0131-556 9579)
