Golden Tales and Pictures Jerry Haigh

“The author today is the descendant of the storyteller who went This summer I went to Newfoundland and told essentially the same African animal into the market-place, sat himself down upon his mat, and beat stories in two different venues. At the Newman’s wine cellar, where Dale Jarvis upon his collection bowl, crying, “Give me a copper coin and I will set thing up, the space and ambience did not allow for anything beyond a verbal tell you a golden tale!” presentation mixed with acting techniques. In the other venue at Corner Brook, where Elinor Benjamin was my host, I was able to use PowerPoint, show all sorts of So wrote Robertson Davies. Modern performers, be they raconteurs, poets, hip-hop images from 35,000 year-old cave drawings to modern events in my own life, and run artists or musicians are telling stories. Who among us does not recognize that the late some brief video-clips. When I morphed in telling folk-tales I was able to mute the Stan Rogers, when he wrote and performed such classics as Barrett’s Privateers or The projector and step forward to project myself and, in the words of Laurens Van Der Mary Ellen Carter was not storytelling? In SC-CC we have members who tell stories Post, “Let the story tell me”. through poetry and song, but that seems to as far as we have allowed ourselves to branch away from the traditional recounting of events, be they imaginary or real. Storytelling without props has one great advantage over the Punch and Judy exponents, Cantastoria artists or those methods needing electricity. All it requires Some of us have been lucky enough to see storytelling performances that go beyond is a teller and an audience, no props, no storyboards, no computers, projectors or those boundaries. I can vividly remember, through the mist of almost sixty years, screens. being taken by my grandmother to see the Punch and Judy show on the beach near her house on England’s south coast. The itinerant puppeteers (called professors) Homer’s gory account of the blinding of Cyclops is an example: were telling a story, using very simple props that could be carried in the back of a “So we seized our stake with its fiery tip station wagon. and bored it round and round in the giant’s eye till blood came boiling up around that smoking shaft and the hot blast singed his As I began to seek ways to recount things from my own experiences I realized that brow and eyelids round the core - by not using pictures I was sometimes doing myself, and my audience, a disservice. I and the broiling eyeball burst.” sought advice from storytellers whom I had seen perform and got some very mixed messages. Dan Yashinski wrote to me and said that those who would dismiss the Homer was not only a poet, but also a helluva storyteller, although we do not idea of using visual aids out of hand were forgetting their history and told me about know if he “beat upon his collecting bowl” in the market place. He used storytelling Cantastoria. techniques that are still in vogue today, particularly repetition of phrases or themes that bring the listener back into the story. That his work has survived 2700 years I found its definition through Google: bears this out. He would have been a star turn at an SC-CC concert. Cantastoria … comes from Italian for “sung story”… and is known by many other names around the world. It is a theatrical Nonetheless we have the power to go a step further and I wonder if we should form where a performer tells or sings a story while gesturing to a consider the view of Robertson Davies again: series of images. “Nothing that concerns mankind is alien to the teller of tales…” Another name for Cantastoria comes from Japan, where, to quote Wikipedia “Japanese canndymen would bicycle around with serial shows Should we in SC-CC be willing to expand our horizons, or do people want to stick to called kamishibai where the story was told to a series of changing th the narrower definitions? Would a Punch and Judy show upset the traditionalists? pictures in a box”. That is surely not far from late 20 century Why not use pictures if they work, and especially if the audience asks for them? Kodachrome slides I used for 20 odd years (as a different kind of st professor) or 21 century PowerPoint presentations. Jerry Haigh, Saskatchewan

LE RACONTEUR - Winter 2009 29