
TALKING STORYTELLING
Alastair K Daniel
Alastair K Daniel is a storyteller and academic living in London. His passion for oral narration informs his practice as a teacher-educator and his writing on the subject of storytelling.
This site is Alastair K Daniel's blog. Click here to go to the Story Tent's website
And here is a link to Alastair's 2011 book, Storytelling Across the Primary Curriculum

- Mar 6
Storytelling Performance Part 4a: ‘I am what I am’ – role in storytelling
In this two-part blog I will explore the roles that a storyteller takes in performance. It has been several months since my last blog (CLICK HERE) and this has been because of a combination of summer holidays interrupting the writing and (possibly more relevant) my struggles with this particular aspect (‘storytelling involves multiple roles’) of the Framework for Storytelling Performance (see Figure 1) within which I am trying to work (CLICK HERE). This is not to say that I h

- Oct 26, 2019
Storytelling Performance Part 4b: ‘I am what I am’ – role in storytelling
In the first part of this blog (CLICK HERE) , I introduced a layered model of storytelling (see figure 1: Storytelling Roles) and explored how a storyteller shifts between the roles of narrating from outside the story and enacting, or behaving as if they are within the story. In this second part, I will go on into more detail what evaluating means in the storytelling context, and why narrating and enacting are layered within it. Finally, I will unpick some of the complexity i

- Mar 16, 2019
Storytelling Performance Part 3a:
Engagement strategies in
performance storytelling - Introduction
This blog is the third in an occasional series of entries exploring storytelling and performance and is linked to the conceptual model of storytelling that I developed in the second of these blogs, Storytelling Performance Part 2 – A Framework, which can be found by clicking HERE. Realising that this topic is very rich and there is a lot to be covered, I have split this blog into three sections a) Introduction b) Verbal engagement strategies and c) non-verbal strategies and c

- Feb 26, 2019
Storytelling Performance
Part 2: A Framework
The framework for storytelling performance that is outlined in this blog is an evolving model. As of the end of February 2019 this is (I think) the fourth version of the framework, and I am grateful to the storytellers and academics with whom I have chatted to, or corresponded with, as I have been working it through. As someone who is interested in the ‘how’ of storytelling as much as the ‘what’, I have been trying to analyse what makes storytelling distinctive from other ver

- Aug 21, 2018
Storytelling Performance
Part 1: Storytelling and theatre - an introductory discussion
[This blog was first written in August 2018, and was updated at the end of February 2019.] In the 1990’s I took time out of teaching and toured schools in Germany with theatre productions of ‘Macbeth’ and Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’. The company was travelling in two vehicles and, on one occasion, the minibus in which four of the cast were travelling (along with all of the sets and costumes) got stuck in a traffic jam on the autobahn. This left just two of us stand

- May 26, 2018
Storytelling presence and performance energy
Stage presence is one of the hardest things to define, but one of the easiest to recognise. In this blog, I discuss the role of breath, bala

- Apr 10, 2018
Story memorisation – to learn or not to learn word-for-word
Although I rarely work with pre-school children, I have been hugely influenced by the early childhood expert, Vivian Gussin Paley, who has described storytelling as ‘the social art of language’ (1990: 23). For me, this phrase is a reminder that storytelling is something that is we created between teller and audience. Jane Yolen says: Told and retold or read and reread, the story exists neither in the mouth nor on the page, neither in the ear nor the eye. It is created between

- Mar 30, 2018
Storytelling spaces: teller and audience
Storytelling takes place between people and happens somewhere. When we watch a You Tube video of someone telling a story, we are not taking part in a storytelling event, but are watching a recording of such an event. On my own You Tube channel (Alastair Daniel) you will find some examples where I have recorded stories to a microphone, but this is something with which I am very uncomfortable as, for me, storytelling is a social activity in which there is real two-way communica