TALKING STORYTELLING
Alastair K Daniel

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

This four-part blog started as a lecture that I was invited to give at the Robert Musil Literature Museum, Klagenfurt in Austria. I have tried to maintain the accessibility of the original lecture in this written version, but have developed the argument, providing more in-depth analysis and extending the references to include more theoretical perspectives. So that it is not too much of a read in one go, I have broken the article down into three sections and will post them in

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

This four-part blog started as a lecture that I was invited to give at the Robert Musil Literature Museum, Klagenfurt in Austria. I have tried to maintain the accessibility of the original lecture in this written version, but have developed the argument, providing more in-depth analysis and extending the references to include more theoretical perspectives. So that it is not too much of a read in one go, I have broken the article down into three sections and will post them in

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

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

[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

2018 marked the 27th Festival at the Edge and its second year at Alderford Lake (near Whitchurch in Shropshire). According to the blurb on t

In this article, I summarise discussions about storytelling and narriative art between artists from the Fabula Collective (based in Brighton

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