The Storytelling Actor - by David Novak ©1991
Storytelling is too vast and varied an art form to be the province
of any one tradition or culture. The current profession of storytelling
offers a kind of crossroads for many fields of endeavor, each
leading into the other through the common ground of the told story.
The shaman, the historian, the psychologist, the librarian, the
writer, and the raconteur all may find in storytelling the origin
of their professions and, perhaps, the apotheosis as well. The
stage actor, along with the rest, has a legitimate claim of kinship
to the first storyteller; and may also find in storytelling the
final fulfillment of his or her art form.
Many theatre artists turned to storytelling
in Europe and the United States over the last twenty years. What
has brought them to this crossroads? What do they seek and what
do they have to offer? A look at a few recent trends in performance
art may offer a means of understanding the place of the actor/theatre
artist1 in the vast arena of storytelling.
Theatre and Storytelling are so closely related it is difficult
at times to distinguish the one from the other. The soliloquy,
the aside, and the direct address of the audience are still prevalent
in modern plays and are indistinguishable from traditional storytelling
in the West. Other elements less traditional to Western storytelling,
such as dance, mask, ensemble and enactment have ties to storytelling
traditions elsewhere. The modern actor, therefore, is bound to
cross into storytelling at some point in his/her development.
The developmental path of the stage actor often involves explorations
in the root forms that make up the modern theatre. Many actors
engaged in such a process, are now storytellers. As actors recapitulate
the evolution of stage performance, they bring new life to the
theatre and become dynamic artists in their own right.
In the field
of Embryology, recapitulation theory suggests that “an organism
passes through developmental stages resembling various stages
in the phylogeny of its group; ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”2
The idea, simply, is that the development of the individual recapitulates
the evolution of its species. For example, there is a period in
the development of the human embryo in which it resembles the
aquatic life forms of its ancestors in the primordial sea. The
birth of the child may be said to recapitulate the evolution of
the species from sea to land. Whether or not this theory still
has validity in the life sciences3,
it may be useful to describe the way modern actors are recapitulating
the history of theatrical art. This recapitulation is leading
them into storytelling. In a way, the modern actor is re-evolving
into the modern storyteller.
If personal anecdote may serve to tell a collective story, I
will offer my own theatrical ontogeny as an example. As a child
I studied theatre for children. I received instruction in many
theatre skills: voice, movement, improvisation, interpretation,
make-up, playwrighting, etc. By the time I went to college I had
two major interests: directing and mime. Directing interested
me because it was concerned with all aspects of theatre art and
was therefore the most general and all-inclusive area of study.
Mime, on the other hand, interested me for the opposite reason:
it was theatre at its most essential. In mime, everything was
concentrated on the actors’ body and the small space it
occupies. Here was the beginning of my recapitulation. During
the 1970’s I divided my time between these two disciplines.
Yet it was mime that lead me to my theatrical origins and set
me on the path to storytelling.
The American revival of interest in mime was well under way by
the 1970’s, reaching a climax at the 1974 International
Mime Festival and Institute at Viterbo College in Lacrosse, WI.
There, a new generation of mime artists acknowledged one another,
celebrating this essential theatre and, at the same time, evolving
away from it. For the rest of the decade, they would expand their
mime repertoires to include mask, juggling, circus skills, experiments
with voice, and clowning. This period saw the advancement of commedia
d’ell arte troupes, juggling ensembles, the arrival of “new
vaudevillians”, a proliferation of soloactor dramatic performances
and performance artists.
In the late ‘70’s, as a member of the Theatre Project
Company in St. Louis, I was able to experience a synthesis of
my many interests. Here, I began to tell stories. In 1980, storytelling
came to St. Louis in a big way, with the first St. Louis Storytelling
Festival. I brought my early efforts at storytelling alongside
more accomplished artists such as Gamble Rogers, Heather Forest,
the energetic Jay O’Callahan and the wonderfully eclectic
Ken Feit. These storytellers, and many others like them, coming
from folk music, education, the ministry and the theatre, were
part of a dynamic exchange of energies and ideas in the form of
the spoken story. The simplicity of the telling of 2 stories was
capable of unifying otherwise disparate disciplines. Entering
into this arena, I discovered a kind of crossroads of many traditions.
Yet I continued to work in the theatre, retreating from the crossroads
to ply my trade along the well-traveled paths of the modern actor.
I went back to school for a graduate degree in a professional
training program. Yet now I was convinced that the actor, more
than the other artists that comprise the theatre arts family,
was at the center of the art. However, the practice of telling
stories (though never fully dormant) began to reassert itself
in my life and work. I left acting and returned to the crossroads
of storytelling.
Such was my ontogeny. Yet it was by
no means unique. Many theatre artists were making the same discoveries
and the same decisions. With some variation, I have heard my story
from scores of other storytellers. All were on the same pilgrimage,
though never certain where it would lead. This evolution may be
summed up in this sequence:
- A return to mime, reducing theatre to its essential element:
the actor in action. No voice. No word. No character. No story.
- A reintroduction of theatrical elements at different stages
(mask, circus, improvised scenario) bringing back character,
object, and narrative.
- A return to storytelling with the word arising from the speaker,
and the evolution is complete.4
This re-evolution was anticipated by one of its progenitors,
Etienne Decroux. Decroux developed the foundations of modern mime
in Paris beginning in the 1920’s. His students
included Jean-Louis Barrault, Jacques LeCoq, and Marcel Marceau.
Marceau, more than the others, brought this art form to prominence
in America and the world. Yet Decroux was not interested in the
kind of pantomime we saw commercialized in America in the ‘60’s
and ‘70’s. He wanted a radical stripping down of theatre
to its essence: the actor in action. In 1931, he articulated a
formula for the rehabilitation of the modern theatre, the first
three points of which were:
- "For a period of thirty years,
prohibit all arts other than the actor’s. Substitute for
the set of the play the set of the theatre, the backdrop of
all imaginable actions.
- "During the first ten years, eliminate all elevation
from the stage such as benches, stairs, terraces, balconies,
etc. Actors shall suggest the ideas of “above” and
“below,” although one partner may be beside the
other. Then allow elevations only on the condition that they
create greater challenges for the actor.
- During the first twenty years, prohibit all voiced sound.
After twenty years, allow unarticulated cries for five years.
Finally, during the last five years allow words contrived
by the actor. “ (Italics my own)5
From here he continues to prescribe the return of playwrighting
and so on, all the while insisting that the actor be the primary
artist. Given the modern evolution of mime-actors into storytellers,
Decrouxs’ prescription appears to have come about, much
as he had envisioned it.
The arrival of actors in storytelling
can be viewed as a sincere effort to rehabilitate their art and
their place within it. In an interesting discussion of the new
storytellers in France, Veronika Görög-Karady observes
that “a large number of them (ie. new storytellers) belong
to the generation which began its adventure with oral literature
after 1968. For many, the years between 1968 and 1978 are explicitly
considered to be the critical years of their development. Clearly,
significant breaks with other forms of classical artistic professions
occurred during this period."6
Why this break? What motivated it?
Many actors experience the modern professional
theatre as restrictive and oppressive. The theatre is increasingly
dominated by the director and the designer; most choices are dictated
to actors, rendering them artistically impotent. We have seen
many efforts to correct this, all closely related to storytelling:
the oneactor play (usually a biographical work in which the actor
has had some authorship); performance art (which seems to be moving
into storytelling at break-neck speed); and monolog (exemplified
by the work of Spaulding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Lily Tomlin, and
the like.) What do these forms offer that traditional theatre
(in its present state) does not? Again, Görög-Karady:
“public narration, even in an institutional context, appears
to approach the closest to the ideal of an immediate aesthetic
relationship.”7
Storytelling offers actors a chance to establish a meaningful
relationship with an audience. Rather than hiding behind the smokescreen
of ‘high culture’, the myth of celebrity, and the
cult of ego, the actor can come back to the real world as a real
person. Yet this real person still has the ability to transform,
to rhapsodize and to mesmerize, but in a new and intimate relationship
with an audience.
Actor-storytellers sometimes come under criticism for their use
of theatrical elements. The word acting is often used pejoratively
in reference to the storyteller who has in some way distanced
himself from his listeners. There is such a thing as good and
bad acting however, just as there is clear and muddled speech;
one can successfully tell a story while the other fails. Storytelling
is performance. Ideally that performance has elements of intimacy,
conversationality, and a degree of participation. The persona
of the storyteller is largely determined by that teller’s
tradition. (Even tellers which claim no traditional ties, have
a style influenced by their life-experiences and the culture(s)
that shaped them.) To require that the actor-storyteller not be
theatrical both a misconceives theatricality and disregards that
teller’s tradition.
The crossroads of storytelling may well be the breeding ground
for a new dramaturgy. Certainly the actor, recapitulated as the
storyteller, has the potential to fuse dramatic energies into
powerful storytelling which is immediate and original. What does
the audience get out of this? Perhaps it is a chance to experience
the theatre they were promised they would find at the playhouse,
but which eluded them. Perhaps it is a chance to participate in
a new indigenous theatre where the actor is celebrant and the
audience is a fellow-traveler. In any event, it certainly is a
chance to hear again a good story well told.
Notes
- It is important to keep in mind that
actors are artists of a kind: their medium is the theatre, their
craft works with human behaviors and languages. I use the term
“actor/theatre artist” to emphasize the point that
acting is more than rote memorization of prescribed language
and tasks. return to article
- McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific
& Technical Terms, 3rd Edition. return to
article
- It is pretty much an obsolete theory
in the Life Sciences, and actually may have been exploited to
support racist and sexist views in the 19th century. However,
the idea gives a useful analog for the purposes of this paper.
For an interesting discussion of recapitulation theory and its
socio-political implications, read The Mismeasure Of Man by
Stephen Jay Gould, New York, Norton, 1981. return
to article
- At various stages along this sequence
a number of important artists have surfaced: the mime of Marceau,
the mask work of Mummenschanz, the clowning of Bill Irwin, “new
vaudevillians” and now “spoken-word” artists,
and so on. return to article
- Vincent L. Angotti and Judie L. Herr,
“Etienne Decroux and the Advent of Modern Mime,”
Theatre Survey, vol. xv, no. 1, May 1974. Translated by Angotti
and Herr from Paroles sur le mime (Paris, 1963) by Etienne Decroux.
return to article
- Veronika Görög-Karady, “The
New Professional Storyteller In France”, ISFNR Theory
Commision Paper (1989). Reprinted in Storytelling in Contemporary
Societies, Lutz Röhrich/ Sabine Wienker-Piepho, eds. ,
Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, 1990. return
to article
- Ibid. return to article
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