Applied Storytelling #001 Community and Performance Storytelling

My name is Laila Jensen and I am interested in the difference between Community Storytelling and Performance Storytelling?

Press play to Episode #001 of Applied Storytelling on the difference between Community Storytelling and Performance Storytelling.

Well, Laila, that is a great question. Community Storytelling is a form of oral narrative where the storyteller has already entered into relationship with the audience before the story begins. The problem here is that Storytelling, Community and Relationship are all words that people use various ways and have very different meanings inside different environments. For some people an online community where you have never met anyone before is a community and for others a relationship means that you have entered into Holy matrimony for over 20 years. So as you can see, there is a wide degree of ideas about what is Community Storytelling.  Performance Storytelling is much easier to define.

That is the time when you get on the stage or in front of an audience for the purposes of telling a story. It can be in a theatre environment. It can be in a street environment. It can be at a fair. It is the time when the story teller is basically entertaining a professional perspective, is attempting to retain the gig for the next time to look good and to get paid well.

But Community storytelling is very different. Community storytelling is the time when you are building that community, when you are adding sub community through the dream of the story. I personally love community storytelling. I love the idea of giving to the community in a mysterious yet somehow delicious symphony of tastes and sounds. So that when they leave they have taken more than was there. They have consumed more than they thought possible.  Not that the two forms are exclusive in any way.

Community Storytelling has an advantage over Performance Storytelling in that it takes place without any payment. It takes place in many communities across the country pretty much invisibly all the time. That of course is the uncle who will share about the war stories and that is the Mayor who tells the story at the ceremony or the preacher who preaches on Sundays. All these are examples of successful Community storytelling. Storytelling that is happening all around us even as many people decry the end of oral narrative as we know it.

Community storytelling is not going to disappear any time soon. It is indicative of the American experience. It is a part of our country. It is how we talk to each other. It is how politicians speak to us. And it is how preachers preach, how children tell their stories to their parents and how mothers and fathers tell their stories at night to their children. Now it is true that the skill level of Community storytelling has fallen inside United States. And the number of extremely skilled storytellers has dropped off over the past decades since the 30s and 40s. Because television drives away Community storytellers – TV drives away the spaces that allow Community storytelling to exist.  As devices like TV have moved into the worldwide web and worldwide web has consumed the television experience, the amount of time that remains for Community storytelling has fallen more and more. But it is still there.

And you my listener still have the experiences, the understandings the skills to practice it. So I would challenge you to not leave storytelling to the professionals to pick up the challenge to pick up the microphone and to practice Community storytelling. For health, for wellness and for the strength of your community. We know that communities that contains strong social fabrics are much healthier than communities that do not. We know that people live longer in those communities. And we know that that social fabric helps the community to survive physical, financial or cultural disasters or even political ones. We know that story telling Community storytelling is a way for strengthening those social fabrics, for helping people to understand one another to build emotional connections. And we know that the art and the science of listening is essential to both successful storytelling and successful enjoyment of stories.

So I would suggest to you that your ability to tell stories to other people and your ability to listen to stories is tied up very much in your long term success and the long term success of your community.

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