Equilateral Triangle
Equilateral Triangle
THAT’S what storytelling is: the equilateral triangle of Audience + Teller + Story
Without any one of those, you just don’t have storytelling! (Another nifty metaphor: a 3-legged stool – “If you don’t have all 3, it doesn’t stand.”)
Storytelling just doesn’t happen without an audience.
I’ve had occasions when I was hired to perform at an event, a festival for example, where I was one of a variety of performers (including magicians, jugglers, musicians, etc.). Picture this:
- When it was time for one’s performance to begin, there often wasn’t already an audience gathered;
- They weren’t turning away from the corn dogs, dart-throwing games and/or giant costumed characters;
- (How do you compete with a roaming, bigger-than-life Cat in the Hat, or the Denver Nuggets’ mascot, anyway?!)
- The jugglers, musicians, etc., could begin their acts, and their ongoing music and/or antics would start to draw a curious audience that would then grow for the balance of the act…
With storytelling…you can’t do that! You cannot tell a story, if there’s no one to tell it TO!
This is a manifestation of both the power and fragility of the storytelling experience!
( – More about that in future blogs, I promise!)
A storyteller who happens to also be a musician as I am can begin with music – in those situations I could begin strumming my guitar and start that audience-gathering with a song. Or you could develop some other audience-gathering shtick – I mean tactic. But the storytelling itself does not happen without an audience.
True confession: Years ago I was hired to tell wolf stories at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the day they dedicated beautiful new bronze wolf sculptures. I had my assigned location, and the performance times were posted on a placard. But wouldn’t you know…the museum-going folks didn’t just turn themselves away from the dioramas and exhibits because a woman was standing by a stuffed antelope, telling them that “Soon we’ll begin a story!”…Hmmmm…
So I told my two young sons, who were with me, that I’d pay them each a dollar to sit in the audience area and act as “seeds.” Ahhh, paid audience plants! – It worked!
Once people saw them there and joined them, ready to engage, the storytelling happened – and wonderfully so!
Pam with a California audience
Equilateral triangle!
Story + Teller + Audience.
Rocky Mountain Storytelling Conference
Thanks for reading – Pam
Hi Pam,
I love the idea of audience “plants.” I will have to try it in the future.
While telling with an audience is aways referred, I love the story Syd Lieberman shares, a personal experience of the time he was hired to tell at a company picnic. The time arrived, no one filled the tent, so he choose to use it as practice time and did his entire set! Of course he tells it so much better than my short synopsis. 🙂
Karen
Ha – Nice Syd Lieberman story! Creative putting-to-good-use of the time and space! [Of course I’d still want to suggest/insist that it wasn’t storytelling, like a wedding rehearsal isn’t a wedding…missing a certain important something! Also, I can imagine his solution/choice would work better in a separated tent-space like that, rather than an open-air stage in the midst of games and refreshment booths, or that museum location…too many witnesses looking askance! :-O ] Thanks for the fun comment! (And let me know how it works, if you ever try plants…!) 😉
Great blog, Pam. I’ll stop by again.
Thanks so much, Maggie – Much appreciated!
Great post! I will be stopping by again #atozchallenge
Thanks so much, Teri – much appreciated! (What’s your blog?!)
There is a place where the storyteller doesn’t see the audience and has no feedback – radio telling. So I have to use my imagination because I do get feedback later and so I know there is an audience out there. It’s probably the most difficult storytelling I do.
Hmm, I’ll have to think about that, Julie, how this variation fits my triangle assertion! Thanks for stopping by!
You are so right about planting seeds as a beginning audience. We would have slow times during our storytelling sessions at the Institute of Texan Culture’s Folklife Festival. As emcees, we would sit on the hay bales listening to the storyteller on the stage. We would laugh extra hard sometimes when something funny was said. It helped the teller tell well and brought in other listeners! I know the storyteller was appreciative also! Love your blog!
Yep, “telling” is TO someone, right?! Thanks for sharing your memory here, Sue!
I read a book last week by Kevin M. Bradt, S.J. called “Story as a Way of Knowing” that is relevant to this topic. Bradt discusses the epistemology of what he calls “storying” as opposed to writing/print ways of knowing. He places so much emphasis on the importance of audience that he decided not to use “storytelling” to describe the event because, using the stool metaphor, it would be lopsided and thus unusable. Bradt says that storying “exists as an interpersonal transaction within a relationship that is constantly being reconfigured, changed, and recontextualized by the exchange of the ‘story-spoken’ and the ‘story-heard,’ the meaning meant and the meaning interpreted.”
Another connection that came to mind were the instructions I was given for performance exegesis of biblical texts. They were to include analysis of the story, the audience and the teller (performance elements). Sounds like a equilateral triangle to me!
BTW, nice blog!
Hey, Amelia, nice to “see” you here! Thanks for stopping by! 🙂
And thanks for referencing Brandt’s book – I read it a long time ago, and I appreciate your reminder of his way of working with these notions…”storying”… And yep – sounds like that triangle to me, too!
Thanks so much, Amelia!
Great post Pam thank you! Love the metaphors – 3 legged stool and the equilateral triangle. They really are strong images that bring home the message of story telling successfully.
Garden of Eden Blog
Thanks so much, Susan. I appreciate the, well, appreciation! 😉
And off we plunge into another AtoZ week – see you soon!