Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People: The Gaps in the Story [1st ed.] 9783030405809, 9783030405816

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN PLAY, PERFORMANCE, LEARNING, AND DEVELOPMENT

Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People The Gaps in the Story Catherine Heinemeyer

Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development Series Editor Lois Holzman East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy New York, NY, USA

This series showcases research, theory and practice linking play and performance to learning and development across the life span. Bringing the concerns of play theorists and performance practitioners together with those of educational and developmental psychologists and counsellors coincides with the increasing professional and public recognition that changing times require a reconceptualization of what it means to develop, to learn and to teach. In particular, outside of school and informal learning, the arts, and creativity are coming to be understood as essential in order to address school failure and isolation. Drawing upon existing expertise within and across disciplinary and geographical borders and theoretical perspectives, the series features collaborative projects and theoretical crossovers in the work of theatre artists, youth workers and scholars in educational, developmental, clinical and community psychology, social work and medicine—providing real world evidence of play and theatrical-type performance as powerful catalysts for socialemotional-cognitive growth and successful learning. Advisory Board Patch Adams, Founder, Gesundheit Institute, USA Natalia Gajdamaschko, Simon Fraser University, Canada Kenneth Gergen, Professor, Swarthmore College, USA and Tilburg University, the Netherlands Artin Gonçu, Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA James Johnson, Professor, Pennsylvania State University, USA Fernanda Liberali, Professor, Pontific Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil Yuji Moro, Professor, University of Tsukuba, Japan Alex Sutherland, Professor, Rhodes University, South Africa Jill Vialet, Founder and CEO, Playworks, USA More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14603

Catherine Heinemeyer

Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People The Gaps in the Story

Catherine Heinemeyer York St John University York, UK

Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development ISBN 978-3-030-40580-9 ISBN 978-3-030-40581-6  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: wundervisuals, Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The tremendous guidance, challenge and support I received from my three Ph.D. supervisors, Prof. Matthew Reason, Dr. Nick Rowe and Juliet Forster, were critical to the research which informs this book, as was the Arts and Humanities Research Council funding which enabled me to concentrate intensively on it. The regular writing retreats led by Clare Cunningham at York St John University have provided an essential and supportive space in which to revisit this body of research and capture it in book form. The unwavering support of my husband Andreas Heinemeyer and our three children was, of course, vital during both periods! Above all, I send my thanks out to all the young people, teachers and practitioners who welcomed me into their schools, youth theatres, mental health settings and youth clubs and agreed to be part of this research. They took a chance on me and taught me rich lessons; may others do the same for them.

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Contents

Part I  Storyknowing 1 Introduction 3 2 Storyknowing and Education 29 3 Chronotopes of Storytelling with Young People 59 Part II  Telling Stories 4 Pushing It Too Far at Maple House: Or, The Space Between Teller and Listeners 105 5 The Arresting Strangeness of Wormwood: Or, The Territory of Story 115 6 No Space for Stories at City School: Or, Dialogic Storytelling Fora 125

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CONTENTS

Part III  Story Gaps 7 Mapping the Space Between 137 8 Defining the Territory of Story: With a Special Focus on Young People’s Mental Health 171 9 Spaces for Storytelling 211 Appendix 1: Practitioner Interviews 251 Appendix 2: Story Games and Structures for Dialogue 261 Appendix 3: Recommended Further Reading 273 Index 275

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. P.1 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 9.1

Triangular relationship between listener, storyteller and story The role of writing in my practice research Conquergood’s ‘dialogical performance’ stance (1985: 5) Relationships between chronotopes of storytelling with young people The gaps in the storytelling exchange Story as a walk through unknown territory Story as founder of a ‘theatre of actions’ or ‘safe space’ Story as No-Man’s-Land Resingularisation and the storyteller

12 23 88 92 103 177 184 192 242

Image 1.1 Reflection sheet for John’s legend of swimming 4 Image 4.1 ‘Girls Combing Their Hair’ (1875–6), Edward Degas, The Philips Collection, Washington, USA. Available at https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/ the-phillips-collection?hl=en, accessed March 2020 107 Image 4.2 ‘The Dream (The Rabbit)’ (1927), Marc Chagall, https://www.marc-chagall-paintings.org/The-dreamThe-rabbit.html, accessed March 2020 109 Image 5.1 Imogen and I performing Wormwood in the Garden 118 Image 6.1 Poster for ‘Liars’ Lunch’ at City School 126 Image 7.1 The space between storyteller and listener 137 Image 8.1 The territory of story 171 Image 8.2 Felix and Oliver’s storyworld 199 Image 9.1 Spaces for storytelling 211

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PART I

Storyknowing

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

John’s Legend of Swimming John arrived as a new inpatient at Maple House, a residential mental health unit for adolescents, with a certain amount of drama. When I came in a few days later and met him for the first time, I couldn’t work out why the atmosphere was so charged, but got on with my weekly workshop. Not many young people wanted to join in any organised activities at that time, preferring to linger around the day room. So I sat with a small group, including John. Our city had recently been badly flooded, so I told them some flood myths, and we searched through newspapers for stories of local people’s almost equally epic experiences, noting them down as sketches and words on a roll of paper. John was particularly struck by the story of one elderly man for whom the flooding had been a boon, because the insurance money enabled him to carry out much-needed disability adaptations to his house. ‘There are always silver linings in life,’ he said, and showed me a ‘positive newspaper’ he had been writing in his free time for other inpatients. I asked the group if they had any personal watery memories which they wanted to add into the collage, and John erupted into laughter. He told me he had been so distressed on one of his first nights in the unit that he had absconded. He had run through the woods in the rain, swum through the swollen river and ended up, freezing, wounded and bedraggled, in a housing estate, where he had gone knocking from door to door looking for © The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6_1

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someone to help him. He was eventually invited in by two women who bandaged and cared for him, and returned him to the unit. Two days later the unit was still reeling from the incident. John himself, however, couldn’t believe the two women had been so welcoming to an alarming-looking stranger, and wished he could meet and thank them. Not only had they helped him practically, but the experience had suggested to him the idea of what he called an ‘infinite circle of trust’: ‘The ideal thing would be if everyone trusted each other, a circle of trust, then everything would work brilliantly in life.’ A few other young people and staff then contributed their own stories of the floods (Image 1.1). The following week, after gazing at the collage, John and another boy were keen to perform their stories to a group of non-participating young people, and we created a ‘stage set’ for them. John’s retelling was commanding and vivid. I pointed out that it incorporated striking parallels with the ‘Legend of Semerwater’ I had told the group, in which an old woman goes from door to door seeking food and shelter in a valley. No-one but a poor couple high up on the hillside will take her in, and she curses the ­valley-dwellers with a terrible flood. It was almost as if John were emphasising the parallels, mythologizing his own experience. It had become a legend. The rest of the group was gripped and, when I asked whether he would like to use the story as the starting point for a song, they encouraged him. It turned out that he was a keen lyricist, and another young man admitted to playing the guitar. John’s enthusiasm was infectious and soon almost all the inpatients were involved, playing instruments and singing the repeating chorus in his song, which featured his message of ‘the circle of trust’. The following week they performed it as a group for all the staff and discussed Image 1.1  Reflection sheet for John’s legend of swimming

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sending it into the local radio station, which was running a series on mutual aid during the post-flooding period. Maple House staff could easily have objected to such a celebration of what was essentially miscreant behaviour, related to John’s illness. They also could have discouraged him from discussing his clinical history publicly. Instead, they allowed themselves to be surprised. They saw how John and his legend were bringing other young people back, at least temporarily, into an optimistic engagement with what the unit had to offer.

Storytelling and Adolescents? Listening to and telling stories has almost certainly always played a vital role in young people’s lives, enabling them to explore their values, learn from the life experiences of others, negotiate their changing social roles and relationships, shape and be shaped by the world around them. It is even possible to argue that storytelling is the especial property of young people between childhood and adulthood. On a grand scale, narrative psychologist Dan McAdams (1993) suggests that a key challenge of adolescence is to become a mythmaker of one’s own life, to make sense of one’s own role in the world through story. On a more pragmatic, everyday level, Mike Wilson observes that teenagers tell stories informally and skilfully to fulfil a wide variety of personal and cultural agendas: For teenagers, storytelling is an essential and integral part of the process of social interaction and as such is absorbed into everyday communicative practices […]. (1997: 185)

As Wilson points out, young people’s storytelling is not limited to break time gossip and ghost stories at sleepovers; they are often adept in a wide range of genres, from urban myth to family lore to personal experience, and their repertoire (just like that of adults) is nourished by film, music, literature and television. Subcultures of young people continue to develop their own manifestations of storytelling, such as hip hop and spoken word, drawing on diverse cultural influences. In our increasingly networked society, vlogging, Instagram and other social media allow young people to ‘tell their own stories’ with increasing agility, bypassing adult-dominated mainstream media and making their mark on the publics they wish to influence (Boyd 2014).

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We might take from this that nothing needs to be done to develop or nurture storytelling practices among young people, and suspect that they neither need nor want stories told by adults. We may perceive sitting and listening to a story as a role for young children, and adolescents as too challenging, too unwilling to be enchanted, too absorbed in media culture, to enter into it. The traditional oral storytelling exchange seems to belong to smoky cottages or campfires. We might also ask what stories we have that are of use or interest to young people. The adolescent experience has changed so rapidly that even younger adults’ memories of teenage years seem alarmingly dated, making us anxious that our own life experience may be irrelevant to young people. We may even worry about the risk of overemphasising narrative at all. Generally speaking, our culture seems well aware of the importance of storytelling these days. Advertisers tell a brand’s story; heritage sites ‘uncover hidden stories’; foreign correspondents focus their reportage on the case study of a single family; and politicians tell stories in place of facts, with alarming consequences for democracy. We are starting to get rightly worried, in fact, that stories told from different perspectives are starting to replace the search for truth. Enough already with all the storytelling! It is striking, therefore, that there does exist a wide range of storytellers, arts practitioners, teachers, mental health professionals, youth workers and socially engaged researchers, who consciously choose to tell and listen to stories with adolescent young people. Very little of this storytelling takes place around campfires, and much of it crosses boundaries of genre, the written and spoken word, the digital and sensory worlds. Their motivations are as varied as their approaches. In US middle and high schools, Kevin Cordi develops ‘storytelling troupes’ who perform to fellow students to expand pupils’ opportunities for self-expression and creativity (Cordi 2003); on a deprived housing estate in Glasgow, the Village Storytelling Centre (2018) hosts storytelling clubs for secondary school pupils and young carers; volunteer storytellers at Belfast’s Fighting Words project support groups of students to develop their own original stories through both the spoken and written word (Young at Art 2018). The Scottish social enterprise Real Talk facilitates personal storytelling evenings, attended mostly by young people, to enable people to share their experiences of mental ill health (Real Talk 2018); theatre practitioners at the Freedom Theatre in Palestine tell fantastical

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stories to provide alternative imaginative playgrounds to young people whose everyday lives are fenced in by barbed wire and checkpoints. Participatory filmmakers Inspired Youth (2015) work with young ‘experts by experience’ to make films which explore issues such as the needs of young carers, often curating fictionalised narratives based on the true stories of participant-filmmakers. Theatre troupe Company Three (2020) publish ‘blueprints’, rather than scripts, for plays for young actors to perform, incorporating stories they gather themselves; The Verbatim Formula (undated) facilitates workshops in which looked-after and care-experienced young people swap their own stories and then reshape them to create verbatim theatre. All of the above might be considered what Walter Benjamin (1973) called ‘sailor storytellers’—visitors to a setting from distant lands, whether the distance is geographical or social. Perhaps even more significant is the endurance of those he called ‘farmer storytellers’, people who work within settings every day and weave their storytelling into the texture of their working practice there. Beneath the notice of any funders or even perhaps of their employers, some secondary teachers stray from their lesson plans and stated learning objectives to respond to a pupil’s slightly left-field question with a story of something they once saw or read. Countless health professionals, probation and housing officers share anecdotes from their own past with their clients, to build trust, or to guide them through situations they are facing. Whether they name their work as storytelling or not, all these people sense or realise that conversation conducted through the medium of narrative enables a qualitatively different kind of understanding. It is an alternative track to mutual comprehension, providing a parallel path when the usual means of communication with young people are blocked or congested. Arthur Frank (1995) suggests that storytelling is a means of putting one’s experience and one’s self at the service of one’s listener—of ‘being for the Other’, in Zygmunt Bauman’s words (1993). In that sense, these diverse storytellers are making themselves genuinely available to adolescents in their storytelling encounters with them, in a way that everyday professional interactions may not allow. There is, however, very little articulate exploration of storytelling practice with this age group, or guidance as to its potential as an ­open-ended practice. Where storytelling is ‘used’ and documented within, e.g., mental health, education or criminal justice, it is often assessed narrowly on its success in achieving pre-specified behavioural or attitudinal

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outcomes: perhaps to decrease repeat offending, or to raise awareness of a health issue. This is not only a limited view—it shows a misunderstanding of the very way that story works. Communication through storytelling is always unpredictable, unruly; it is a process of intuitive negotiation between two or more minds. A storyteller may think she has presented an epic which explores the need for tolerance, until she is faced with a barrage of questions as to the fate of the sick dog in the first scene. What listeners take away from a story is, ultimately, up to them. And this is in fact a necessary and wonderful aspect of storytelling, the source of its continued flexibility and regeneration. As Jerome Bruner points out, ‘a culture’s stories reflect not only the comforts of conformity, but also its glimmerings of possibility. So stories can be dangerous stuff’ (Bruner 2006: 232). This book contends that the current generation of young people need spaces where they can have unusual conversations with non-aligned adults and each other. Whether storytellers are ‘sailor storytellers’ or ‘farmer storytellers’, storytelling exchanges often enable such conversations by suspending usual roles and rules. This is a particularly fluid and sometimes unsettling way of working, requiring a map or ‘counsel’, in the sense described by Benjamin (1973) in his essay ‘The Storyteller’. This book is my attempt to provide this. What it offers is not a ‘model’ of practice, nor a ‘how-to guide’ (see ‘Recommended Further Reading’ for some guides to developing your storytelling skills). Rather, I aim to share my own discoveries about the potential of storytelling, developed through diverse and long-term practice with adolescent young people and, in so doing, to prepare the reader for some aspects of the landscape they may traverse themselves.

The Borders of This Book Every observation in this book is inescapably situated in a particular context, and made from the vantage point of my own practice and the practice of others which has informed mine. The latter is concentrated in the UK, although it draws on a more international body of theory and practice. Further, the review of evolving storytelling practice in Chapter 3 is delineated by a largely educational/informal educational perspective—focusing on storytelling that happens where adults and adolescents are both present. The book does not primarily concern itself with the richness of diverse narrative cultures that grow up among adolescents

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themselves, although these are a vital counterpart to any adult-facilitated storytelling or participatory arts work with young people—as can hopefully be discerned in the stories of practice in Part II. A particularly significant backdrop against which I examine storytelling practice is therefore the educational context in England, as becomes apparent in Chapter 2. This backdrop is dominated by neoliberal systems of accountability, assessment and competition, with resulting closely defined curricula and emphasis on skills required by a globalised economy. For readers from other countries, this overview might act as a case study rather than resembling the educational experience of young people with whom they are concerned. Even Welsh and Scottish readers will recognise significant differences, working as they are in a context much more sympathetic to student-centred learning approaches and to the creative arts. However, as Fazal Rizvi and Bob Lingard (2010) document, the same overarching trends can be witnessed in the education systems of numerous countries, albeit at different paces and with local nuance. The fact that this practice research took place in England places a further significant restriction on its scope, in that the rich enduring storytelling practices which might be observed in developing countries (particularly in rural areas), and among indigenous peoples in many countries, have limited influence here. Indeed, for many young people, I was their first significant contact with someone who called herself a storyteller. Where my practice did give me glimpses of particular young people’s own narrative inheritances, I seek to share these glimpses with the reader and explore how they brought these resources to the storytelling encounter. Related limitations include how my own ethnicity (white Irish) conditions my interactions with young people, and the relative cultural homogeneity (white British) of the area in which the majority of my practice was conducted. A considerable degree of cultural travelling, research and curiosity is inherent to storytelling, and my repertoire involves stories from many cultures; however, this is always passed through the filter of my own position as a white, middle-class woman on a relatively rich European island. As Donna Haraway (1988) reminds us, there is no such thing as a ‘view from nowhere’. A further caveat concerns the distinction between the kind of practice that was possible within fully funded doctoral research, and the kind of practice more usual within current funding structures. As will be explored further in Chapter 3, much current participatory arts work with

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young people is structured as time-limited projects on behalf of a sponsoring organisation (a school or charity, or a health, criminal justice or arts organisation), often aiming to achieve particular outcomes. I have been involved in many such projects myself. In contrast, the practice discussed in this book, which took place between 2013 and 2016, had the luxury of being primarily driven by my own perceptions of the needs and creative impulses of the young people involved. Rather than rendering my findings irrelevant, however, I hope this serves as a way of testing the full potential of storytelling for dialogue, by removing most possible excuses. I am telling stories of my storytelling world, and inviting yours in return.

Storytelling and Applied Theatre This book is also a quest to bring together two worlds: participatory storytelling and applied theatre research. In the UK as in many countries, both storytellers and applied theatre practitioners work in similar community settings—schools, mental health settings, disability groups, youth and community work. Both groups aim to bring about some gains in quality of life, range of options, sense of agency or expressive abilities in those whom they work, often young people experiencing disadvantage in some form. The lack of engagement between these two adjacent bodies of reflective practice is to the detriment of both (though bridges are being built in places). It is also puzzling, until we look at the different tracks along which their ‘parent’ performance disciplines, storytelling and theatre, have developed in recent decades. In the period following the 1960s counterculture in many European and Anglophone countries, alternative theatre-makers developed new forms of theatre to enable cultural emancipation from capitalist institutions, and suggest different visions for society. Simultaneously, the storytelling movement rediscovered and reinvented an ancient form of everyday theatre which could….enable cultural emancipation from capitalist institutions, and suggest different visions for society! Both have sought new spaces and terrains to bring their work beyond conventional performance spaces to audiences in their own communities. Yet the two have held themselves largely apart. The theatre world has tended (with notable exceptions) to be fairly incurious about developments in the apparently homespun and insular world of storytelling. Meanwhile, storytellers’ discovery of the power of unmediated, unscripted, oral

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narration can risk creating an unhelpful mystique, and unwritten rules which exclude many forms of storytelling (such as theatre, literature, spoken word and multimedia forms), including those in which young people are active. Mike Wilson (2006) and Thomas Maguire (2015) have made important contributions to teasing apart this barbed wire fence between storytelling and theatre, particularly within performance settings. While both appreciate the different values and practices that have evolved within alternative theatre and storytelling, they reject the idea of a clear boundary between them, and celebrate the (growing) body of innovative performance which draws on both traditions. Their examples range from Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo, to the political cabarets of 7:84, to Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, to Conor MacPherson’s Rum and Vodka, to Billy Connolly’s close-to-the-bone comic storytelling. Maguire explores how the simplicity of storytelling allows performers like Anna Deavere Smith, Joan Didion and David Hare to involve audiences deeply in their autobiographical experiences and their political implications. It is timely to open up a similar dialogue between participatory storytelling with young people and applied theatre. In one direction of flow, storytelling practice could learn and benefit from the critical awareness and cultural agility of much applied theatre research. In the other, applied theatre practitioners could learn from storytellers’ rich understanding of what Matthew Reason and I (2016) call ‘story­knowing’, or how stories really work. This book argues that a rich practice can arise at the nexus between these two traditions, responsive to the needs of contemporary young people and adaptable to a wide range of formal and informal settings. The Tenets of Storytelling and of Applied Theatre The first task in this process of exchange is to lay out something which is an article of faith for most storytellers: the triangular relationship between listener, storyteller and story (see, e.g., Jackson 2002; Maguire 2015). This is the understanding that, when people meet and a story is told, there are three separate relationships at play, bringing about a meeting of minds and a balance of power between these three parties. The storyteller may bring the story and appear to be the dominant voice, but the story will in fact take shape in negotiation with the listener(s). Even a nursery school teacher telling The Three Little Pigs to a class of

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­ -year-olds cannot determine what messages, meanings or learnings the 3 children will take away from the story. The children can affect her telling through their physical responses to the images forming in their minds; through their bestowal or withdrawal of attention, their laughter, interruptions and questions; through their memories of pigs previously seen, wolves previously feared and versions previously heard. The teacher may sense these resonances, sometimes acutely and sometimes dimly, and seek to respond to them. Geoff Mead describes his stark realisation early in his career as a storyteller that the storyteller’s ability to do this is, and must be, limited: ‘All three are in relationship with each other but the crucial relationship between the audience and the story is beyond the storyteller’s grasp’ (2011: 39–40) (Fig 1.1). Looking back on my own induction and informal training as a ­storyteller—learning from others in workshops, gatherings, clubs, and performances—I can see how this model, or tenet, was communicated to me through practice. I was encouraged, by example, to look into my listeners’ eyes and follow the threads of their interest. As a listener, I experienced this from the other side, seeing other storytellers recognising my own appreciation of a certain character or moment, and bending their tellings to it. Experienced storytellers shared their minimalistic devices for memorising the bare bones of a story’s plot, so as to leave its fleshing out to this live interaction with listeners. I never heard an explicit moral being drawn from any story, nor any questions being asked to assess listeners’ understanding or interpretation. Some storytellers might call for active audience participation in songs or refrains, but the most valued participation was absorbed listening. A story might be followed by a brief

Fig. 1.1  Triangular relationship between listener, storyteller and story

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discussion, but by far the most common response was a brief appreciative silence, often followed by another answering story from someone else. Storyteller Jo Blake (Appendix 1) describes her own similar induction into storytelling, and rightly calls for an opening up and questioning of this mode of transmission. This is a discussion to which this book will return. At this stage, however, I will assert the simplicity of one of its overriding strengths. That is, the effect of embracing this triangle as a model is continually to draw attention to the ‘gaps’ in a story—its ambiguities and blind spots—and the sharing of meaning-making within these gaps between storyteller and listener. The storytelling exchange, understood in this way, becomes an aspiration towards an almost magical intersubjective meeting of minds, what Martin Buber (2013) called a ‘real conversation’ between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, while simultaneously emphasising that such a meeting is impossible. The message, implicit or explicit, I absorbed from the storytelling movement is: Simply look your listeners in the eye, tell a story just for them, and then accept their freedom to develop their own relationship to it. Your telling will be full of gaps, and this will be the most fertile thing about it. In contrast to this emphasis on the listener’s privacy, applied theatre has traditionally taken a much more interventionist approach. Influenced by Augusto Boal’s ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ (TO) approaches (1993, 1995), and those of others after him, applied theatre often aspires to have a direct effect on reality, or at least on participants’ understandings or behaviour. The starting point for TO workshops is often, in fact, storytelling by participants or facilitators, but there end the similarities to storytelling practice as described above. Far from leaving listeners to make their own sense of the stories they have heard, facilitators seek to use them to set off a process of ‘ascesis’—‘the movement from the phenomenon to the law which regulates phenomena of that kind’ (Jackson in Boal 1995: xx). That is, TO practice seeks to make participants (or ‘spect-actors’) more consciously aware of the injustices limiting their lives, and provide them with immediate opportunities to rehearse resisting them. Applied theatre practice has radiated in many directions beyond Boal, but this dynamic action orientation remains as a tenet, and often as a measure of its usefulness. The concept of ‘usefulness’ and the instrumental value of storytelling are thorny and interesting questions which will repeatedly surface in this book.

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The Dialogic Zone The problem with tenets is suggested by the word itself, which is rooted in the Latin ‘tenere’, to hold. Something we hold onto too tightly ceases to act as a guiding light and becomes instead a binding chain, limiting where our journeys can lead us. A storytelling practice too rigidly reliant on the ‘magic’ of the triangular relationship risks overemphasising the power of the story itself, and missing opportunities for dialogue and advocacy through storytelling. An applied theatre practice too fixated on a ‘dynamic’ impact on the real world may tie down meanings too tightly or too quickly. It may also raise unrealistic expectations of empowerment of young people, in a socioeconomic situation in which they have limited power and few real options, as James Thompson (2011) warns. Neither may reflect the wishes of young people, who may need most of all a space in which they can explore their place in the world from many sides, and gradually formulate their own agendas. For this reason it is not surprising that both storytellers and applied theatre practitioners are starting to hold their tenets more lightly, learning from each other, and seeking a broader range of influences to guide them. A key example, influential on my own thinking and practice, is the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at the University of South Wales, which since 2008 has brought together many socially engaged researchers and practitioners to explore a broad range of interdisciplinary and contemporary approaches to storytelling. It is also possible to see a more common agenda developing in the work of recent theorists whose writings are influencing a wide range of practitioners working with young people through story. This agenda responds to the most pressing issues in young people’s lifeworld at this time, and in Chapter 3 I will be exploring it under the banner of ‘dialogic storytelling’. Crucial Influences and Key Discussions Three key discussions in particular, which echo with but also extend the tenets of storytelling, have had such an influence on applied theatre practice in recent years, that it is worth outlining them briefly before we proceed, despite the risk of oversimplification. While many practitioners may not have read the authors in question, their ideas have trickled through via osmosis, training and debates within professions. As will be seen,

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the three are interconnected. All will be explored in more detail in later chapters. The first is the discussion of the relationship between ‘affect’ and ‘effect’, explored most incisively by James Thompson (2011) and shaped by numerous authors before and since. Art of all kinds produces an emotional, or affective, response; in fact this is what defines it. It may also produce an effect – a change in behaviour or attitude (say, resistance to prejudice, or a decrease in offending behaviour). Yet Thompson (2011) argues that the idea of shooting directly for this effect has become over-dominant in applied theatre, rests on flawed analogies between theatre and therapy, and may even pose risks to participants by raising false hopes of their immediate agency to change their circumstances. Rather, he wishes applied theatre practitioners to concentrate on making good, honest theatre, and to be closely attentive to participants’ actual desires and situations. Helen Nicholson draws on her own rich practice to point out the need for humility and responsiveness in doing this, since participants’ affective or effective responses cannot be second-guessed or planned for: ‘Recognising that stories have multiple interpretations involves identifying the limits of one’s own horizons’ (2005: 64). She describes, for example, how the same workshop for drama teachers given in the UK and in post-war Sri Lanka generated radically different reactions. Most recently, Cathy Sloan helps to articulate how applied theatre’s potential for good in fact relies on an acceptance of this very unpredictability, and the scope it offers for choice and change: applied theatre provides ‘a space of potentiality which embraces indeterminacy as a leaning towards fluidity rather than static assumptions or agendas’ (2018: 3). There are clear parallels here to storytellers’ understanding of the dynamic space of negotiation between teller, listeners and story. The second is the exploration of the idea of ‘dialogue’ between those of different backgrounds, statuses and perspectives. Two key moments in this have been Dwight Conquergood’s influential 1985 essay, ‘Performing as a moral act’, and Grant Kester’s (2004) identification of an emergent ‘dialogical aesthetics’ in art. Conquergood examines the dialogue between the performer and the community whose experiences he seeks to represent in his performance, based on his own experience of performing the stories of disadvantaged groups for advocacy purposes. There are clear lessons for both ‘farmer’ and ‘sailor’ storytellers in his mapping of the potential ethical pitfalls performers can fall into in such work—but he urges sensitive persistence, a continued quest for

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genuine dialogue. Kester concentrates on art which aims to create dialogue between different communities (such as older people and teenagers, farmers and indigenous land users, or police officers and inner-city youth). He highlights the potential of such art projects to open up another channel for genuine, empathetic listening across social faultlines, where conventional approaches to communication have failed. Underneath both of these understandings of artistic dialogue lies Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) exposition of the dialogic nature of all language, written or spoken. The multifarious ways in which human understanding and language evolve rely upon the way each utterance, untidily and unpredictably, influences future utterances. The significance of storytelling by and with adolescents is integrally bound up in a Bakhtinian understanding of how meanings particular to certain groups accrue in layers and can be transmitted to wider society. The perspectives of Bakhtin, Kester and Conquergood are discussed in greater depth in Chapter 3, which also picks up the task of defining a dialogic approach to storytelling with young people. The third is the critique of the idea of ‘participation’, which has become understood as a self-evident Good Thing since the 1960s, and harnessed by recent governments as a means of promoting a certain conception of good citizenship. Claire Bishop (2012) makes a powerful attack on the capture of participatory art by the state to neutralise the political threat posed by disadvantaged communities, and by art itself. Many participatory art projects seek to demonstrably ‘involve’ marginalised people in projects which ameliorate their social situation, without challenging the fundamental causes of that situation. Indeed Kester (2004) makes the same point, but thereafter Bishop parts company with him, describing the ‘dialogic’ works he chronicles as consensual and unprovocative. She also, like Jacques Ranciere (2009), criticises the notion that an active spectator, joining in with a project, is participating in a more meaningful way than one ‘simply’ listening or watching, making sense of it in his own mind. For Ranciere the political or social impact of an artwork is in the viewer or listener’s privacy and freedom to draw his own conclusions from it, and the potential it offers for him to imagine alternative realities than those prescribed by society or even by the artist. Matthew Reason points out that this process of making sense of an artwork may be a lifelong one: he sees an artistic experience as ‘something actively constructed by individuals in negotiation and in relation to their sense of selves, of others and of the world around them’

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(2010: 24), in an ‘ongoing, limitless, and plural process’ (25). Thus the stories we heard long ago may keep resurfacing in our memories, chiming harmonies and dissonances with our more recent experiences, and taking on new meanings as they do so. This may, ultimately, be our most important form of ‘participation’ in them. All of these arguments oppose the growing tendency by many funding bodies, as has been rigorously documented by Belfiore and Bennett (2008, 2010), to expect a measurable instrumental benefit from artistic experiences. I will risk gross oversimplification one more time. My observation is that storytellers—both those that call themselves storytellers, and those that ‘simply’ tell stories in their work—tend to have a tacit appreciation of these three ‘new’ sensibilities. Realisations that stories work through affect rather than effect, that dialogue is complex and often oblique, and that participation can take many different, sometimes invisible forms, resonate closely with the tenets of storytelling and the experience of most storytellers. Yet they have not, at least until very recently, been part of the debates on the role of practitioners. The task of this book is to build on these and other understandings to elucidate a dialogic approach in relation to practice with young people: meeting and collaborating with them in the ‘gaps’ within stories. I must first of all justify my own basis for taking this upon myself.

My Own Journey Towards Dialogic Storytelling My own journey towards articulating this dialogic approach to storytelling with young people was through long-term doctoral ­practice-as-research in a wide variety of settings. I was first led to define a magical chronotope, and realise that I was often operating within it, when I observed that telling stories to teenagers called for a loosening of the ‘web’ in which I hold my listeners during performance. The following was one of several incidents which made this clear: Performing at a small festival this summer, I found myself in a yurt, unexpectedly telling to a group including not only young children and parents, but also four teenage boys. I started to spin my tale of Maori adventurers, inviting the audience to row with me across the ocean, chanting in time with the oars. The boys rowed – and how they rowed. They generated enormous waves that sent them and other audience members crashing to the ground. They parodied the fairies’ wicked baby-stealing and wailed like

18  C. HEINEMEYER abandoned infants; they answered every rhetorical question with a smart riposte. The little children were transfixed by them, my ‘web’ of entrancement was broken, and my cheeks started turning red. And yet the boys stayed until the end of the performance. Later in the weekend, they asked me to come and see an intricate ‘fairy theme park’ they had built in the woods, with lookout points for spotting babies to steal. (Heinemeyer 2013)

Such subversive engagement was certainly a response to a ‘magical’ atmosphere the boys felt had been set up for younger children. They mocked and undermined the absorbing experience I had sought to give the young families present—clearly exemplifying why adolescents are often perceived as too challenging, too unwilling to be enchanted, for storytelling. If the magical chronotope tends to demand reverence for a certain folk or traditional repertoire and a certain spellbinding mode of performance and reception, they had wrested both out from my control. However, as their later playful development of the storyworld indicated, what they were rejecting was not the story but the closed terms within which it was offered. Moreover, they wanted me to see and respond to their creation. It was a beautiful example of what Jo Blake (Appendix 1) calls ‘reverent irreverence’. This and similar experiences led me to question my own assumptions and practices regarding storytelling with young people. The four boys’ implicit critique of my practice seemed to confirm Jack Zipes’ indictment of storytellers who behave as ‘stars and initiates of a secret sect, as if only they possess the secret of a good story’ (1995: 4). Zipes, whose aim is always to hand over to young people the strategies of storymaking, would have been delighted with the boys’ irreverent appropriation of my story for their own purposes. Yet I felt reluctant to adopt Zipes’ methodology wholesale. He proposes that storytellers embrace the role of ‘rabble-rouser’ (1995: 6), yet I suspected that this risked usurping the role of the young people themselves. After all, the four teenage boys at the festival had taken joy in challenging me by turning my story inside out. A teacher at Maple House similarly observed that one of my most important functions in the setting was allowing the young people to make the empowering choice to reject or subvert my stories. In order for them to choose to strip the dignity or wholeness from the story, it needed to be present in the first place. Equally, there were many occasions when young people chose to

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leave its dignity intact, finding in my stance vis-a-vis my story the permission to present their own with equal care. On still further occasions, all my efforts to facilitate any creative response to a story were fruitless; one young woman at Maple House presented me with a letter from her mother asking that she be allowed to be present to listen to stories, but not have to say a word. Her responses, whether respectful or subversive, were hers alone. It simply was not possible to foresee what a group of young people might want from me on a given day. I struggled with the demands of this: In the course of a week I tell stories to a group of three 14-year-olds who are playing with clay and interrupting me continually to tell me what ought to happen next; to a roomful of silent, wide-eyed, troubled, inscrutable adolescents whose reactions are unpredictable and momentous […] When I say I feel vertiginous from surfing this continuum within storytelling every week, it’s because I’m sliding along a scale which has big bumps along it. It demands that I reset my sense of purpose and role. (Heinemeyer 2014)

Practice with this age group led me away from reliance on magical engagement; yet young people also resisted any too great expectations of dynamic engagement. It was this that generated my recognition of a dialogic chronotope which allows the teller to borrow from the repertoire and performance styles of both the magic and dynamic, and to reach, at times, beyond the limits of both. Such a practice may look very diverse. At times it may involve long, absorbing, ‘magical’ tellings of stories by me, and tellings or retellings by young people; or it may have elements of a structured, dynamic, workshop which helps a group see through the stereotypes embodied in a story. Yet more often it may be difficult to distinguish from a normal social gathering. My experience resonates with the observations of Amy Shuman (1986) and Mike Wilson (1997) that adolescents often prefer more informal, conversational or playful performance. Working with adolescents has a tendency to pull storytellers down what Wilson defines as the ‘performance spectrum’ to this informal style. It is key to holding a dialogic tension between the poles of magical and dynamic engagement, ready to discern the nature of their interest (or disinterest) and what a story can or cannot provide for them in a given moment. This may mean being able to break off in mid-performance for a discussion

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the story provokes (a form of metalepsis, leaving the storyworld in order to comment on it); or sometimes simply listening to a group of teenagers chatting, and knowing when to add a relevant story. Dialogic storytelling is, for me, a way of inhabiting shifting sands. It is conversation which holds the door open for artistry, or artistry that does not shut down conversation.

Practice Research: One Articulation Practice research (or ‘practice as research’, PaR) is now established as a key methodology within arts research (Hann 2015; Nelson 2013). It enshrines a process Schoen (1983) calls ‘reflection-in-action’, by which practitioners refine and come to understand their practice, as a vital source of knowledge. PaR is still relatively new as an approach to applied arts research, so it may be of value to some readers for me to give some further detail on my particular approach to it. My core methodology was reflective practice: the hundreds of storytelling workshops I have held with young people, the documentation of process and outputs of these workshops, and the critical reflection I engaged in both individually and in dialogue with collaborators (participants and practitioners/teachers), which in turn reshaped my practice. In this I took inspiration from the cultural democracy of certain early community artists (Braden 1978), who sought not to ‘bring their artform to the people’ but to reshape it in response to communities’ interests. Crucially, this involves recognising young people’s existing storytelling practices, and entering into creative dialogue with these. A further element required to raise such reflective practice to the level of practice as research is a conscious fertilisation of one’s own thinking by the thinking of others, a ‘fast track’ in Hall’s words (1999: 1). Rather than ‘depth mining’ into a particular discipline, Nelson advocates a ‘syncretic’ approach to reading in PaR (2013: 34), allowing oneself to be led along interesting paths that resonate with one’s practice, or (as I often found to be the case) provoke or challenge one’s assumptions. In this way, a PaR researcher is justified in drawing on a more eclectic and interdisciplinary network of theoretical influences than conventional research may entail. Thus, my research was thoroughly infused with theory, as well as the practice of others. While it is primarily a means of capturing what artistic practice ‘knows’, PaR tends to be, as both Nelson (2013) and Morwenna

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Griffiths (2010) state, a multi-modal enquiry incorporating ethnographic and other social science approaches as well as art-based enquiry. My own enquiry into storytelling with adolescents was no exception. In addition to reflective practice, I also drew on two ethnographic methodologies. Firstly, I employed the ‘arts ethnography’ of researchers like Wendy Luttrell (2003), who seek to allow research participants to represent themselves in the research through their own considered artistic creations (in the case of my research, usually stories). Secondly, I drew on thinking from performance research, a notoriously difficult-to-define cluster of methodologies which ‘resist(s) disconnected, disembodied, and disinterested forms of scholarship’ (Performance Research 2018), and celebrate the unexpected, situated knowledge which can arise from performance itself. Specifically, I found the telling of a story itself to function as a performance research method. Telling a story creates an intersubjective space in which sense can be made (as will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3). While telling a story, I am aware of the points where it resonates with participants, as well as those where its unfamiliar causality surprises or its anachronism shocks them. As Bruner points out, surprise ‘allows us to probe what people take for granted’ (1986: 46), their presuppositions and when they feel these have been violated; it thus helps us to understand the models of the world by which other people work. Fundamental to the oral telling of a story is that I must respond accordingly to create, on my feet, a retelling of it for these young people on this occasion. To the extent that I can capture these tacit observations after the fact, either by making them explicit in writing or by allowing them to modify my future practice, this makes the telling of the myth or folk story itself a research method into the perceptions of adolescents. In total, I worked with approximately 400 young people, in some cases for only a few sessions, in other cases over a period of up to two years. Brief narratives of my work in each of these settings can be found in my online curated portfolio (www.storyknowingwithadolescents.net) along with a filmed performance of a meta-narrative of a typical workshop, including a folktale told by me. The three settings in which I spent most time, and which will most frequently be referred to in the pages of this book, are an adolescent psychiatric unit (pseudonym: Maple House), an urban comprehensive school (pseudonym: City School) and a youth theatre for young people with additional learning needs (Acting Up). In Maple House, I led weekly storytelling sessions with inpatients aged

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13–17 for two years and also initiated collaborative performance, writing and digital storytelling projects with small groups of interested young people on several occasions. In City School, I held twice-termly storytelling sessions with three 11–14-year-old ‘intervention classes’—small classes of ‘lower ability’ young people for two years, ran a lunchtime storytelling club, led training sessions for staff and mentored talented young storytellers to perform in the local theatre. In Acting Up, I acted as storyteller and assistant practitioner for one year, during which period the group devised and performed a show called ‘Mythic’ which drew together various traditional and fictional stories the group had explored. I also held shorter storytelling residencies in other groups: a youth club for young people of migrant backgrounds (pseudonym: Global Youth Club), a small alternative education provision (pseudonym: Kitchen School), a mainstream youth theatre for 14–16-year-olds (Project J), a project for young people refusing to attend school regularly (The Collaborative Project), holiday storytelling projects at York Theatre Royal and an Indian Dance school (TICO). Drawing research findings from such a large body of practice seems to involve a great degree of redundancy or ‘waste’, unless one takes into account that in PaR the practice cycle does not simply generate data; it is also the principal means of analysis and the embodiment of its findings. The process leaves its marks on the practitioner-researcher’s self, and the self thus becomes a research instrument, as I noted in a blog post: My skin has thickened, my instincts have been tuned, my range and repertoire has been stretched in every direction. I am incorporating this learning, these ‘findings’, into my own self, whether I choose to or not. (Heinemeyer 2015)

Processing my reflection on this large body of practice into theoretical understandings required a sequential and disciplined approach to writing. Following workshops with young people, I wrote extensive field notes. In addition to capturing incidents and relating them to my ongoing processes of understanding, these also made space for what Luttrell (2003) calls ‘dusting off’, a form of emotional debrief that allowed me to emerge from the interpersonal intensity of practice and to make sense of it. The next stage was to write blog posts which crystallised particular concepts as they emerged from the research. Linking these concepts formed the basis of the many conference papers and articles I wrote as I

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progressed, and gradually formed my theoretical framework. There was therefore a journey from narrative knowledge (incidents from practice) to abstracted or propositional knowledge (theorising practice), and to some extent back to narrative for the purposes of sharing my understandings (Fig 1.2). Clearly, the process of sharing knowledge gained from working with young people is saturated with ethical dimensions. Research ethics in relation to applied practice could occupy an entire book of their own, and the briefest of notes must suffice here. The ethical obligations of the researcher articulated by Beauchamp et al. (1982: 18–19) as ­ non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy or self-determination, and justice, are complex, intersecting and subject to interpretation on a dayby-day basis. While I complied with all the university’s ethical approval procedures, with particular emphasis on young people’s ongoing informed consent to participate in my research, formal ethical procedures are largely focused on the principle of non-maleficence (doing no harm), and cannot guarantee even that. Murphy and Dingwall (2001) argue, for example, that a consent form does more to protect the researcher than the participant. Rather, ethical PaR in participatory settings is a continual process of interpersonal negotiation with participants, as individuals with agency and equal rights to oneself, which permeates every aspect of the research. Conquergood’s (1985) fluid stance of dialogical performance, discussed in Chapter 3, was my single most helpful guide in maintaining a nuanced awareness of participants’ interests.

Fig. 1.2  The role of writing in my practice research

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It is notoriously difficult in practice-as-research to claim widespread applicability for one’s findings. Inevitably, they are heavily conditioned by the particular circumstances in which one works, and the pre-existing understandings one brings of one’s practice. As to the first bias, through working across many settings, with their constantly shifting populations of young people, I hope I manage to avoid both unjustifiable generalisations, and claims which are specific to one kind of institution. My wide-ranging ‘practice review’ (largely contained within Chapter 3) also enabled me to find the resonances to the practice of others which confirmed or challenged my own perceptions. I also include in this book the voices of two other practitioners whose very different theatre and storytelling work gives them perspectives other than my own (Appendix 1). As to the second, any reader who wishes to check just how far I managed to reach beyond my comfort zone is cordially invited to read my research blog, www.storytellingwithadolescents.blogspot.com, and online portfolio, www.storyknowingwithadolescents.net. The latter also contains further ‘stories of practice’, reflective writings and videos of performances which attempt to encapsulate some of the intangible ‘findings’ of this kind of research. Ultimately, however, the most I can promise is what any storyteller offers her listeners, that which Benjamin (1973) calls ‘counsel’, which might be expressed as: I have been this way before, and perhaps what I found there may be useful to you in your own onward journey. A Brief Note on Pronouns Throughout this book, I use the gendered pronouns ‘he/him’ and ‘she/ her’ interchangeably in referring to ambiguous characters such as ‘the storyteller’, ‘the practitioner’ and ‘the listener’.

The Shape of This Book The remaining two chapters in this section chart the evolution of a dialogic storytelling practice with young people, centred on an understanding of ‘storyknowing’ or narrative knowledge. Chapter 2 examines the nature of storyknowing, something which may we may understand instinctively, but which is so at odds with the culture of measurement and pre-specified outcomes that prevails in our schools (and many other institutions) that it needs to be held up to the light to be recognised and

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reasserted. This chapter takes a particular focus on the status of storyknowing in formal education in England, as the clearest context in which to track its changing fortunes over time and examine the consequences of these changes for young people. Chapter 3 then picks up many of the threads laid out in this introductory chapter to chart the evolution of storytelling practice with young people through four different ‘chronotopes’, each of which has had a different relationship to storyknowing. It functions as a practice review, albeit one centred on an English-speaking, developed-world context. It argues that the most recent of these chronotopes, the dialogic chronotope, is the most responsive to contemporary young people’s needs. (Appendix 1 introduces other perspectives on this dialogic way of working with story, through a pair of interviews with ­theatre-maker Matthew Harper-Hardcastle and storyteller Jo Blake.) Part II quite literally, tells stories of my own storytelling work with adolescent young people to illuminate this dialogic practice from the ground up. Three short chapters illustrate both its potential and its challenges, and pose ‘practical thinking’ exercises for readers to consider resonances with their own practice. Part III then offers a conceptual framework for understanding dialogic storytelling with young people; some practitioners may find it superfluous to their needs. Each of its three chapters examines one of the productive ‘spaces’ or ‘gaps’ which are created by storytelling: the space between teller and listener, the gaps in a story which they can explore together, and the creative gap which a storytelling forum can create within a youth setting. Despite its greater theoretical density than the rest of the book, it is my hope that my mapping of these gaps will strike a chord with all those who wish to develop their role as storytellers, storylisteners and storymakers within their own practice in the arts, education, health care or youth work.

References Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas. Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Beauchamp, T., Faden, R. R., Wallace, R. J., & Walters, L. (Eds.). (1982). Ethical issues in social science research. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Belfiore, E., & Bennett, O. (2008). The social impact of the arts: An intellectual history. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

26  C. HEINEMEYER Belfiore, E., & Bennett, O. (2010). Beyond the “toolkit approach”: Arts impact evaluation research and the realities of cultural policy-making. Journal for Cultural Research, 14(2), 121–142. Benjamin, W. (1973/1955). The storyteller: Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations. London: Fontana. Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London: Verso. Boal, A. (1993). Theater of the oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Boal, A. (1995). The rainbow of desire: The Boal method of theatre and therapy (A. Jackson, Trans.) London: Routledge. Boyd, D. (2014). It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. New Haven: Yale University Press. Braden, Su. (1978). Artists and people. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bruner, J. (1986). Active minds, possible worlds. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Bruner, Jerome S. (2006). In search of pedagogy (Vol. II). London: Routledge. Buber, M. (2013/1958). I and thou (2nd ed., R. G. Smith, trans.). London: Bloomsbury Revelations. Conquergood, D. (1985). Performing as a moral act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance. Text and Performance Quarterly, 5(2), 1–13. Cordi, K. D. (2003). Listening is the other half of telling: Teaching students with story. In A. M. Cox and D. H. Albert (Eds.), The healing heart--families: Storytelling to encourage caring and healthy families (pp. 164–168). Canada: New Society Publishers. Frank, A. W. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness and ethics. London: University of Chicago Press. Griffiths, M. (2010). Research and the self. In M. Biggs & H. Karlsson (Eds.), The Routledge companion to research in the arts (pp. 167–185). London: Routledge. Hall, J. (1999). Designing a taught postgraduate programme in performance practice: Issues for disciplines and context. Conference proceeding: Further and continuing education of performing artists in the Nordic countries. Hann, R. (2015, July 25). Practice matters: Arguments for a ‘second wave’ of practice research. The future of practice research. futurepracticeresearch.org. Accessed December 2015. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledge: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Heinemeyer, C. (2013, November 11). ‘It’s not about the story’: Articulating a practice-as-research inquiry into storytelling with adolescents through a focus on context. Paper presented to Research Snapshots Conference, York St John University, York.

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Heinemeyer, C. (2014, October 7). Surfing the performance spectrum. http:// storytellingwithadolescents.blogspot.com/2014_10_01_archive.html. Heinemeyer, C. (2015, June 16). The profligacy of practice-as-research. www. storytellingwithadolescents.blockspot.com/2015/06/the-profligacy-of-practice-as-research.html?m=1. Inspired Youth. (2015). YCR tiny treasures. https://ycrtinytreasures.wordpress. com. Accessed February 2020. Jackson, M. (2002). Politics of storytelling: Violence, transgression and intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Kester, G. (2004). Conversation pieces: Community and communication in modern art. Berkeley: University of California Press. Luttrell, W. (2003). Pregnant bodies, fertile minds: Gender, race, and the schooling of pregnant teens. New York: Routledge. Maguire, T. (2015). Performing story on the contemporary stage. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McAdams, D. (1993). The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York: The Guilford Press. Mead, G. (2011). Coming home to story: Storytelling beyond happily ever after. Bristol: Vala Publishing. Murphy, E., & Dingwall, R. (2001). The Ethics of Ethnography. In P. Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Coffey, J. Lofland, & L. Lofland (Eds.), Handbook of ethnography (pp. 339–351). London: Sage. Nelson, R. (2013). Practice as research in the arts: Principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nicholson, H. (2005). Applied drama: The gift of theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Performance Research. (2018). Researching performance, anticipating tendencies, mapping practices, documenting processes, stimulating inquiry, performing research. www.performanceresearch.org. Accessed February 2020. Ranciere, Jacques. (2009). The emancipated spectator. London: Verso. Real Talk Project. (2018). https://www.realtalkproject.org/. Accessed June 2018. Reason, M. (2010). Asking the audience: Audience research and the experience of theatre. About Performance, 10, 15–34. Reason, M., & Heinemeyer, C. (2016). Storytelling, story-retelling, story­ knowing: Towards a participatory practice of storytelling. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 21(4), 558–573. Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing education policy. Abingdon: Routledge. Schoen, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.

28  C. HEINEMEYER Shuman, A. (1986). Storytelling rights: The uses of oral and written texts by urban adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sloan, C. (2018). Understanding spaces of potentiality in applied theatre. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2018.1508991. The Verbatim Formula. (n.d.). Every voice counts. www.theverbatimformula.org. uk. Accessed February 2020. Thompson, J. (2011). Performance affects: Applied theatre and the end of effect (2nd ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Village Storytelling Centre. (2018). Just kidding. http://www.villagestorytelling. org.uk/free-arts-programme/kids/#justkidding. Accessed August 2018. Wilson, M. (1997). Performance and practice: Oral narrative traditions among teenagers in Britain and Ireland. Aldershot: Ashgate. Wilson, M. (2006). Storytelling and theatre: Contemporary storytellers and their art. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Young At Art. (2018). Fighting words belfast. http://www.youngatart.co.uk/ fighting-words-belfast. Accessed June 2018. Zipes, J. (1995). Creative storytelling: Building community, changing lives. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

Storyknowing and Education

Storyknowing This chapter asks whether story can be considered as a form of knowledge in its own right. Answering this question in the affirmative, it also spells out what is different about it, how it risks being undervalued in educational settings, and why this should matter to those seeking dialogue with young people. We could start by comparing the following two statements: “When temperatures drop below zero, water always freezes because…” “Well, the winter set in especially hard that year and the lake froze over…”

The first speaker is concerned to explain general laws of cause and effect, neutrally and efficiently. Jerome Bruner would describe this as an example of propositional, paradigmatic or logico-scientific knowledge, which ‘seeks explications that are context free and universal’ (2006: 116). The second speaker is talking about a particular lake, a particular winter, and implies a particular set of people or animals who perhaps suffered from it. Bruner would characterise this statement as narrative knowledge, which ‘seeks explications that are context sensitive and particular’ (116). Hamish Fyfe expresses the same idea more pithily: ‘In stories events seem to yield their own meaning’ (Parfitt 2019: viii). Bruner argues that these ‘two irreducible modes of cognitive functioning’ (116)—or two different © The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6_2

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ways of thinking, communicating and knowing—are highly interdependent in human learning. He argues that the role of narrative knowledge is poorly understood and under-appreciated in most Western cultures and academic systems. My own sense of the significance of story to education is closely tied up in my experiences of leading storytelling initiatives in schools, to which I will have frequent cause to refer during this chapter, and most particularly in my two-year residency at ‘City School’ during my doctoral research. I led a lunchtime storytelling club (see Chapter 6) and short storytelling projects in many classes, mentored individual talented young storytellers and, most importantly, developed a long-term relationship with three small classes of pupils with moderate additional learning needs (known as ‘intervention classes’). Working closely together to hold two storytelling workshops per term per class, their humanities teacher and I developed a storytelling-based pedagogy within their history and geography lessons. The pupils’ creative and intellectual achievements during these lessons revealed to me the irreplaceable role of story in learning; the eventual fate of our collaboration drove me to investigate the endangered status story holds in formal education in the UK. Substantial sections of this chapter have already been published in Heinemeyer and Durham (2017), and I am grateful to my co-author Sally Durham and to SAGE Publications for allowing me to reproduce them here. Both the practice and the educational context discussed in this chapter are located in England. The story of the fate of narrative in education is complex enough even within one education system; it is beyond my scope here to compare this systematically with the broader international picture. However, it is important to locate this discussion within a much wider context of education policy worldwide, intertwined with globalised and neoliberal economics, and systems of accountability and measurement. Fazal Rizvi and Bob Lingard, in their ambitious mapping of the global politics of education (2010), draw on their research and professional experience of the Australian, Asian, UK and Caribbean education systems to examine ‘the ways in which global processes are transforming education policy around the world, in a range of complicated, complex, commensurate and contradictory ways’ (3). They argue that rationalist policy approaches aiming to achieve specific social improvement outcomes have been widely in evidence since the post-war period, and that since the more intensively globalised 1980s, these have given way to an emphasis on narrower, more standardisable measures of performance.

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They note that these globalised policy discourses ‘always manifest in vernacular ways, reflecting the varying cultures, histories and politics within different nations’ (x). Nonetheless, upon examining the international picture, they chart an almost universal shift from social democratic to neoliberal orientations in thinking about educational purposes and governance […] educational purposes have been redefined in terms of a narrower set of concerns about human capital development, and the role education must play to […] ensure the competitiveness of the national economy. (Rizvi and Lingard 2010: 3)

The story I tell later in this chapter of the fate of narrative in the English and Welsh school system can thus be understood as a parochial case study of wider global trends. Creating Knowledge with the ‘Intervention Classes’ A single workshop will exemplify the knowledge that was explored and shared through storytelling. When one class studied ‘rainforests’ as a topic, I first asked the teacher, and then the pupils, to share their most powerful memories of trees and forests. Out of the moment of silence and the somewhat ‘wooded’ atmosphere that followed this, I moved on to tell them the story of an indigenous Indonesian chief who was approached by government officials to sell his people’s land for logging, to make space for poor tenant farmers. The pupils, without exception, listened avidly for fifteen minutes, until I paused at a crucial point. They then experimented with their own endings to the story (many were by now confident storytellers). The teacher did not intervene to shape their conclusions, but made her own contribution in her turn. At first, these endings were optimistic, but as the pupils played out the power dynamics of the interactions between loggers, forest people, tenant farmers, experts and officials, the likelihood of the forest’s destruction hit them. They were visibly deflated by this conclusion. In response, I had nothing to offer them but another story—that of the Huaorani people of Ecuador (Kane 1996)—which had been important to me in my own adolescence; it had helped me express my grief at ecological destruction, but also to understand that, even where victory is impossible, persistence and solidarity can start to build a movement which can shift society’s

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ideas. We went online to research the work of Survival International, supporting indigenous peoples worldwide to defend at least parts of their homeland. My field notes record that They are full of questions about this […] I feel strangely like a university lecturer, pointing the pupils to further references, not a storyteller in an ‘intervention’ class. (20 November 2014)

Each storytelling workshop was different and surprising, but the pupils’ sophisticated, emotionally engaged, reflective engagement in the issues raised by this story was typical. Indeed, our observations of the pupils’ responses support the arguments made by Bruner (1986, 1996, 2006), Daniel (2012), Goodson et al. (2010), Prentice (1998), Roney (2009), Rosen (1988, 1993), Ryan (2008), and Zipes (1995, 2004) for storytelling, ranging from the higher level of language pupils employed during storytelling, to the expression and thinking skills it generated, to its ability to engage even usually unmotivated young people, to improved relationships and communication between teachers and pupils, to the nourishment of pupils’ imaginations and empathy, to the value of narrative communication as a life skill. Joe Winston, in his influential ­story-based drama work with young people in numerous schools (2004), similarly found such engagement to develop children’s language skills in terms of contextual understanding, making sense of human intentions and relationships expressed as subtext, the embodied and performative nature of language, active sense-making where there is ambiguity, and issues of social and cultural value. Class teachers working with Winston reported an enrichment and multifaceted development of young people’s writing following this work. In our multi-art form storytelling workshops at the International Centre for Arts and Narrative, Matthew Reason and I found that groups of people exploring and retelling stories expressed complex life experiences and understandings that they could not necessarily articulate outside the story. We coined the term ‘storyknowing’ to refer to this succinctly (Reason and Heinemeyer 2016). Adopting this term for narrative knowledge leads us to focus both on the knowledge young people already hold (and can articulate through story) and the knowledge they build by exchanging stories with each other and with adults. That is, the term ‘storyknowing’ suggests both an inner resource and an active practice. As such, understanding it will be vital to exploration

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of a dialogic approach to storytelling. If, as Bruner says, narrative knowledge is the forgotten relation, it is worth holding it up to the light and examining it carefully—to understand its anatomy, and relate this back to practice. Having done so, I will argue that storyknowing is, in a sense, an endangered species in education, and explore how this situation has arisen. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the consequences of marginalising narrative in schools, expressed partly in the words of City School pupils.

An Anatomy The characteristics of storyknowing can be discussed under the headings of its purpose, technique, epistemology and model of learning. That is, when we are gathered with a group of young people, why might we exchange stories with them?; how would these stories take shape?; what view of knowledge would we be implicitly expressing in doing so?; and how could this process build knowledge and understanding? In addition to Bruner, there are numerous authors who have investigated narrative and propositional knowledge (although some use different labels), on whom to draw in this task. It is vital to note before setting out that there is an ethical dimension to many of their discussions. Story has of course been used for ill ends as often as it has for good. As practitioners, we are concerned not only to recognise the difference between storytelling and propositional knowledge, but to distinguish ‘good storytelling’ from manipulative or propagandistic storytelling, and practise it ourselves. PURPOSE: Narrative aims to communicate the particular experience of the teller to the community of listeners, in a way that will be relevant to their particular circumstances or needs For Walter Benjamin (1973), story’s task is to convey experience meaningfully, rather than facts accurately. Storytelling does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel. (91–92)

Arthur Frank goes further, emphasising the inseparability of storytellers’ whole person from their experiential knowledge: ‘their bodies give their

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stories their particular shape and direction’ (Frank 1995: 27). Thus, to take his most powerful example, a storyteller who has experienced illness or trauma is speaking for her body, which has been marked by these experiences. Richard Kearney (2002) makes the related point that story conveys perspectives, rather than messages or instructions, enabling us to ‘identify […] with as many fellow humans as possible’ (62). And in so doing, story often aims to give ‘counsel’ by guiding listeners along a path already travelled. In Benjamin’s words: ‘every real story […] contains, openly or covertly, something useful’ (1973: 86). The storyteller must, like a craftsman, ‘fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way’ (108). Jo Blake, in Appendix 1, endorses this view of her craft: […] there is, to me, some kind of inherent link between the storyteller and wisdom. When I think about the storyteller, what makes the storyteller different from the dancer or the actor, I associate the storyteller with wisdom, which is a depth of knowing which only comes through experience – through knocks and difficulties and stuff that life throws at you.

Counsel need not be a matter of the guidance of elders—just a little more experience is enough. When I was leading a group for young people who were ‘school refusers’, I invited a young woman as guest speaker, only a few years older than them, who had missed many terms of school because of her mental health. She herself had once told me that when she was in youth mental health services, she had often wished she could have heard from older young people a little further along the journey towards recovery than herself. I hadn’t given her much guidance or introduction and waited slightly nervously to see what she would talk about. Notably, she did not give the group any tips to help them return to school. She simply told her story, including all the good reasons why school was not always the best place for her to be, some of the useful and positive things she had done as alternatives, and how she had eventually gone back into formal education. Yet the word ‘simply’ belies the sensitivity and responsiveness of how she was shaping her experiences for her listeners. I could sense, watching the young people listen to her, how the harsh binary choice between attending and not attending school was dissolving in their minds, becoming something through which they could navigate their own paths.

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This example illustrates how we measure the worth of a story. Although a storyteller may seek to be honest, storyknowing does not seek to legitimate itself against universal standards of proof or logic (Jean-Francois Lyotard 1984), but to share learning which has integrity and relevance within the particular cultural context of the telling. Crucially, this exchange of life experience and guidance binds together tellers and listeners: [A] collectivity that takes narrative as its key form of competence […] finds the raw material for its social bond not only in the meaning of the narratives it recounts, but also in the act of reciting them. (Lyotard 1984: 22)

TECHNIQUE: The compositional strategies of story are based on collaboration Knowledge creation through the narrative track relies on both teller and listeners. This is partly because, as Bruner (2006) suggests, the primary driving forces of narrative are characters’ needs and desires; action is largely interpreted ‘in terms of the working out of human intentions in a real or possible world’ (121). As the rainforest example above indicates, it therefore requires interpretation by the listeners: what were the characters’ intentions, and why? In the conflict between indigenous forest dwellers and tenant farmers, who ‘won’, and why, and what can we learn from this? This is in contrast to propositional knowledge, which according to Bruner comes pre-interpreted, usually expressed ‘through the operations of causes, structural requiredness, reasoned correlation’ (121). Moreover, the best stories, affirms Benjamin (1973), are told with the minimum of ‘psychological shading’—with hints or implications rather than detailed inner lives. A storyteller might, for example, give the revealing detail that a father sells the family’s last cow without telling his children, but it is up to the listeners to surmise exactly how much the family has suffered to get to that point, or how the farmer felt when he walked home that night. Both storyteller and listeners thus have work to do to make sense of the linkages between cause and effect, and this joint task relies on their ability to ‘assign appropriate presuppositional interpretations to what is being said’ (Bruner 2006: 124). During a live telling, this collaboration can be sensed as they respond to each other both verbally and non-verbally.

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The flipside of this observation is that where teller and listeners do not share cultural common ground and associations, the telling of the story then becomes an opportunity for exploration of each other’s assumptions and worldviews, and for the creation of new shared meanings. Such differences in common ground can be generational, or class-based. I once told a group of pupils with additional needs at City School a version of the biography of William Kamkwamba (Kamkwamba and Mealer 2010), the Malawian teenager whose passion for engineering led him to design and build wind turbines which electrified his village, out of scrap materials left on a landfill site. For me, and the teachers present, William’s central predicament was how to achieve this incredible feat despite poverty, famine and local suspicion. Yet the pupils, in our discussions and in the poster they made together, homed in on his large, crowded, hungry family, the love but also the competition for resources that must have existed among his siblings. For some, this undoubtedly reflected their own knowledge of family dynamics and the tensions of scarcity. Their poster focused less on William’s controversial inventions than his escape to play and experiment on the rubbish heap. Through succinctness and memorability, narratives allow the listener, in turn, to become the teller and disseminate these shared meanings: ‘The cardinal point for the unaffected listener is to assure himself of the possibility of reproducing the story’ (Benjamin 1973: 97). The story becomes his own, simply because he has heard it. The pupils who had made the poster of William Kamkwamba’s story asked to keep it—the record of their version of the story—on the wall, and referred back to it throughout the year. EPISTEMOLOGY: The knowledge embodied in story is irreducible to categories, labels or general principles There is a fluidity and flexibility to the meanings embodied in stories, which allows a single narrative to contain multiple and even contradictory layers of meaning. Stories are not simple metaphors to drive home emphatic messages (although people may sometimes attempt to use them in this way); they are experiences which reveal realities too complex to summarise. De Certeau expresses this beautifully, writing of stories: You ask what they “mean” (“veulent” dire)? I’ll tell them to you again. When someone asked him about the meaning of a sonata, it is said, Beethoven merely played it over. (1984: 80)

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The refusal of stories to be pinned down to single messages allows them to become the containers for exploration of controversial or complex topics. Peter Reason and Peter Hawkins (1988) used storymaking in response to contentious discussions around gender relations within their research group, where different group members had strongly conflicting opinions about how gendered language should be used. Rather than trying to reach agreement, they proceeded by telling stories in turn. They found that the narrative knowledge generated ‘tentatively feels the way forward towards a synthesis without artificially creating a compromise, or explaining away the differences’ (1988: 95). My experience with one class at City School, studying the lives of poor city-dwellers in India, mirrored that of Reason and Hawkins. Having researched the informal waste recycling industry in Calcutta, I told the class the story of a slum-dwelling child who made his living scavenging for scrap metal and selling it to dealers. The pupils became absorbed in the story of George (as they named him) and were keen to develop it as a ‘chain story’. However, it quickly became apparent that they had sharply different visions of George’s future and were becoming irate with each other. Some saw him contributing to his family’s income so they could invest in their own business, while another student said that would never happen, and George would more likely be recruited by a local gang. I suggested that we each work individually on our own written version of the story. The cynic developed his idea up to the point that the gang leader killed a friend of George’s, and George decided to take lethal revenge. However, after listening to a range of other contributions without comment, the student pulled his paper back towards him to modify his ending: George and his mother turned the gang leader into the police. I typed up the story and then all the possible endings, and gave it to the pupils, a record of all that was possible in George’s life. MODEL OF LEARNING: The process of building knowledge is cumulative, through exposure to many stories Whereas the classic scientific approach to theory is to seek to encapsulate the totality of a realm of reality in the abstract, storyknowing is built up by exchanging multiple stories of what has happened within it. The more complex this realm, the more difficult it will be to sum up in a principle, and the more we may need stories to start to get a sense for it. For example, Bruner considers how he has developed his understanding of the challenges of life through reading and hearing many stories:

38  C. HEINEMEYER I do not think that my interest in theatre and literature has made me more abstract. Instead, it has joined me to the possible worlds that provide the landscape for thinking about the human condition, the human condition as it exists in the culture in which I live. (Bruner 1986: 128)

De Certeau (1984) expresses this distinction in terms of the difference between a ‘route’ and a ‘map’; many stories of journeys must be told before a map of an area can be compiled, and if these are ‘pushe[d] away into its prehistory’ (121) once the map has been drawn, a great richness of knowledge can be lost. This resonates with feminist critiques of science and research, as expressed by Donna Haraway (1988). There is a path to steer between making claiming an unbiased access to the truth (as scientists of the Enlightenment did, as if their white, male privilege did not give them a particular perspective on the world), and giving up the idea that objective reality exists (as some social constructivists would urge). For Haraway, this middle path consists of ‘situated knowledges’. Once we have accepted that everyone, including scientists, speaks from a particular social position, we can collaborate in good faith to build up a more complex and faithful understanding of reality. Rather than seeking to capture the overall shape of this landscape by referring to a standardised map, we can tell stories to share with others our own past journeys through it. Gradually, a more complex picture will start to emerge of what this ‘country’ of human experience is like. Emma Parfitt (2019) gives a revealing example of this phenomenon in her own practice research: a student, following a thread which emerged circuitously from a story a group had been told, told of a suicide in his family, to which another student responded with the experience of a suicide in her own. Parfitt relates such ‘sharing conversations’, unpredictably initiated by the free-flowing discourse in response to a story, to emotional learning and emotional literacy, an area which she argues is neglected in the curriculum. This cumulative, map-building view of narrative knowledge is represented visually in Chapter 8, Fig. 8.1.

Synergies and Struggles Between Narrative and Propositional Knowledge So far this chapter has focused on the differences between storyknowing and propositional knowledge. In fact, the distinctions are far less rigid; the two have an interdependent role in learning and creativity.

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Bruner (1996: 119) describes the process of learning as a ‘spiral curriculum’, in which pupils are introduced to new concepts first intuitively, as experiences or stories. From that basis, they can reach a certain level of abstraction or conceptual understanding. The teacher may then bring them back to experiential or story-based learning in order to bring them deeper into the subject, or understand the significance of the concept they have just learnt. Say for example a geography teacher: Tells his class of his summer walking holiday, when he saw the remains of a house whose garden had partially fallen into the sea after a storm, then… Uses statistics and maps to establish the point that coastal erosion is a major threat to coastal communities, then…

Creates a playdough model of a cliff and subjects it to various forces (water, wind, pedestrian traffic and grazing), and asks the pupils to describe what they just observed… Moves pupils towards articulating the interaction between different forces in causing coastal erosion…

Shows the class a video about a community which made an action plan to save their village from erosion. This spiral process makes intuitive sense and still resembles how many teachers might structure their lessons, building bridges between ‘what happened’ and ‘what happens’. On an intuitive level, most people understand the relationship between learning and narrative knowledge: that ‘children often need to test abstract notions in concrete terms’ (Fyfe in Parfitt 2019: viii). Yet both within education and more broadly in youth work, mental health and sometimes even in applied theatre, a creeping mistrust of knowledge embodied in story is in evidence. Within formal education, it manifests as an urgency to move as quickly as possible to the right hand side of the spiral, as if learning only starts at the point where pupils start to generalise and conceptualise. Young people are, by and large, not considered to ‘know’ something unless they have explicitly named it, no matter how complex this area of learning might be. As Winston observes:

40  C. HEINEMEYER Within the framework of the National Literacy Strategy, as in all kinds of instructional teaching, teachers tend to strive for transparency not only in their language, but also in their intended learning outcomes. What children are supposed to learn needs to be clear, and it needs to be clear whether they have learned it or not. This approach to teaching works very well for skills but not so well for other important areas of learning, such as the indeterminate area of social and moral concepts. (2004: 20)

One corollary of this is the decline in provision and uptake of arts subjects, which typically prioritise experiential and narrative learning over the ability to generalise and conceptualise. The Cultural Learning Alliance (2019) cites Department for Education figures which document that between 2010 and 2018 the number of hours the arts were taught in England’s secondary schools fell by 23% and the number of arts teachers fell by 22%. Furthermore, the Bacc for the Future campaign (2019) highlights the growing class inequality of access to the arts: ‘Figures from the Joint Council for Qualifications show there has been a 34% decline in the number of state pupils taking arts and creative subjects at GCSE since 2010.’ Parfitt’s point about the role of narrative in developing emotional literacy is of relevance here. Where it might once have been assumed that reading The Catcher In The Rye or acting in Hamlet allowed pupils to explore the existential and emotional challenges of life, and that much of this process would occur in their own minds over time, it is increasingly considered a better use of time to teach them a list of strategies to increase one’s well-being and feeling of connectedness to others. Thus, recent years have seen a rise in ‘resilience training’ and ‘happiness lessons’ (see Heinemeyer 2018) in the UK. It is tempting to imagine what Hamlet himself would have said if someone had invited him to resilience lessons! Simultaneously, as OFSTED (2012) itself has decried, there is a tendency, when studying literature, to focus on identifying examples of particular rhetorical tactics and developing what Winston calls ‘the secretarial or technical skills of language’ (2004: 20), for example the ubiquitous ‘PETAL paragraphs’ (Point, Evidence, Terminology, Analysis, Link—see, for example, Talk Teaching 2016). Winston laments that As a result, many language exercises become divorced from context, as it is the skill rather than the experience that is seen as important. […] The

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context here is narrowly self-referential – how to learn a skill rather than how to do anything purposeful with it. (2004: 20)

Such fragmenting approaches to language may restrict opportunities for emotional learning: there is often no need to get absorbed in the whole story to be able to perform such operations, as extracts and fragments will do. While many schools do their best to retain opportunities for deep absorption in a text, drama researcher and trainee teacher Claire Read describes her experience of the marginalised and instrumentalised position of drama and narrative as follows: The word ‘drama’ only appears I think four times in the primary curriculum and is very much absorbed into English as spoken word. Hardly ideal. Or promoting the art. Good schools try to get drama workshops etc - but that’s funding based and few and far between. I’ve been at schools […] where they try to set up scenes to prompt writing etc; may use still images to articulate ideas of characters; have theme days where the teacher is effectively in role as a Victorian school master etc but it’s mainly English driven. To me that is worrying. (personal communication, January 2020)

Beyond schooling, the suspicion of storyknowing appears as a codification of subject matter—‘issues’, desired outcomes and learning objectives—in areas of life once seen as too unfathomable for such specific goals. Largely driven by funders’ agendas, community arts and applied theatre work is increasingly ‘about’ something particular and structured as targeted projects, in which inclusion or well-being aims are foregrounded throughout in practitioners’ and participants’ minds (indeed participants will be expected to name these gratefully at the end-of-project evaluation). On the freelance CVs of most arts practi­ tioners of my acquaintance (including my own) there will figure a large number of funded projects of around ten weeks’ duration, aimed at reintegrating young people into school, improving their mental health, reducing their vulnerability to grooming, or building their understanding of sex and relationships. This can be understood as part of a wider landscape of ‘resilience thinking’, in which citizens are pressed to take on responsibility for their own well-being in a context of permanent economic and social insecurity (Chandler 2014; Evans and Reid 2014)—a discussion which will be further pursued in Chapter 9.

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Thus, parallels can be drawn between the overemphasis on propositional knowledge and the creeping instrumentalisation of interactions between young people and adults: storytelling and other art forms are ‘used’ to convey knowledge, change behaviours or attitudes and achieve pre-specified outcomes. Bruner is not the only theorist to contend that the functioning of narrative is often poorly understood in psychology, education and most other disciplines. Lyotard (1984) tries to redress the balance, asserting that narrative is not an underdeveloped attempt to attain ‘scientific’ knowledge, but a viable way of knowing in its own right. Its denigration, he says, limits our understanding of reality to that subset of it which can be understood by the scientific or propositional track. The denigration of narrative has cultural and class dimensions. Maybin (1992) discusses Heath’s (1982) ethnographic research with black ­working-class children in a school in Trackton, North Carolina. The children often arrived at school with little experience of books, but a rich oral home culture of storytelling and discussion. They then found themselves faced with expectations to convert the content of stories they read or heard into ‘specific skills and content information’ (1992: 77). Heath quotes the following exchange after the teacher had read the children a story: Teacher: What is the story about? Children: (silence) […] Teacher: Who is the main character? Um….what kind of story it is? Child: Ain’t nobody can talk about things being about theirselves. (Heath 1982, cited in Maybin 1992: 77)

The child is not only unable to answer the questions; he considers them absurd. The story was about the story. Anyone who had just heard it was in the same position of knowledge, so he could not see the point of the teacher’s questions. He would surely have been more eloquent if she had stayed within the storyworld she had constructed for the class, and asked him, for example, what might happen the next time the characters met each other. Young people in the small inclusion groups at City School also struggled to answer such direct propositional questions, for example when the teacher and I held a focus group to evaluate our storytelling work,

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whereas their work within the framework of stories showed deep understanding. They were essentially cleverer within the story. Perhaps this owed partially to their additional learning needs, but it may also have reflected the oral culture within their home environments, or perhaps simply the nature of human thought. Drama practitioner Matt ­Harper-Hardcastle (Appendix 1) describes how, regardless of the learning abilities of the groups with whom he works, working in depth on a detailed story is the most powerful approach to give a group a grasp on the whole devising process and a rationale for making decisions. Maybin reports that Heath found the Trackton children to struggle with the fact that teachers’ questions so often asked for labels, attributes and discrete features of objects and events in isolation from the context. In the child’s community, people asked questions about whole events or objects and their uses, causes and effects; answers usually involved telling a story, describing a situation or making comparisons with other events. (Heath 1982, cited in Maybin 1992: 77)

The saddest aspect of this was the Trackton school’s failure to draw on pupils’ bank of stories and oral culture in learning: ‘this ability to link two situations metaphorically and recreate scenes was not tapped in school— in fact, it could often be a nuisance to the teacher’ (1992: 77). Many British teachers, particularly at secondary level, would recognise the lack of freedom they have to harness this kind of knowledge in classrooms. Nor is this a new situation. In fact, in many places and times in history, it can seem as if a central purpose of education has been to suppress pupils’ natural affinity for story. As the educationalist Harold Rosen observed in 1985, ‘the further up the school system we go, the less likely is it that spontaneous, pupil-made narrative will be able to insert itself comfortably and naturally into the flow of talk’ (Howe and Johnson 1992: 20).1 I would contend that this limits the range and depth of dialogue that is possible between young people and their teachers. I will now take a closer look at how this situation has arisen. The story is a complex one.

Storyknowing in Schools The status of story and narrative in schooling at all levels has undoubtedly varied with dominant educational ideologies. I therefore divide my investigation into overlapping ‘moments’: (1) before and (2) during the

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‘progressive’ or ‘child-centred’ era of the 1960s–1980s, (3) the onset of the National Curriculum and (4) the most recent decade during which a compliance and target-led agenda has been strongly dominant. My focus is on the language of overt ideologies, and also, where possible, on indications of the strength or weakness of what we might call the ‘narrative voice’ within everyday classroom communication in each ‘moment’. This excavation will necessarily need to complement evidence with some educated guesswork and set aside the inevitable variation between individual classrooms, schools and regions; it also focuses primarily on humanities education. It is also vital to acknowledge that, while these trends have run their course in formal education, there exist many islands of rich narrative culture outside it. Moment 1: Before the Progressive Era A logical place to start is the influential literature aimed at helping teachers and librarians become oral storytellers, which flourished during the first half of the twentieth century, in particular Marie Shedlock’s The Art of the Storyteller (1915), Anna Cogswell Tyler’s Twenty-Four Unusual Stories for Boys and Girls (1921) and Ruth Sawyer’s The Way of the Storyteller (1942). Patrick Ryan (2008) attests that the influence of these works was such that a weekly story hour became widespread in many pre-1960s classrooms, including some secondary schools. Strikingly, these books address a potential storyteller who may need to develop their confidence or skills in remembering, choosing or telling a­ ge-appropriate stories, but who does not need any convincing as to the value of storytelling itself. There may be several reasons for this, not least that, for teachers facing large classes, with limited resources and often mixed age ranges, storytelling’s ability to absorb children made it an excellent, cheap and engaging behaviour management strategy. Moreover, until the 1950s, as Lowe (2007) documents, the curriculum itself was seen as a ‘secret garden’ within the control of schools and teachers, almost entirely beyond government interference. Teachers, rather than information resources such as curriculum guides or even books, were often the primary vessels of knowledge, and it was up to them to decide how best to convey it to pupils. This naturally foregrounded their own experience and intuition as to what stories pupils needed to hear. Bruner recalls his own science teacher in the 1920s as epitomising this role of guide and conduit:

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In effect, she was inviting me to extend my world of wonder to encompass hers. She was not just informing me. She was, rather, negotiating the world of wonder and possibility […] She was a human event, not a transmission device. (1986: 126)

Subjects such as history, in particular, were taught through a strongly narrative approach. While there were tensions between the ‘great tradition’ of teaching the lives of ‘great men and women’ and the idea of historical training and skills, Sylvester (1994) states that until the 1960s, in history teaching, Methodology remained largely unchanged. Teachers gave oral accounts of the main events, putting notes on a blackboard for pupils to copy or expand. Or textbooks were read, often around the class, to secure the main factual outline […] Often this was followed by pupils writing prose accounts or essays as long as they could manage on the main topics on the syllabus. (12)

That is, pupils heard or read a narrative, then retold it in their own words. Their understanding was built up through guided crossings over the landscape of human history. It goes without saying that there were limitations to this approach and the epistemology it implied. Such classrooms may have allowed relatively little space for pupils to challenge dominant narratives, at least out loud, or for the collaborative storymaking into which the City School pupils entered so thoughtfully. However, crucially, they did tend to place the teacher in the autonomous, embodied role of storyteller, and gave pupils the opportunity for free-roaming, absorbed listening and private sense-making. Moment 2: The Progressive Tradition The values of many teachers and educationalists in the 1960s–1980s, as celebrated in Doddington and Hilton’s (2007) retrospective examination of the progressive or child-centred tradition, seem at first glance to be hospitable territory for storytelling. A constructivist view of learning, emphasising talk and collaborative sense-making, nurturing relationships between teacher and pupils, developmental appropriateness, interdisciplinarity, creative responses and prioritisation of meaning over information, undoubtedly gave teachers the freedom and justification to incorporate storytelling into their classes. Jack Zipes (2004) explicitly identifies his

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influential school-based storytelling programmes from the late 1980s onwards as manifestations of the (increasingly threatened) progressive philosophy of education, emphasising the empowerment and critical literacy of young people. It is notable that my teacher collaborator at City School, Sally Durham, was herself trained during the progressive period, and the principles she absorbed are a key motivation for her to retain a central role for the informal narrative voices of teachers and pupils in her humanities teaching. Moreover, teachers at this time retained considerable autonomy over what to teach and how to teach it. English teacher Betty Rosen’s (1988, 1993) evocative accounts of her storytelling work in the 1970s and 1980s in urban comprehensive schools are indicative of this freedom: she could devote one afternoon a week to simply telling folktales. However, at the same time, the progressive era’s democratic focus on the child’s voice, experiential learning, play and freedom, undoubtedly also discouraged many teachers from embracing the apparently authoritarian role of storyteller. Returning to the example of history, the Schools Council History Project (1976) undoubtedly lessened the role of narrative in teaching when it established that ‘Pupils were “to do” history, not merely receive it’ (Sylvester 1994: 10). The word ‘merely’ succinctly expresses this period’s prevalent perception that listening to a lengthy narrative rendered pupils passive and subservient. The picture becomes yet more complex when we consider what Lowe (2007) describes as the ‘new sociology of education’ which emerged during this period, which started to examine the effectiveness of teachers’ strategies in terms of specific educational goals and outcomes: Implicit in their work was the argument that without much closer definition of what it was that the teacher was seeking to impart or convey, the whole process of educating was at best ill-defined. (54)

This seems a natural concern in the twenty-first century, but at the time it was radical. The curriculum was no longer to be a ‘secret garden’ but a means of achieving societal goals which could be scrutinised and set in the public sphere. The mood this created was suspicious of storytelling, with its unpredictable and intersubjective knowledge outcomes, and favoured more obviously active or conversational forms of communication, in which pupils could demonstrate their conceptual understanding. It is notable that Rosen, unlike earlier advocates of storytelling in schools

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such as Sawyer and Shedlock, feels the need to make an explicit case for the value of story, and reassure readers that pupils will learn something from it: On every occasion – without exception – that I have told a story in someone’s classroom I am told of this child or that who has never before sat so still, listening; and on every occasion – again, without exception – in written follow-up work, there will be pupils excelling themselves in quantity and in quality where they would normally produce nothing or a reluctant little. (1993: 35)

Story now needed to prove its usefulness. However, Rosen’s argument is instrumental only in that she claims that storytelling will motivate reluctant pupils; she does not yet feel that her readers will require persuasion that it will achieve specific learning outcomes. In this sense, her position is a revealing bridge into the period in which the National Curriculum was being written, imposed and contested. Moment 3: The National Curriculum and National Oracy Project (1987–1993) To understand how the tussle to shape the overarching and ­subject-specific goals of schooling sidelined storyknowing, we can look again to the example of the history curriculum. Peter Lee and colleagues, writing when the National Curriculum was new and under constant review, identified opposing pulls to make history a means to objective outcomes, either of societal transformation, personal and social skills, or a renewed patriotism based on canonical knowledge. Both endangered the true nature of the subject, which was ‘something which expands our whole picture of what ends may be possible’ (Lee et al. 1992: 22)— almost a definition of storyknowing. Moreover, these increasingly vexed and instrumentalised debates on curriculum made it more difficult for teachers to inhabit the embodied role of storyteller: a guide to knowledge speaking from one’s own experience and personal directives. Indeed, there was what Lowe describes as a ‘widespread sense […] that teachers were becoming the deliverers of other people’s messages rather than […] the arbiters of what went on in the schools’ (2007: 98). Rosen feels it necessary to reiterate the value of teachers’ experience and agency:

48  C. HEINEMEYER Teachers’ voices must be heard, however, even against all the odds and oddities of officialdom. […] And our voices are at their best telling stories, our own stories and stories we have made our own. (1993: 3)

Meanwhile, there is evidence that the National Curriculum impacted on the everyday communication between pupils and teachers, including their informal storytelling. Alexander (1990) describes language in primary schools as ‘a predominantly oral culture […] a spoken language which is immediate, idiosyncratic and ephemeral, metaphoric and allusive’ (1990: 74–75). The imposition onto this world of the new formal, target-based language of the Curriculum was a shock to many teachers at both primary and secondary level; Lowe (2007) cites a teacher who wrote to the Times Educational Supplement in 1992 to recall that: When the core subject folders were thrown at teachers three years ago I leafed through the pages and skimmed what was, basically, a new language. Astonished that anybody could really believe that this neat, new system of ticking boxes, compartmentalizing and dehumanizing education would actually work, I sat back and waited [for the reaction]. (104)

This ‘new language’ appears inimical to narrative. Yet coincident with the advent of the Curriculum was a new emphasis on speaking and listening through the National Oracy Project (NOP), in which storytellers had a significant presence; many storytellers were busy freelancers in schools during this period, and the NOP even published a storytelling guide for teachers (Howe and Johnson 1992). In addition, edited collections on oracy aimed at teachers and educationalists (Holderness and Lalljee 1998; Norman 1992), as well as a more recent textbook on speaking and listening covering similar ground (Jones and Hodson 2012), each include a chapter on storytelling. It is noteworthy, however, that these three books contain few or no references to storytelling or narrative outside these chapters. Rather, their primary theoretical emphasis is the role of facilitated classroom talk in developing metacognition, and learning within Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (the theory that learning occurs most dynamically at the level of understanding just above the learner’s current level, facilitated by interaction with someone who has already mastered this higher level). The speaking and listening that is to be encouraged is aimed primarily at enabling children (particularly those with additional challenges such as disabilities or membership of

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a minority group) to work at a higher level of abstraction, and demonstrate that they are doing so. The National Oracy Project was a valuable influence on the National Curriculum, and it is encouraging to see oracy rising to prominence again in recent years (see, e.g., the Oracy@Cambridge blog and the many high-profile conferences it documents). However, neither the NOP, nor the newer oracy movement, have at their centre an appreciation, or even an understanding, of narrative knowledge. Moment 4: Compliance and Creativity (2000s to the Present) There is nothing intrinsically hostile to narrative in the content of the National Curriculum. However, as Parker (2015) highlights, a generation of teachers have now been trained in an era of circumscribed autonomy and personal initiative, and schools are increasingly compelled to orient themselves towards compliance with detailed prescriptions. In this climate, both the self-directed role of storyteller and the unfathomable state of listener have arguably become endangered in much of schooling. Because of the fundamental indeterminacy and idiosyncrasy of what a teacher may choose to tell, or a pupil may choose to take from a story, lessons rich in narrative will rarely be the shortest route to demonstrating that learning outcomes have been achieved. Yet it seems vital to examine a simultaneous trend within this period, namely an emphasis on creativity in teaching and learning. The 1999 National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE) report, commissioned by the New Labour government, recommended that schools should prepare young people for an unpredictable future through a strengthened emphasis on creative education, innovation, and the arts. This was followed by governmental commitments two years later to infuse creativity throughout all education policy (DCMS 2001). Numerous subsequent works guiding teachers in the development of creative approaches to teaching, such as Fautley and Savage (2007), emphasise its focus on ‘higher order’ or ‘convergent’ thinking, interdisciplinarity and nonlinear problem-solving (Fautley and Savage 2007). This move might seem fertile ground for storyknowing, given its affinity with complexity, multiple truths and imagination. Yet it is not so. Anna Craft (2011) notes that this emphasis on creativity remains strong in English education, for economic, social and technological reasons. Yet, she says, it is riddled with tensions:

50  C. HEINEMEYER creativity has been seen as increasingly significant in relation to education since the end of the 20th century, despite a powerful set of drivers towards ever-higher achievement on narrower measures […] perhaps the most visible challenge for creativity in education is the disconnect with performativity. (2011: 20)

Thus, even as moves towards creativity have worked their way through the system, they have been thwarted by countervailing pressures to achieve closely specified outcomes in the shortest possible time. It is perhaps for this reason that the literature on creative teaching contains little or no reference to narrative or story, effectively redefining ‘creativity’ as a set of highly choreographed strategies which minimise the risk that pupils will fail to arrive at the desired destination. As Fautley and Savage point out, There can be chance examples of creative decision-making, but in the classroom you will not want to wait for these but pursue a more purposeful course aimed at producing this type of thinking. (2007: 4)

Such a course may be a lively and active learning experience, but is likely to have very minimal scope for either absorption in a narrative world, or the unpredictability of an exchange of anecdotal experience. The squeezing out of narrative is occasionally tacitly recognised by the educational establishment itself as an unintended consequence of its own directives; for example, OFSTED’s Moving English Forward (2012) laments that ‘excessive pace’ in many schools meant that pupils rarely have the chance to enjoy and reflect on whole novels or poems. Indeed, the current moment in UK education might be characterised as an irreconcileable tussle between compliance and creativity, leaving little space for teachers’ autonomous sense of what narratives might guide pupils through their lives. As Fautley and Savage themselves admit, After all, if you are constantly being told what to teach and when and how to teach it, how can you really be expected to be creative as well? This is a good question and one that many teachers are grappling with. (2007: 23)

Thus, by the time I began my own storytelling practice in schools in 2008, narrative and story had fallen to a low tidemark in English education.

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An Endangered Species The ongoing story of my work in the additional needs classes at City School is itself illustrative of the problematic status of storytelling in secondary schools. Nearly two years after I started working with these classes, the Inclusion Department came under increasing pressure to align its curriculum planning and assessment regime with that in the rest of the school. Arguably, the storytelling session described early in this chapter did not directly help the pupils meet their attainment targets. While it gave them a contextual, narrative grasp of the complexities and power dynamics of particular forest dwellers’ lives, it did not generate a list of generalisable facts about rainforests; while the pupils engaged with persuasive language, this did not always demonstrate that they had acquired the transferable skill of constructing an argument. Moreover, the storytelling took valuable time away from activities which might have proved these skills efficiently. Thus, the teacher felt she had to take pains to ensure the extent of our collaboration remained ‘under the radar’. In her words, We have a set amount of topics we are expected to cover and this often means there is insufficient time to study anything in any depth. Using time in storytelling could be construed by some as ‘wasting time. (1 June 2015)

Meanwhile, my other projects in the school were struggling, despite goodwill from many teachers, to compete for limited curriculum time, financial resources and teacher support. Chapter 6 of this book tells the story of one of these initiatives, a lunchtime storytelling club. Feedback from staff was that they perceived a great potential benefit to the storytelling projects, for the young people’s development both as writers and citizens, but that there was insufficient direct relevance to the curriculum as currently defined. Indeed, the rainforest workshop was one of the last sessions we held with the Inclusion classes; the following academic year, cost savings meant that they were absorbed into larger mainstream classes, whose teacher did not see a justifiable role for storytelling.

What Is Lost When Story Is Lost It is worth concluding this chapter with pupils’ own observations on how they experience learning through story, and by implication, what kinds of learning experience become scarce when it is squeezed out.

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As already mentioned, the humanities teacher and I held a focus group towards the end of our two-year collaboration, to allow the pupils to reflect back on it together. By this stage, each class had five terms of twice-termly storytelling workshops behind them, so the table and the classroom walls were covered with artefacts of our work together: posters of King Charles’ escape from Cromwell across the Fens; stories of a desert family’s trials; collaboratively written poems about plague victims in our city. The first striking thing was how they anchored many of their comments in particular memories these evoked—enabling them to discuss our sometimes abstract prompt questions (e.g. ‘What is different about the storytelling lessons?’) in narrative terms. Several pupils (all names are pseudonyms) started by describing the difference between the usual classroom environment and the more egalitarian and sociable atmosphere of the storytelling lessons, in which we often sat around a single island of tables, and pupils, teaching assistants, teacher and storyteller were all necessary contributors: Joe: Instead of your mate being over there – over there – and over there – you just get to chill with them […] Dan agreed that storytelling was ‘a more calm way’ of learning. In fact, perhaps the pupils’ most unanimous emphasis was on the absorbing and entertaining nature of storytelling, and the freedom to allow one’s mind to roam and create images within a storyworld. Joe was keen that we should realise that his mind was active and doing valuable work in these moments, though he might appear passive or ‘tuned-out’: Joe: It’s just – you know when you’re telling a story and some of us put our heads down like that (puts head down on folded arms) – it’s only because some of us do it to, like, picture the images in our heads. Such observations lend weight to Parfitt’s call for education (and especially provision for young people with additional or behavioural needs) to pay heed to young people’s emotional backgrounds. She points out (2019: 100) that the Department for Education’s 24 recommendations for alternative education provision for young people struggling in the school system abound in words such as ‘quality’, ‘effective assessment’, ‘intervention’, ‘targets’ and ‘managing pupils’ behaviour’, but that nowhere are young people’s differing emotional starting points

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acknowledged. Joe’s comment suggests that storytelling may provide a tranquil space in which emotions can be felt and calm can be found. He went on to contrast (quite pithily) the freedom and solitude of listening to a story with the more coercive and stressful nature of usual lessons, which he felt were based around ‘facts’ and having to prove that you understood them: Joe: Well facts are, for example, you’re about to walk into a wall…that’s a fact. And a story is where you just – put your head down and listen. The pupils felt that this absorption, in various ways, helped them learn. Sam observed that a sensorily rich storyworld helped him to imagine the time or place being studied: Sam: You can link the story with the lesson. […] Like say we were learning about World War Two, really good storytellers would explain how the planes were flying over, the sound, the terrain. His words call to mind Lev Vygotsky’s (1967) insight that imagination and creativity are combinatorial processes. That is, in order to develop both creative thinking and logical reasoning processes, young people need to build a repertoire of images to draw upon and try out in different combinations, and they can acquire these through the narrations of others as much as through first-hand experience. Various pupils said knowledge in stories was easier to remember than facts: Amos: I remember more stuff if it’s entertaining – if it’s boring I just forget about it, and that’s what normally happens. Sam: Facts, sometimes you get told a fact and later on someone asks you, ‘What was that fact?’ and it’s hard to remember it. Stories – you would probably remember the story, or look it up somewhere. Stories are entertainment – facts are information. This allowed the stories to remain in the class’ collective memory and helped them make sense of their curriculum topics in subsequent lessons (underscoring Bruner’s call for a ‘spiral curriculum’). Maya articulated this ‘slow-burning’ nature of one particular story precisely:

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Maya: And after we went back the other day, after we had the story with you, we learnt lots from the story. Indeed, the detail with which the pupils recalled the stories and artefacts laid out around us indicated just how long their burn had been. Since the class had not only heard the stories together, but in most cases also added a ‘layer’ to them through creative writing, art or drama, the new incarnation of each story became shared class property. In gesturing to their posters, poems and other collaborative outputs on the classroom wall and on the table, the pupils seemed to be referring to these not simply as collective achievements but as new additions to the canon of knowledge. Thus, three pupils, to underline a point about how story engages imagination, offered to retell a particular story which their class had collaboratively written a year previously: Sam: Do you want me to read what this says? There’s a boy. He never gives up. He saves people. He’s determined. He imagines dangers. He tries his best. He’s kind, helpful, strong, courageous, a wit. The pupils were interested in the process of knowledge formation itself, and how this was manifested, or made transparent, in storytelling. Throughout the two-year period they had frequently asked about my sources (Dan asked without fail, ‘How do you get to know this stuff?’) and so I had developed the habit of bringing in any books, images or research documents I had used in shaping a story for them. Several pupils were interested in the role and craft of the storyteller; Sam mused on the various routes by which stories entered the class lexicon: Sam: Either that someone’s made up, or they’ve got from someone else, or they’ve learnt, or they’ve taken their time to, like, remember that story. This interest extended to speculation as to how they had developed, and might further develop, as storytellers themselves. They suggested various ways to develop the group’s storytelling practice—by inviting other storytellers to perform for them, joining their stories together in a book, or researching them in other ways. Sam and another pupil (not present) had worked with me to prepare a performance in a local festival, and reflected that the experience had ‘made me want to be a storyteller when I’m older. That’s why I picked drama….’ Perhaps because many of the pupils had

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dyslexia or other learning difficulties, they recognised ‘storyteller’ as a potential social role through which they could become knowledgeable, and respected for it. The focus group was a rare opportunity to plumb the views of secondary pupils who had had enough exposure to storytelling to articulate their responses to it. Their reflections demonstrate that storytelling lessons were not simply a welcome break from routine; rather, they suggest that they brought qualitatively different elements to their interactions with each other, the depth of their learning, and their understanding of knowledge.

Storyknowing and Dialogic Storytelling This chapter has discussed the idea of storyknowing as a form of knowledge in its own right, and one that deserves closer examination and appreciation. Chapter 3 grabs this understanding in its fist to explore some different approaches to storytelling with young people. It charts the emergence of a dialogic chronotope of storytelling across many areas of practice, which seems to harness the potential of storyknowing in fertile ways.

Note 1.  More recently, his son Michael Rosen, past UK Children’s Laureate, has taken up the call for more literature and discussion in schools in his ­writing, campaigning and teaching.

References Alexander, R. (1990). Core subjects and autumn leaves: The national curriculum and the languages of primary education. In B. Moon (Ed.), New curriculum—National curriculum (pp. 71–80). London: Hodder & Stoughton. Bacc for the Future. (2019). https://www.baccforthefuture.com/. Accessed February 2020. Benjamin, W. (1973). The storyteller: Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations. London: Fontana. Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. London: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. S. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

56  C. HEINEMEYER Bruner, J. S. (2006). In search of pedagogy (Vol. 1). London: Routledge. Chandler, D. (2014). Resilience: The governance of complexity. London: Routledge. Cogswell Tyler, A. (1921). Twenty-four unusual stories for boys and girls. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. Craft, A. (2011). Creativity and education futures. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Cultural Learning Alliance. (2019, August 7). Continuing decline in the hours of arts teaching and number of arts teachers in England’s secondary schools. https://culturallearningalliance.org.uk/continuing-decline-in-the-hours-ofarts-teaching-and-number-of-arts-teachers-in-englands-secondary-schools/. Accessed Feb 2020. Daniel, A. K. (2012). Teachers and children: A classroom community of storytellers. In D. Jones & P. Hodson (Eds.), Unlocking speaking and listening (pp. 48–65). London: Routledge. De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press. Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). (2001). Culture and creativity: The next ten years. London: DCMS. Doddington, C., & Hilton, M. (2007). Child-centred education: Reviving the creative tradition. London: Sage. Evans, B., & Reid, J. (2014). Resilient life: The art of living dangerously. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2007). Creativity in secondary education. Part of the Achieving QTS series. Exeter: Learning Matters. Frank, A. W. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness and ethics. London: University of Chicago Press. Goodson, I., Biesta, G., Tedder, M., & Adair, N. (2010). Narrative learning. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledge: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Heath, S. B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11(1), 49–76. Heinemeyer, C. (2018, September 3). Mental health crisis in teens is being magnified by demise of creative subjects in school. TheConversation.com. Heinemeyer, C., & Durham, S. (2017). Is narrative an endangered species in schools? Secondary pupils’ understanding of “storyknowing”. Research in Education, 99(1), 31–55. Holderness, J., & Lalljee, B. (Eds.). (1998). An introduction to oracy: Frameworks for talk. London: Cassell. Howe, A., & Johnson, J. (1992). Common bonds: Storytelling in the classroom. The National Oracy Project. Sevenoaks: Hodder & Stoughton.

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Jones, D., & Hodson, P. (Eds.). (2012). Unlocking speaking and listening. London: Routledge. Kamkwamba, W., & Mealer, B. (2010). The boy who harnessed the wind. London: HarperCollins. Kane, J. (1996). Savages. New York: Vintage Departures. Kearney, R. (2002). On stories: Thinking in action. London: Routledge. Lee, P., White, J., Walsh, P., & Slater, J. (1992). The aims of school history: The national curriculum and beyond. London: Tufnell. Lowe, R. (2007). The death of progressive education: How teachers lost control of the classroom. London: Routledge. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Accessed November 2016.http://www.abdn.ac.uk/idav/documents/ Lyotard_-_Postmodern_Condition.pdf. Maybin, J. (1992). Children’s language practices at home and school. In K. Norman (Ed.), Thinking voices: The work of the National Oracy Project (pp. 74–82). London: Hodder 7 Stoughton. National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE) & Robinson, K. (1999). All our futures: Creativity, culture and education. London: DfEE. Norman, K. (Ed.). (1992). Thinking voices: The work of the National Oracy Project. London: Hodder & Stoughton. OFSTED. (2012). Moving English forward: Action to raise standards in English. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/181204/110118.pdf. Accessed February 2015. Parfitt, E. (2019). Young people, learning and storytelling. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Parker, G. (2015). Teachers’ autonomy. Research in Education, 93(1), 19–33. Prentice, M. (1998). Story-telling in the classroom and across the whole school. In J. Holderness & B. Lalljee (Eds.), An introduction to oracy: Frameworks for talk (pp. 96–113). London: Cassell. Reason, M., & Heinemeyer, C. (2016). Storytelling, story-retelling, storyknowing: Towards a participatory practice of storytelling. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 21(4), 558–573. Reason, P., & Hawkins, P. (1988). Storytelling as inquiry. In P. Reason (Ed.), Human inquiry in action: Developments in new paradigm research (pp. 79–101). London: Sage. Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing education policy. London: Routledge. Roney, R. C. (2009). A case for storytelling in the K-12 language arts curriculum. Storytelling, Self, Society, 5, 45–54.

58  C. HEINEMEYER Rosen, B. (1988). And none of it was nonsense: The power of storytelling in school. London: Mary Glasgow Publications. Rosen, B. (1993). Shapers and polishers: Teachers as storytellers (2nd ed.). London: Harper Collins. Ryan, P. (2008, May). Narrative learning/learning narratives: Storytelling, experiential learning and education. Lecture for George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling, University of Glamorgan. Sawyer, R. (1942). The way of the storyteller. New York: Viking Children’s Books. Shedlock, M. (1915). The art of the storyteller. New York: Cornell University Library. Sylvester, D. (1994). Change and continuity in history teaching 1900–93. In H. Bourdillon (Ed.), Teaching history. London: Routledge/Open University. Talk Teaching. (2016). PETAL Paragraphs. https://talkteaching.wordpress. com/2016/06/21/petal-paragraphs/. Vygotsky, L. S. (1967). Imagination and creativity in childhood. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42(1), 7–97. Winston, J. (2004). Drama and English at the heart of the curriculum: Primary and middle years. Abingdon: David Fulton Publishers. Zipes, J. (1995). Creative storytelling: Building community, changing lives. London: Routledge. Zipes, J. (2004). Speaking out: Storytelling and creative drama for children. New York and London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

Chronotopes of Storytelling with Young People

We have seen that storytelling with young people is happening across a vast range of contexts, both strategically and spontaneously, formally and informally, through networks of storytellers and in isolation. This cacophony cannot be reduced to a single melody line, even within a UK context. Yet it is possible, and important, to chart how it is developing over time and across different communities of practice. So, this chapter introduces the idea of ‘chronotopes’ of storytelling practice and travels a journey through four such chronotopes. This account is of course a simplification—a narrative placed around understandings of narrative. In fact, most readers will identify their own approach to practice with more than one of these overlapping chronotopes. However, it will enable us to draw out the influence of different disciplines and assumptions about storytelling on the work we do with young people. Why pull in the term ‘chronotope’ (a word invented by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin) to discuss this diverse and changing land­ scape of storytelling practice with young people? Why not simply talk about different approaches to storytelling, or eras of storytelling? Firstly, because it would be difficult to choose between these two options, approach or era. Storytelling practice has evolved, but different ways of understanding and working with story also co-exist in the current moment, within different sectors, disciplines and subcultures of storytellers—and these are often strikingly unaware of each other’s existence. Secondly, because the word ‘chronotope’ does something unique: © The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6_3

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it brings together artistic strategies with surrounding political, economic and social conditions and ideologies. Bakhtin coined the term, from the Greek chronos (time) plus topos (place), to understand the unwritten rules of literary genres: ‘how fictional time, space, and character are constructed in relation to one another […] how texts relate to their social and political contexts’ (Vice 1997: 201). In his essay ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’ (1981), Bakhtin analyses the nature of time and place in various genres, such as Greek adventure romance, the chivalric, the carnivalesque and the idyllic. The chronotope of a genre gives us the rules for how to read it, from how to understand the characters and their agency, to whether to view the text as distant and authoritative, or available for mockery or imaginative exploration. We can see this by comparing the attitude we are encouraged to take to the central protagonist in three different chronotopes. A hero in a Greek tragedy might be placed on a pedestal of ‘long ago in our land’, and we feel we should see his or her actions as unquestionable and determined by fate. The equivalent character in a Shakespeare play would be exposed to psychological and moral analysis, and we would probably judge his or her actions within their historical context. Finally, in a carnivalesque novel of Rabelais we might be encouraged to poke fun at the character as a spoiled aristocrat. These three texts have radically different political purposes and give the reader or listener very different jobs to do. A particular chronotope implies a particular set of relationships with one’s chosen texts, one’s surrounding society and one’s audience. In relation to storytelling practice, talking about chronotope allows us to identify the attitudes implicit in our practice, and how we understand the triangular relationship between storyteller, storylistener and story. What claims are we tacitly making in our practice as to the timelessness or contemporary relevance of our stories, their truth value and our own authenticity? What are we positing as the relationship between the story and the life circumstances of the listeners, and their agency or desire to change these circumstances? The stories we choose to tell, and the way we tell them, say a lot about what we are expecting or intending from the storytelling exchange. Thus, the concept of chronotope is ideal to explore the relationships between storytellers’ aspirations and their ­chosen repertoire. Between them, the four chronotopes will sketch out a history of storytelling practice in recent decades. As will become clear, each

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chronotope also has a different relationship to, or understanding of, storyknowing. A box containing a ‘typical’ imagined storytelling workshop with young people will illustrate each chronotope, and these will reflect the places and time in which it flourishes (or flourished). A Note on ‘Imagined Workshops’ The workshops I present in boxes within each chronotope are invented scenarios, rather than being true accounts of my own practice. Specifically, they are a synthesis of experiences I have had in my own work, and work I have observed or read about by numerous other practitioners. The reason for this strategy is to present as ‘typical’ as possible an example of work within each chronotope, and the likely responses of young people to each way of working. Each is presented with minimal comment or analysis, for the reader to form their own judgements. I hope that in this way I can point narratively to the strengths and pitfalls of each chronotope, without making over-generalisations or caricatures, or holding the work of any one practitioner (including myself!) up for judgement.

The ‘Everyday’chronotope: The Librarian and the Teacher Since the 1880s—and possibly long before that—in the English-speaking world there has existed a confident and articulate tradition of storytelling teachers and librarians (Ryan 2008). Despite the professional contexts for their work, this group might be seen as representing an ‘everyday chronotope’, because they viewed storytelling as a self-evidently necessary, non-specialist, multi-functional, socially embedded practice. The didactic works of storytellers such as Marie Shedlock (1951), first published in 1915, Anna Cogswell Tyler (1921), Ruth Sawyer (1962), first published in 1942, and Eileen Colwell (1980) take a practical tone, drawing on their own extensive practice with children and young people in schools, libraries and community settings to inspire others to do likewise. Under their influence, weekly storytelling became widespread in many pre-1980s classrooms, including some secondary schools (Ryan 2008). For these advocates, storytelling is a kind of wonderful discovery, a special channel of communication which any adult can open with young people. They were arguably reacting to the fact that the radio, books and other mass media were causing oral storytelling practices to dwindle in

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many homes and informal settings, and like Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay The Storyteller (1973), they wished to draw attention to the value of what was at risk of being lost. Yet unlike Benjamin, their tone is cheerful. For them, storytelling skills and repertoire are not something innate or hallowed that prospective tellers must inherit at their grandparents’ knee, but something everyone (especially teachers, parents and librarians) should be encouraged to acquire. This uncomplicated and pragmatic approach does not mean, however, that a storytelling practice can be developed without reflection or dedication. Rather, their emphasis is on practice, humility, wide reading, thoughtfulness and care for young people. They urge storytellers to devote energy to what Sawyer calls ‘the building of background’ (1962: 99): searching out source material themselves, finding alternative versions of stories, honing their skills of choosing and shaping stories. There is a correlation between these storytellers’ aspirations and their approach to repertoire, best characterised by the words ‘breadth’ and ‘trust’. In terms of aspiration, these authors say remarkably little about the specifics of what listeners should be expected to learn or take away from the stories they are told. Rather there is an underlying assumption in their work of the value of narrative knowledge, which they often express as interdependence between literacy, emotional and moral education, development of the imagination and self-expression. Their recommended repertoire is accordingly broad, ranging from history, poetry and literature, to folktale and mythology—anything that, in Ruth Sawyer’s words (1962), rings true. Marie Shedlock (1951) is typical in counselling simplicity, and trust in the listeners: tellers should learn to avoid the ‘dangers’ of over-illustration, too much detail, too contrived appeals for audience participation. She warns that The danger of overexplanation is fatal to the artistic success of any story, […] because it hampers the imagination of the listener, […] we must leave free play, we must not test the effect, as I have said before, by the material method of asking questions. (1951: 20)

The implication is that it is up to listeners what they take away from the stories they have heard. Thus, schools and libraries which offered regular storytelling often valued it for its long-term and cumulative enrichment of students’

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imaginations, and other holistic benefits, rather than for any explicit links to the curriculum. One of the few documented examples is the Chicago ‘Lab School’ which has held a story hour for all younger pupils every week since 1949. This has recently been investigated by Pat Ryan and Donna Schatt (2014), who add that the school was influenced by John Dewey’s thinking on ‘collateral learning’ and the ‘pedagogical fallacy’ that children learn what we think we are teaching them. When Ryan and Schatt interviewed adult past pupils about the weekly story hour, interviewees recalled that stories never had anything to do with what they were learning, and indeed were never even discussed in class. They struggled to remember individual stories they had been told, but their descriptions of the overall experience were ‘emotional, visceral, vivid and powerful’ (139). Interviewees felt, without exception, that the regular exposure to stories and the plethora of images they had absorbed from them had influenced their careers, powers of expression and cultural outlook as adults. Ryan and Schatt note that educators practising storytelling in this period particularly emphasized that the accumulated experiences of listening to stories developed a positive emotional bond between teacher and students that facilitated experiential learning. Such emotional, physical and social experiences embedded into what became lifelong habits: ways of thinking objectively or critically, practising and recognizing the value of “cultured, civilized pastimes” (such as visiting bookshops or pursuing a career that served society). (2014: 141)

Ongoing efforts have been made during the post-1980s period by storytellers and educators to reassert the everyday chronotope, and embed (or re-embed) storytelling in the daily life of school communities— for example Ryan (2008), Mary Medlicott and Derek Jones (1989), Robin Mello (2001), and Betty Rosen (1988, 1993). The inclusion of storytelling in the National Oracy Project, discussed in Chapter 2, is as much a testament to the weekly efforts of thousands of teachers to ‘keep making time for story’, influenced by authors such as Rosen, as it is to the high-profile interventions of better-known storytellers. To cite a single example, retired secondary English teacher Dorrie Brown recalls being so inspired by Rosen’s call for regular storytelling that she experimented extensively with it in her classes during the late 1980s

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and early 1990s, with great success. She thinks she was the only teacher in her department to do so with such enthusiasm, but she remembers being aware of having counterparts in other local schools who were doing the same. These later advocates give more emphasis than their ­predecessors, such as Shedlock and Colwell, to the potential for pupils too to become storytellers, and the benefits this will bring. However, they are united in expressing the benefits of storytelling in education as relational, holistic, systemic and to some extent unfathomable. For example, American storyteller Mello taught storytelling to student teachers in a deliberate attempt to reclaim their ‘storied voice’ in their teaching, and reports that: ‘Storytelling, students noted, created relationships between student and text, plot and life experience, as well as the audience and the teller’ (2001: 7). These are not things that can be easily measured. As we have seen in Chapter 2, however, this chronotope has run against the walls of an increasingly outcome-focused education system. Reviewing school-based storytelling in 2008, Ryan sees it in terminal decline. No longer is storytelling ‘practised as a matter-of-fact by a majority, integrated without much notice’ (2008: 12); it is rather limited to the occasional visit ‘from a visiting professional during Book Week or Arts Week’ (11). In addition, as Erin Walcon (2012) argues particularly in relation to secondary schools, the involvement of any visiting artists is now often aimed at achieving predetermined educational, psychological or behavioural outcomes (such as overcoming bullying or building emotional resilience), something that my own experience confirms. Ryan (2008) draws on his vast experience in schools to ascribe this endangerment of ‘everyday’ storytelling in education to financial cuts, curriculum change, changes in teacher and librarian training, but also to the professionalisation of storytelling, which is increasingly seen as a specialist practice. It is perhaps too pessimistic to imagine that the everyday narrative voice of teachers can ever be thoroughly suppressed. However, in looking through the following classroom keyhole, we might find it sounds quite retro, perhaps set some time before the onset of the National Curriculum.

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Imagined workshop 1: The everyday chronotope

The teacher enters the classroom of rowdy 12–13-year-olds. It is not her usual class—she has been asked to cover for a sick colleague— but she knows most of them from the corridors, or from classes she taught last year. It’s Friday afternoon, and she decides not to attempt to pick up where her colleague left off in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but to tell them a story. She explains that it’s a Scottish folktale she once read, that left a strong imprint in her mind. It’s about a man lured away to dance with a fairy woman. After a few enchanted hours, he then hurries home to his wife—only to find that hundreds of years have passed, and all his family are dead and gone. She can’t remember every detail, but as she is telling she can see that, as usual, the pupils are more absorbed by a haltingly told story than a smoothly read one. She makes up names and places. By the time the story is finished, half the lesson time is gone. She looks around the class and sees the images racing across their retinas. The first voice: ‘Did that really happen, miss?’ She marvels at the credulity of the usually streetwise pupil. Another few seconds and chaos will creep back into the room—the words will be tumbling from their mouths. To harness the flow, she asks them to talk to their desk neighbours about their favourite moments in the story. When they then tell the whole class their chosen moments, the pupils rapidly move on from simple describing, to trying to make sense of the story. One boy points out that what happens to time in this story is nearly the opposite of what happens in the Dream. Others retell films they’ve seen where different time shifts happen. A pair of girls has another concern: they are indignant at the man’s casual betrayal of his wife, and feel he deserves what happens to him. He is as bad as Oberon and Titania. That’s what fairies are for in stories, for teaching people when they’ve gone too far, they say. As other pupils weigh in to defend the man, who was after all lured by forces against his will, the bell rings. The teacher allows the voices to compete for airtime. She finds herself hoping her colleague will still be ill tomorrow, so she can set them the challenge of re-writing the story in their own words, and see what emerges.

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The ‘Magical’ Chronotope: Spellbinding Performance and Healing Stories The next coordinated attempt to promote oral storytelling practices in English-speaking, industrialised nations emanated from a different source. The post-1968 period saw a rediscovery, or revival, of storytelling traditions within the political and ecological counterculture (there are excellent accounts of this movement in the UK by Wilson 2006, and in the USA by Sobol 1999, 2008). The oral heritage of indigenous cultures, as well as the peasant past of industrialised cultures, was recognised as containing vast troves of spiritual, civic and ecological wisdom which had much to teach an increasingly complex, unsustainable society. Wilson describes this revival as a moment when: Numerous storytellers and performers in the UK and USA optimistically turned their backs on the social and political institutions to find authentic voices of the past and their own authentic voices through story. (2006: xviii)

That is, like any revival, it was in some respects a reinvention, to meet the needs and agendas of a new period in history. Storytellers drew on the folk material of a partially imagined past to express opposition to a technologically advanced but socially atomised, or corrupt, present. The revival movement, according to Sobol, is fundamentally concerned with healing the ‘brokenness’ of present society through communal aesthetic experience; it seizes on a practice that seems to do an urgent artistic work: to transport the audience and performer and to connect them in a powerful and significant way. (1999: 29)

Central to this idea of transportation is the liminal or ‘hypnagogic’ state in which the ‘listener’s heart rate slows down, temperature lowers and breathing slows’ (Ryan 2008)—a state of calm absorption which most people who have listened to a good story will recognise. This can bring a sense of communion and confluence with others present (Mead 2011) which has a neurological, and for some even a spiritual, basis. This continues to be one of the most widely documented and celebrated aspects of storytelling, often described as feeling ‘spellbound’. Listening to a story can be a particularly intense form of the state Mircea Eliade (1969) calls ‘enstasy’—a condition of being ‘in’ or ‘within’ oneself. For

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Julian Stern (2014), enstasy is a healthy, contemplative solitude that is generative and important for well-being, and sometimes difficult to ­ attain in fast-paced modern lives. Storytelling offers the opportunity to experience enstasy while being co-present with others—in Stern’s words, a chance ‘to be alone and together’ (161). This seems to promise the potential for both individual and collective transformation. Once more intention and repertoire are intertwined in what might be called the ‘magical’ chronotope of storytelling: the quest for connection and wholeness in the moment of telling, and the choice of traditional folk material to evoke it. Storytelling festivals such as Beyond the Border and Festival at the Edge, organised by networks such as the Society for Storytelling (UK), together with numerous regular local and regional storytelling clubs, continue to disseminate not only the repertoire, but also the skills and values of this form of telling and listening. My own initiation into storytelling as an adult was, in fact, through being ‘spellbound’, almost against my will, by a storytelling collective named Fire Springs, when I heard them perform ecological-themed folktales at an environmental conference in my early twenties. I felt drawn to experiment with storytelling in my own environmental education work and later became involved with the events and Annual Gatherings of the Society for Storytelling. Thus in a sense, I am a child of the magic chronotope. I learnt my craft through storyrounds in yurts, workshops on rhythm, voice or creating ‘a sense of place’, book stalls of folktale collections, filling notebooks with notes on stories heard, heated discussions at AGMs, articles in society newsletters, inspirational performances by others. Jo Blake (Appendix 1) describes her own training as more formal, involving a course at Emerson College, but essentially similar in philosophy. Like, Jo, this was the grounding upon which I started to work as a freelance storyteller in performance, educational and other settings. In this work, I felt privileged to watch my listeners creating worlds in their own minds behind inscrutable faces. I saw for myself the genuine value of the liminal ‘spellbound’ state, as well as that of the traditional repertoire, but I also became aware of their possibly strangling grip on popular (adult) perceptions of storytelling. Teachers, youth leaders and parents often have a strong desire for young people to experience the unmediated, low-tech ‘magic’ of a story. Their view that adolescents may be less susceptible to its charms than other age groups is often given as a reason for considering them too old (or too young) for storytelling. This is a question to which we will return shortly.

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I would like to explore in more detail young people’s involvement in two areas of storytelling practice which have radiated out from the magic chronotope and its networks of practitioners: performance storytelling and therapeutic storytelling.1 Performance Storytelling In festivals, in theatres, and in community venues, storytellers since the revival have sought to develop a performance practice so as to bring their stories to wider and more diverse audiences (and, of course, to make a living). Sobol (2008) emphasises that the new generations of performance storytellers (or in the USA, ‘platform storytellers’) make an implicit claim that they are continuing a lineage of storytellers that had existed since time immemorial. What they are in fact creating, he claims, is a new art form with its own rules.2 This art form looks somewhat different in different countries. In the UK, storytellers typically perform to small audiences, without microphones, and often with house lights at least partially up so that the audience and teller can look each other in the eye. Their repertoire is most often folktale and myth of a wide variety of cultures. In the USA, ‘platform storytellers’ often give amplified performances to huge audiences at large-scale storytelling festivals. Because of concerns over copyright and cultural appropriation, they often confine themselves to personal or family stories, or stories from cultures to which they can individually claim to belong. Other countries which have seen ‘storytelling revivals’, such as Ireland, Australia and Canada, have likewise developed their own peculiarities. Yet all these diverse performance subcultures tend to centre their performances on what Sobol calls ‘the master trope of tradition’ (2008: 124). They focus on the unscripted, unmediated telling of material classed as traditional (although they may do this in innovative ways), and they aspire, by and large, to captivate or spellbind the audience. Parfitt refers to this as the ‘bardic model’ and argues that it is overprivileged in storytelling, putting focus ‘on what the audience rather than what the storyteller learns from the experience’ (2019: 18). Whereas, she continues, ‘Some listeners and tellers that are drawn to storytelling for its social, community aspects argue the profession should emphasise co-construction, shared voice, and interaction between tellers’ (2019: ­ 18). The promotional text for a performance by Sally Pomme Clayton is characteristic: ‘This intimate and enchanting performance takes the

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audience into the secret world of the magician’ (A Bit Crack 2016). The Londonist’s reviewer felt that this claim and the audience’s expectations were fulfilled: ‘Sally Pomme Clayton has that magic in plenty – she is a dream weaver, a spell-binder’ (A Bit Crack 2016). Storytelling attracts criticism from within its own ranks for investing too greatly in this magical approach. Performer Jo Blake, in Appendix 1, talks of the need to ‘disenchant’ storytelling and disentangle it from too great an association with the past: (W)hen I talk about enchantment I almost feel like storytellers are enchanted by their own myth, this mythical idea of what a storyteller is,[…] what I’m trying to do constantly with my own work, is to explore what a storyteller can be right now. I am interested and inspired by what a storyteller used to be. But the times we are living in now are different from any other time. What do these myths have to say right now?

It is interesting, in the light of this, to consider why adolescents’ involvement in this art form—either as performers or as listeners—has been rather limited, both in scale and form. Tellingly, very few of Parfitt’s young storytelling research participants were at all familiar with storytelling: ‘Out of all 24 students, only five anticipated or mentioned oral storytelling in their initial interviews, and this was usually mentioned in relation to someone reading from a book’ (2019: 42). A notable and interesting exception is the Young Storyteller of the Year (YSOY) competition, which was organised annually by the Traditional Arts Team from 2005 until 2014. The organisers suggest two reasons for the invisibility of young people in performance storytelling: The teens and twenties have been unrepresented, ignored or excluded in an art that is held by the sage and the specialist as being theirs by right, and is often judged by young people as only suitable for children. (Traditional Arts Team 2010: 1)

No longer so susceptible to enchantment, thus unfit as listeners, nor are adolescents considered qualified for initiation as tellers. This says more about what is understood by ‘storytelling’ within the magic chronotope, than it says about adolescents. The barrier to listenership—that of perceived age inappropriateness— is one that surfaces throughout the literature on storytelling with

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adolescents as creating a flashpoint between storyteller and listener. Helen East found a group of 14–15-year-olds to be ‘initially very sceptical about the whole idea of “telling stories”’, though they were happy to tell short personal anecdotes or urban myths (Howe and Johnson 1992: 51). Some of the teenage pupils working with Xanthe Gresham on a history-related storytelling project by the International Centre for Arts and Narrative (Reason and Harrison 2013) were similarly resistant to ‘weird’ folk material they felt to be irrelevant to them and their curriculum. Yet adolescents, in my and others’ experience, have little resistance to the liminal state of listening to a story itself. Their objections rather arise when a storyteller tries to lead them, unprepared and without a sense of context, into what East calls ‘“the world of make-believe” of folktales and comparable narrative’ (cited in Howe and Johnson 1992: 51), which they may suspect as alien and childish. Those storytellers who have built up extensive performance practices with this age group, such as Gail de Vos (2003) and Kevin Cordi (2003), tend to address these issues head-on and take as their starting point the affinities and preferred style of adolescents. This home territory, to generalise, features personal or family anecdote, the subversive or grotesque (e.g. ghost stories), informality, and a lack of concern with genre boundaries (Wilson 1997a). De Vos advises tellers to start conversationally with anecdote, ghost and trickster stories, and to facilitate the leap to less familiar, mythological genres by discussing their peculiarities with the audience in advance: This eliminates the need for members of the audience to react negatively at that point in the story in order to demonstrate to their peers that they are too mature to be taken in by such nonsense. (2003: 25)

She warns too against expectations of visible audience participation. These measures in place, she finds her large high-school audiences receptive and hungry for a broad range of stories. In fact, she believes that ‘young adults need a strong background in world mythology in order to better understand and appreciate the world of popular culture that surrounds them’ (2003: 81). Nonetheless, it is clear that storytellers with a ‘magical’ practice tend to find adolescents a challenging audience. The barrier to adolescent tellership is perhaps rather one of definition than of actual practice. That is, there has been a tendency among

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storytelling networks to define and even police the boundaries of ­storytelling. For example, performance agency The Crick Crack Club has produced its own set of ‘criteria for performance storytellers’ (Haggarty 2011), which would be very hard for a young storyteller to meet. Perhaps this is an unfair point, as Haggarty points out within this document that it is aimed at seasoned performers rather than emergent ones. Yet even the unwritten rules in operation at the much lower-key gatherings of the Society for Storytelling would alienate many young people: no scripts or notes in sight; most tellers perform traditional tales or parts of myth cycles in the third person, past tense, as fluently and proprietorially as if they had absorbed them during early childhood. As Sobol puts it, these are ‘de facto canonic structures that operate purely by imagery, assumption, and implication’ (2008: 123). Such an ethos excludes young people who wish to incorporate elements of their lives, of their influences, of popular culture, of emerging forms of writing and performance, into their work. Hannah Harvey (2008) provides an interesting case study of conflict between younger and older performers at a US storytelling festival. Both the festival’s seasoned audience members and fellow storytellers condemned an angry autobiographical performance by one young teller, and the ­genre-crossing work of a ‘narrative theatre’ company of university students which ‘worked the borderland between disciplines to engage storytelling in/as a liminal site’ (137), infusing mythic material with personal experience and social comment. The message is that young storytellers are welcome, as long as they respect rules accreted over decades by an older generation. This is perhaps best illustrated by a closer examination of the Young Storyteller of the Year (YSOY) competition. The YSOY sought to challenge the barriers to young people storytelling by demystifying and sharing the skills of storytelling with young people, as Zipes (1995, 2004) urges tellers to do. Its preparatory programmes and mentoring support achieved ‘progressive development from absolute beginners to confident public performers’, to the extent that it has launched the careers of many young storytellers (Trad Arts Team 2010: 1). However, in the competition I attended in 2014 (the last one held by the Trad Arts Team), performers transposing their stories to the first person, or incorporating too much comedy or personal experience, lost to those giving more ‘faithful’, mesmeric renditions of myth and folktale in the familiar form of the third person, past tense. Thus, the YSOY approach opened

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up membership of the storytelling community to young people, but limited their right to reshape the art form itself. It rather reinforced the canonical repertoire and style. Past YSOY winners Jo Blake and Tamar Eluned Williams have both described the unwritten rules of repertoire, style and self-presentation which have dogged their individual processes of carving out a professional identity as a storyteller. Blake described sensing these rules as an almost tangible, weighty and sometimes oppressive ‘mantle of the storyteller’ (2016). Inevitably, the UK storytelling scene is diversifying both in style and repertoire, with socially engaged ‘spoken word’ storytellers like Kate Tempest and Hollie McNish inspiring younger people to create their own work, and cross-fertilisation with digital storytelling, theatre, songwriting and other art forms. In other words, young people are telling stories. Yet some gatekeepers of storytelling networks still do not recognise these performers as storytellers. Meanwhile, another branch of the magic chronotope has been the growth in recent decades of therapeutic storytelling, either in individual therapy or in groups. Therapeutic Storytelling Those using storytelling therapeutically have tended to locate its healing potential in the two facets of the magical chronotope I have already identified—that is, in the therapeutic nature of the act of storymaking or listening (Wilson 2006), and/or the wisdom conveyed by specific stories. On the former side, therapists have found it productive to harness the liminal, spellbound state of absorption in metaphor and symbolism so as to ‘bypass the “left brain” that acts as a logical “watchdog”’ (Crawford et al 2004: 4) and sometimes a hindrance to personal transformation. On the latter, the influence of Carl Gustav Jung’s thinking on the collective unconscious has been extremely significant, and forged a strong bond between storytelling and psychological therapy. The narrative structure of the ‘hero’s journey’, inspired by Jungian archetypes and identified by Joseph Campbell (1949) as a universal myth, has been proposed as a template for supporting healthy adolescent development, for example by Andrew Lines and Graham Gallasch (2009) in their ‘Rite Journey’ initiative with teenage boys in Australia. Others working with teenagers in mental health concentrate on the storymaking abilities of young people themselves, and their need to hear

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certain kinds of stories to guide this process. Dan McAdams (1993) suggests that adolescence coincides with the beginning of the ability to become a self-conscious mythmaker, to story one’s own life. An appreciation that limiting or oppressive self-narratives become self-fulfilling has led to the use of stories to provide alternative metaphors, for example G. W. Burns’ (2005) compendium of ‘healing stories’ for young people. Human Givens therapy takes this further, using storymaking, particularly with young people, in a targeted attempt to combat trauma by reprogramming neural pathways (Yates 2011). All such approaches rest on an understanding of obliquity, the way in which ‘metaphorical image provides the means for a child to look at his powerful feelings from a “safe distance”’ (Sunderland 2000: 14). Sunderland finds, however, that adolescents are more reluctant than younger children to enter the imaginative space the therapist seeks to create—precisely because they have become conscious of the mechanisms of the myth-making process and feel exposed even in their fictional storymaking. They may also, on occasion, suspect the therapist’s agenda, or the particular conclusions to which she may be trying to lead them. Eloquent illustrations of the potential, but also the difficulties, of trying to harness the ‘magic’ of storytelling to therapeutic outcomes, are provided by Alida Gersie’s accounts of her therapeutic storytelling and storymaking practice, much of which is with adolescents (Gersie 1997; Gersie and King 1990). Gersie’s nuanced writing emphasises the creation of multiple fluid meanings, rather than simply specific ‘lessons’ she is trying to teach the participants. She is simultaneously aware of the potential for developing mutuality and collaborative ability, building tolerance for a range of emotions, loosening unhealthy self-narratives, reclaiming agency and a sense of responsibility, and becoming aware of alternative explanations and actions. However, Gersie’s attempts to use specific stories to heal, untie a knot or hit a particular target occasionally founder when working with adolescents. An honest vignette from her work with a group of inner-city teenage girls provides a hint of the limitations of such an approach with perceptive, suspicious, sensitive young people. In frustration at the girls’ boredom and refusal to participate wholeheartedly, she tells them a story of a minister walking out on his recalcitrant flock. One girl immediately perceives her thinly veiled meaning—“You’re fed up of us aren’t you?”—leading to a discussion which makes clear their feeling that Gersie prefers her own interpretations to theirs and treats them like children (1997: 12). Even Gersie’s acute interpersonal

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intelligence had not been enough to outweigh or disguise the messages and agenda carried by her stories, and she was made to pay for this. Chapter 4 contains an account of a comparable experience of my own with an equally perceptive group of young women! Such experiences resonate with Emma Parfitt’s observation that the idea of storyteller as ‘wise bard’ risks giving rise to a lack of humility or openness: The bardic model puts focus on what the audience rather than what the storyteller learns from the experience (especially when working with marginalised groups […]). Some listeners and tellers that are drawn to storytelling for its social, community aspects argue the profession should emphasise co-construction, shared voice, and interaction between tellers. (2019: 18)

There is, in short, much to learn from the magic chronotope, but enough reason to seek some critical distance from it, in our work with young people, as the following imagined workshop illustrates:

Imagined workshop 2: The magical chronotope

The first evening, when the whole group of boys is gathered around the common room, the storyteller looks around them and feels the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. They are participants in a project for youth offenders and he has been brought in to work with them through storytelling. Some look nervous and chat loudly to their friends; others have closed faces, entirely unreadable. Many stories pass through his head but he wants to choose the right one, one that can get past their defences, live in their unconscious and show them the potential of this weekend camp. He takes a deep breath and starts to tell the story of the young man who wanted to experience what fear was like. He begins loudly, punchily, to grab their attention, then lets his voice settle into a hushed tone. Looking into each of their eyes, he observes the ebbs and flows of their interest—who is ‘with’ him, who is straining away. Soon he feels they are almost all bound into a single group, breathing more slowly, following the thread of the nameless young man’s trials until he learns that only through love can he experience fear.

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There is an awkward silence as he concludes. He knows they are wondering what he is going to ask of them next. He writes the word FEAR on a large sheet of paper, and asks them to suggest other words or images to link to it. After a while one young man lifts the pen and writes a word, SNAKES, throws the pen back down again. Other voices: ‘Go on Shaun, nice one, did you spell it right?’ No-one else comes forward. There is a lot of shifting in seats. The storyteller says, ‘Right, let’s get up on our feet. In a circle. Shaun, would you mind standing in the middle?’ Shaun is blindfolded and asked to fall, trusting the others to catch him. After many false starts and feinted drops, this is accomplished, and others take a turn. Laughter and banter fill the room. The storyteller then gives out more blindfolds and puts the boys in pairs. He asks them to guide each other, blind, through the landscape of the story. He models this first with Shaun, pointing out how he keeps his partner safe from harm and guides him around obstacles. Another young man says, ‘Nah, I’m alright thanks,’ and he and several others sit back down. The remaining participants then have to do their guiding in front of an amused audience. Enormous snakes—and the body parts they suggest—feature heavily in the story landscapes they traverse. The storyteller had been planning to ask them to narrate their experiences in the ‘landscape’ to each other, but the atmosphere is certainly not safe enough. Instead he decides to wind the session up with a circle in which each person names one thing that surprised them about themselves in the session. Some mention the falling game, but once more, snakes predominate!

Therapeutic storytelling is only one of the tributaries feeding the wider river of participatory or applied storytelling—that is, storytelling ‘applied’ to the wounds of psychological, behavioural, emotional, political, societal, environmental or economic problems of young people and their communities. This work happens in schools, youth groups, community groups, prisons, arts venues and hospitals. It draws on diverse influences beyond the therapeutic and beyond the storytelling world

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itself. Indeed, it is often a battleground on which therapeutic approaches clash and eddy with very different ones, with other intentions and repertoire. It is time, therefore, to explore the dynamic chronotope.

The ‘Dynamic’ Chronotope: Applied Storytelling and ‘Telling Your Own Story’ The growth of applied storytelling projects can be understood as the cross-fertilisation between the worlds of applied theatre, and of ‘magical’ or therapeutic community-based work by storytellers following the revival. Applied theatre is itself ideologically complex terrain: as Helen Nicholson (2005) discusses, it has roots in Marxist and anarchist activism (via Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (2000) and the community arts movement) as well as in the socially ameliorative role of the welfare state, and in dramatherapy. Applied theatre and storytelling have different theoretical reference points and intersect somewhat haphazardly. This sometimes makes their mutual influence difficult to chart, but it is worth persisting to understand the underlying values and assumptions of what I am calling the dynamic chronotope. Like the magical chronotope, the dynamic chronotope starts from a critique of late-capitalist society, but the relationship between story and contemporary circumstances is direct and critical. Within the dynamic chronotope, engagement with a story should not bypass or escape advanced capitalism as in the magical chronotope, but rather prepare participants to grapple with and reshape it. It is articulated most clearly by Jack Zipes, the most influential and erudite critic of magical approaches to storytelling (1995, 2004). Although he rarely refers by name to the Marxist-inspired work of Augusto Boal, Paulo Freire and Bertolt Brecht which is so foundational to applied theatre (explored in detail by Deborah Mutnick, 2006), his contribution is arguably to extend their critical pedagogy to storytelling. The aim is to move ‘from reflective enquiry to social transformation’, as Mutnick says of applied theatre (2006: 37), and to place young people as quickly as possible in the role of confident storytellers. While granting the power of the liminal state of listening, Zipes does not wish to linger there. He vehemently rejects a passive listening role for young people, or any ‘cult-like status’ or ‘mystical overtones’ for storytelling, whose function for him is rather

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to provoke thought and curiosity […] Storytelling that is not engaged in the everyday struggles of the teachers and children is just another form of commercial amusement. (1995: 6)

Jo Blake seems to call for a similar corrective when she states (in Appendix 1): My main desire as a storyteller is to be of service to contemporary audiences, and people and communities, and I feel like more than ever, my job as an artist is to help wake people up. That is the opposite of putting people to sleep, which is often what storytellers are seen as aiming for!

Zipes wishes storytellers to use the texts of the past as a stimulus to ­critique and prepare to change the present. His school-based storytelling practice, emanating from this position, places heavy emphasis on understanding the structure and grammar of story, active storymaking and often subversion of cultural myths by young people. He trains his ‘teaching artists’ to ask young people to change endings, reverse perspectives, upend stereotypes, challenge assumptions, scramble story elements to satirise or transform them. In Bakhtinian terms, he wishes to entitle young people to ‘knock down’ the epic (Bakhtin 1981). In Brechtian terms, he wishes to hand over the means of mythic representation to them. Strategies he recommends to facilitate young people’s subversion of mythic or folk material include: • Telling several contrasting versions of the same story so as to draw attention to the socio-historical roots of each version, the different assumptions and stereotypes each may propagate, and the legitimacy of children creating their own version in the here and now (see ‘Further Reading’). • Free play with the plot elements of fairytales, using randomising devices such as flash cards or ‘What if?’ questions to encourage children to relocate, re-order, or completely upend their narrative arcs. Such an approach also aims to reveal the common plot structures of stories to children, to strengthen the authority of their own narrative voices. • Games that satirise and modernise stories, particularly through encouraging children to rewrite stories from the perspective of ­‘baddie’ characters to examine what societal forces led them to act the way they did.

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Zipes’ influence has rendered community-based storytelling more critically reflective, ambitious and socially relevant; for example, Wilson cites him as the inspiration for the Developing Schools Project Storytelling Residency in six Northern Irish secondary schools, whose aim was that ‘the storytelling would not end as soon as the residency finished’ (2006: 102). Such an emphasis on young people’s existing resources and understanding of the world around them inevitably leads to a heightened awareness of intermediality and contemporary cultural references. Evolving transmedia storytelling practices can supercharge young people’s ability to appropriate narrative materials for themselves, some of the most obvious examples being genres such as fan fiction, vlogging, multiplayer worldbuilding in gaming, ‘second screen’ experiences and creating ‘stories’ in social media. The Bolton Storyworld at the University of Bolton (Zaluczkowska and Robinson 2013) is an example of a project which harnesses students’ interest in actively helping to create a fictional storyworld using multiple forms of media; as well as watching videos, using the geolocative website, reading characters’ blog posts and attending live parties (which were in part performances), hundreds of Bolton students contributed to the evolving multi-channel narrative through social media, competitions and an online game. However, processes of re-mediation of story can be observed even within more low-tech or traditional storytelling spaces. Parfitt’s experience in the storytelling sessions she organised in secondary ­ schools confirms my own: young people made links between traditional folktales and Disney films, computer games such as Assassin’s Creed, YouTube videos, major news events, ‘and Ava’s favourite programme was the BBC TV series Merlin which she related to every story’ (2019: 43). Parfitt found the students’ intermedial and intertextual abilities to be key to their appropriation of storytelling for their own purposes: The students brought prior experience of many narrative forms into the storytelling space; previous narrative knowledge provided individuals with the narrative experience to further contextualise stories, empowering them to enact their own processes of observation, exploration, experience and inquiry in order to draw their own meanings from the fairy tales. Then they retold the stories, shared stories or used their imaginations to create new ones. In doing so they became storytellers themselves. (49)

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The dynamic chronotope, whether transmitted via Boal or Zipes, has had a further consequence for much applied storytelling work: a marked emphasis on facilitating young people to tell their own autobiographical stories. Once more, the declared aspiration and preferred repertoire of the chronotope become intertwined in the majority of practice. This does not originate with Zipes himself, whose work builds on his vast knowledge of fairytale and literary repertoire, and his complex analysis of its utopian and subversive potential (1994, 1995, 2012). However, his focus on equipping young people to be storytellers resonates strongly with the cultural democratic ethic in applied theatre, which often privileges participants’ own life experience over canonical material introduced by the artistic establishment. Strikingly, the Campaign for Cultural Democracy demanded in 1984 that people should be ‘taking part in the telling of the story, not having a story told to them’ (Dickson 1995: 24). The forms of applied theatre most often linked to oral storytelling, such as forum theatre and other Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) approaches (Boal 2000), playback theatre (Fox and Dauber 1999) and verbatim theatre (e.g. Anderson 2007) are all explicitly focused on this goal. Of these, forum and verbatim have been very widely used with adolescents. Personal digital storytelling too, often in tandem with applied theatre processes, has been seen by many practitioners as particularly suited to this age group; Megan Alrutz sees its potential to ‘invite youth to critically reflect on and (re)imagine metanarratives about their lives’ (2013: 51), while Prue Wales finds it to allow for ‘resistance and authentic self-expression’ (2012: 548). Accounts of devising processes in applied theatre projects have also emphasised that their starting points were personal storytelling by young people. Christine Hatton, for example, says of her devising with teenage girls that In seeking out the personal narratives for exploration in drama, we invite the narrative meaning-making of each individual into the learning process of the group. (2003: 151)

Thus in a 2016 symposium organised by myself and colleagues to bring together those working with adolescents through story, the majority of papers submitted dealt with varying approaches (verbatim theatre, devising, digital storytelling) to the retelling of teenagers’ own experiences

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of suffering or marginalisation (Allum 2016, Davies 2016, Inchley and Baker 2016, King 2016, Shoba 2016, Village Storytelling Centre 2016, Walcon 2016). These projects aimed, variously, to use story to give the young people some distance from these experiences, help them envisage alternative stories of possible futures, build supportive communities to resist or cope with difficulties or empower them to change current realities. All began with the starting point of the personal story. Although these papers demonstrated clearly how valuable these projects can be to young participants, the emphasis on personal experience in work with this age group needs some unpicking. It may partly owe to the affinity already identified in this chapter between teenagers, anecdote and personal myth-making. It undoubtedly also arises from Boalian approaches aiming to foreground young people’s own knowledge and perspectives rather than stories brought by facilitators, and thus ‘to position even the least powerful individual in the proactive, subject position’ (Cohen-Cruz and Schutzman 2006: 103). This is summed up in Wilson’s aim, when working with adolescents, to help them to become ‘storytellers of their own lives’ (2004: 20). It is rooted too in Boal’s concept of ‘ascesis’, glossed by Seyla Benhabib as the understanding that All struggles against oppression in the modern world begin by defining what had previously been considered private, non-public, and non-political as matters of public concern, issues of justice, and sites of power. (cited in Cohen-Cruz and Schutzman 2006: 102)

Yet the emphasis on personal storytelling also confirms James Thompson’s observation that there exists a dominant ‘discursive system’ within applied theatre, the ‘imperative’ to ‘tell one’s story’, particularly one’s story of trauma (2011: 43). While not denigrating such work, Thompson suggests that it rests on a) an uncritical parallel with psychological understandings of post-traumatic stress disorder, and b) an unsafe assumption that telling one’s story will lead to empowerment and solutions to social problems. This way of working may also deny young people’s right to choose not to tell their story, and rather to retain their own complex, private relationship with their own experience—what Thompson calls a ‘difficult return’. As Thompson points out, participants may have good reasons for doing so. For example, Jenny Hughes and Simon Ruding found that for a young woman involved in a project based on individuals’ stories of offending behaviour, ‘a focus on the offence was damaging efforts to support the

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development of a positive sense of self and capacity to control events in her life’ (2009: 220). As this example illustrates, a further thorny set of issues has arisen around personal storytelling in recent decades, during which participatory arts have increasingly been harnessed by the state to deal with or educate young people perceived as problematic or at risk. Thus, many applied storytelling projects operate not on the ‘personal-is-political’ model envisaged by Boal, but in pursuance of individualised behaviour change goals: to reduce adolescent pregnancy rates (Cox 2003); to combat persistent offending behaviour and raise aspirations (Village Storytelling Centre 2016); or to improve ability to cope with stress (Goodman and Newman 2014). This is consistent with developments within applied theatre, as Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston observe: ‘It is commonplace in the UK today for applied theatre projects to be undertaken directly or indirectly at the behest of the Government’s social inclusion policies’ (2009: 14). Such projects, in the hands of skilled practitioners, may in fact be far less narrow than they sound, and may even provide empowering and rewarding experiences for young participants. However, they involve a complex and often misty grafting-together of therapeutic (magic) assumptions with techniques associated with socially critical (dynamic) approaches. They also imply an overly mechanistic understanding of storytelling and a lack of understanding of storyknowing, as we have explored in Chapter 2. That is, by seeking to be about a particular issue, they may impose a restricted, propositional agenda on a creative narrative encounter that has the potential to be much more. They may even put pressure on young people to give what Alison Jeffers (2016) calls a ‘bureaucratic performance’ of their own personal stories, to meet the requirements of institutions or to protect their own interests. It is not uncommon for young people’s ‘progress’ to be measured before and after projects, or ‘interventions’ as they are sometimes called, so as to assess their efficacy. This is perhaps an inevitable development in a community arts ecosystem reliant on scarce, short-term funding, and the hamstringing consequences of this instrumentalist approach are discussed in depth by Kester (2004) and Bishop (2006). It is strongly at odds with the belief held by most storytellers that listeners or participants must have freedom and privacy to make sense of stories in their own way, or in Mead’s words, that ‘the crucial relationship between the audience and the story is beyond the storyteller’s grasp’ (2011: 39–40).

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One of the most practical forms of resistance to the excesses of i­nstrumentalism may be to leave it up to young people to decide whether they want to share their own personal stories or not. Nick Rowe, director of Converge, an arts and education programme for users of the mental health system, points out, ‘Just because a group of young women have anorexia, does not necessarily mean they will want to tell stories about anorexia’ (pers. comm. 2014). The young women in his example may prefer to use storytelling and storymaking to explore and articulate perspectives, inventions, ideas, identities, influences, interests, fears, hopes and values which are part of their developing selves rather than their illnesses—or indeed, they may simply want to have some creative fun. Just like an overweening belief in the healing power of certain archetypal stories in some therapeutic circles, the assumption that ‘telling young people’s own stories’ should be the main purpose of storytelling with this age group still often goes unchallenged within applied theatre. The following imaginary workshop perhaps gives food for thought.

Imagined workshop 3: The dynamic chronotope

As the bell goes for the end of the school day, the practitioner makes her way to the classroom where the young people, aged from 11 to 16, are already starting to trickle in. It’s the fourth session she’s had with this group of pupils from refugee families. Some are recent arrivals to the UK; others have few memories of living anywhere else. She gathers them in a circle with some trepidation, because this session will focus on storytelling. It’ll be the first time that potentially traumatic experiences might be touched upon. ‘Today we’re going to explore the difference between how people perceive refugees, and the reality. You’ll know that there are certain stories told about refugees in the media and in our society. But you’re the experts on this, so it’s important that people hear your stories, and your voices telling it like it is’. She starts a simple storytelling warm-up game: ‘Walk round the room with an object that belongs to you, and every time you meet someone, tell them about it and swap objects’. A busy hubbub ensues.

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The group has really enjoyed making theatre images in previous sessions, and can pull together a group image in seconds. So she asks them to make an image of ‘what other people think refugees are like’. They promptly form an image of a huge family queueing for handouts. She does not feel that much needs to be said about this, and moves swiftly on, asking them to work in pairs. ‘Give each other an account of a day in your life. Afterwards, you will tell it to the whole group, and they will make an image of a moment in it – to show what it is really like being a young refugee’. There is animated conversation in the pairs, but the first one to take the ‘storyteller’s chair’ in front of the whole group seems to dry up. He says, ‘I get up, I have breakfast, I go to school….I sit in lessons…I play football…’ The practitioner urges the group to make an image of one of these things—the football perhaps? They form an image of a football game. There is some warming up after that, as the young people start to think about the question—images are made of skyping with relatives and being worried about them; talking English to parents who respond in a home language; teachers asking intrusive questions; a student studying hard to get back to the top of the class where she used to be back home. The practitioner encourages each storyteller to give feedback and intervene, but most quietly accept what has been made. She gets out a sheet of flipchart paper and invites the group to share ideas: what could be done in school to give other students a more accurate idea of what it’s like being a refugee? Someone suggests a poster campaign, or that school could show some kind of film about what people have been through—but no, someone else says, other kids would be shocked and would not know how to react. She asks whether they would like to use their images and stories to make a film of their own? No, the consensus is that they would not. One girl offers to write down her story for her—‘You can use that if you like’—and the practitioner thanks her sincerely. She tells them that next week they will develop some of the ideas they have come up with today, and they nod politely.

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So far, we have talked about chronotopes from the storyteller’s point of view. In fact, magical and dynamic forms of engagement are also possible responses to any storytelling situation. That is, if a storyteller tells a group of young people a story, or facilitates them to create one, they may feel transported by it, or inspired to action by it. I suggest that it is in preferentially setting out to engender one or the other response that the storyteller declares their (perhaps unconscious) affiliation to a magical or dynamic chronotope. Resisting this choice is perhaps the most notable characteristic of the final chronotope in my trajectory.

The ‘Dialogic’ Chronotope: Meeting in the Gaps in the Story Fairytales, folktales, myth and legend have always had a complex relationship to reality, but the ways they are cropping up at the boundary between storytelling and theatre practice with (and by) young people in recent decades are striking and thought-provoking, for example: • Matt Harper-Hardcastle’s play, The Holding Place (2016) (see Appendix 1), stages the encounter between a group of refugees at the Calais ‘Jungle’ camp and a convoy of young British volunteers. After a devising process with his teenage actors, he embedded into the script a retelling of the Greek myth of Dido and Aeneas by the refugees, which explores the dramatic emotional and political landscape of the situation, and the lack of easy answers. • Theatre student Megan Hardcastle’s solo storytelling performance Her (2016) fabulised her problematic relationship with a childhood friend, allowing the friend finally to disappear in a mysterious flutter of white feathers echoing a Grimm’s fairytale. • In Mike Wilson’s Clay Stories project in Restormel, Cornwall, young people gathered memories and local legends from members of the community of all ages, for performance and publication. This was not, writes Wilson, a ‘preservation’ of a vanishing heritage, but a ‘celebration’ of an evolving oral culture (1997b: 151) in which young people’s personal stories were woven together with the more ‘hallowed’ material of the past. • Jack Dean, a 26-year-old storyteller and theatre-maker, blends hip hop, personal memory, oral storytelling, and songwriting to create ‘a brand new steam-punk fairytale for grownups’, Grandad and the Machine (2015).

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These projects blend the personal or ‘real’ with the fantastical and ­traditional oral storytelling with young people’s own cultural references and other artistic genres. Hughes and Ruding observe a similar trend within applied theatre in criminal justice settings, away from social realist personal storytelling, ‘to a more direct embracing and exploring of the metaphorical or fantastic’ (2009: 220). In my own practice and collaborations, I have seen a group of young Indian Dancers (Bharatanatyam) turn a Rwandan coming-of-age myth into a powerful physical performance which hinted at the ongoing restrictions and expectations governing girls’ lives. I have offered two stories with clear parallels—the true story of an enterprising Malawian teenager, and the legend of Blackfoot Indian hero Poia—to a group of struggling secondary pupils, and been deeply moved and surprised by the wounded hero and unusual plot arc they created in answer. I have found a little-known Italian folktale to be fertile ground for young people in a mental health unit to explore universal questions of guilt, blame, power, trust, solidarity and the future (see Chapter 5). I have seen young people draw on fantastical stories to mythologise their experiences, satirise their institutions, make political points, share their hurts, critique my practice, inspire their peers and assert their identities. Sometimes, they have done these things with a canny knowingness; other times, with a sense of joyous excess. Matt Harper-Hardcastle identifies something similar in youth theatre practice: It’s not simple to ask (young people) to play Lady Capulet, trying to make her daughter get married, when they are staunchly opposed to that. Their own views about the justice of that situation need to find some expression in the performance as a whole. […] Many theatre makers are considering: how can this story be told in the voices of the young people? How can we fully acknowledge and harness the fact that this piece of theatre is being created and performed by young people, and how can it say something because of that fact? We’re using Brechtian techniques so there’s a teenage commentary on the whole scenario, so that they’re self-referencing who they are, as well as playing the parts.

I suggest that an emergent dialogic chronotope of storytelling is becoming evident at the boundary between storytelling and theatre, particularly with young people. There are several senses in which the word ‘dialogic’ applies to this work:

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• The dialogue between fantasy and reality. Storytellers’ attitude to the traditional heritage is neither worshipful, nor rebellious; the story is neither a wise text as in the magic chronotope, nor a constraining archetype to be knocked down as often in the dynamic chronotope. Rather storytellers put elements of myth, folktale, history or personal experience at the service of listeners/participants as they construct new narratives for themselves within their contemporary experience. • The dialogue between enchantment and action. The storyteller has the potential to be both magical spellbinder and dynamic agent provocateur, employing both connecting and distancing devices. However, in the dialogic chronotope, storytellers are aware that the impact of their words and actions do not arise from their own will, but in the intersubjective space they inhabit along with listeners/ participants. • The dialogue between storyteller and young people. Rather than according undue dominance to the storyteller’s voice, or to the right of young people to tell their own stories, dialogic work recognises that these are mutually nourishing. Storytellers are aware of the potential of both the magical and dynamic engagement with stories—that young people may be both enchanted and empowered—but are open-minded as to how these may interact, and sensitive to participants’/listeners’ desires. They are interested in possible synergies between inherited traditions and young people’s own ‘grounded aesthetics’ and performance influences. The Roots of the Dialogic Chronotope This chronotope undoubtedly has many roots. On a fundamental linguistic level, Mikhail Bakhtin’s explorations of communication in The Dialogic Imagination (1981) opened up the ways in which every utterance, written or spoken, is part of a long-term, multivocal dialogue. That is, each utterance performs subtle transformations on the language it uses, for example by pushing the boundaries of the meaning of a certain word, or creating or strengthening an association between two images. The next time a listener or reader uses these words or images, they will carry some of this new freight with them and disseminate the new meanings into the world. This underscores the significance of every storytelling encounter, in that each moves forward the gradual shifts in meaning

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which enable human language to keep pace with new circumstances. To put it more succinctly, the dialogic nature of language is what makes new things sayable. For example, in recent decades the word ‘awesome’, originally meaning ‘inspiring fear or awe’, has been repurposed by youth culture, which needed a more striking way of saying ‘brilliant, splendid’. To take a more political example, the word ‘emergency’ has since 2018 gathered connotations of a heightened awareness of the ecological crisis, and implications of the radical action needed to solve it, through frequent deployment in campaigning, policy and conversation. Such shifts in meaning are occurring on both subtle and dramatic levels in the words we use all the time. It seems possible that stories, with their intuitively understood processes of negotiation and interpretation, may even act as a ‘fast lane’ for such linguistic evolution. My choice of the term ‘dialogic’ is also made in conscious acknowledgement of two other influential uses of this word, by Grant Kester (2004) and Dwight Conquergood (1985). Kester identifies a body of participatory art which he calls ‘dialogic artmaking’, in which the dialogue is the art. Kester sees participatory art as a means of facilitating an open and responsive dialogue between individuals or groups whose social roles would normally hinder them from empathising with each other’s perspectives. He gives as his first example Suzanne Lacy’s 1994 work The Roof Is on Fire, which brought together 220 urban young people and 100 police officers for unprecedented conversations in cars in a rooftop car park (Kester 2004; Lacy 2010). Conquergood’s ‘dialogical performance’ is not a type of art, but an ethical stance. In his performance and advocacy work among Hmong refugees, young gang members and other marginalised groups, Conquergood became aware of the ‘complex ethical tensions, tacit political commitments, and moral ambiguities inextricably caught up’ (1985: 4) in the work of performance with less powerful others. There are balances to be struck between identity and difference (acknowledging participants’ difference but not exoticising it), and between detachment and commitment (showing solidarity with people’s difficulties but not claiming them as one’s own). Going too far in any of these directions can lead to naïve, exploitative, sensationalist or cynical stances which prevent ‘genuine conversation’ with participants. Held in the tension between these poles is a stance he calls dialogical performance (Fig. 3.1). Genuine conversation becomes possible when arts facilitators (such as storytellers) are aware of all the risks they and their participants run in

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Fig. 3.1  Conquergood’s ‘dialogical performance’ stance (1985: 5)

their practice, and the likelihood of making mistakes, but aspire nonetheless to keep trying to find the open-minded, responsive, dialogical middle ground. This emphasis on the subtle interaction between artist and community resonates with Jack Zipes’ stance in more recent writing, particularly in Speaking Out (2004), in which he defines the idea of a ‘genuine storyteller’, a person who comes to a community without his own agenda, driven by the values of honesty, criticality, curiosity and service. Kester’s and Conquergood’s uses of the term ‘dialogic’ add essential layers to the meaning of dialogic storytelling. Kester’s ‘dialogic artmaking’ lays out a sense of its purpose—making possible conversations that could not otherwise take place—while Conquergood’s ‘dialogic performance stance’ sensitises us to the ethical balances to be struck if we want to enable genuine dialogue. However, both Kester and Conquergood focus on practice which engages propositionally and explicitly with the issues affecting participants, whereas we are primarily concerned with conducting dialogue through the narrative, often indirect or even unfathomable track of storytelling. As such, dialogic storytelling is further informed by recent developments in applied theatre, in reaction to instrumentalist paradigms discussed in the previous section.

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Practitioners’ growing appreciation of mythic material, with its often ambiguous, unresolved meanings, seems intertwined with the recent broader recognition within applied theatre practice that artistry and ‘affect’ may be as important as messages, solutions or ‘effect’ (Thompson 2011). The problematising of ‘effect’ challenges not only the idea that arts projects can achieve measurable behavioural or social outcomes, but also the sometimes exaggerated and over-simplified claims made by practitioners that their practice empowers participants to change their circumstances. It questions the very value of categories such as ‘applied theatre’, which imply a false binary choice between aesthetic enjoyment and social value. Rather practitioners increasingly embrace the fact that each participant’s or listener’s response to a story or project, and the impact it may have on their lives, is unique, unpredictable, long-term and multi-layered (as I have discussed in Heinemeyer 2017). The embrace of the fantastical, and of affect, in applied theatre are, in turn, related to a line of thinking, provocatively expressed by Jacques Ranciere in The Emancipated Spectator (2009), on the creative ­meaning-making role of listeners, readers or spectators. Ranciere critiques the Marxist idea that audiences must be catalysed into political consciousness and agency either by works about the contractions on society (such as Brechtian theatre), or by works which rely on their overt active involvement (such as participatory or immersive theatre). Empowerment, for Ranciere, is not orchestrated by the artist but claimed by the audience member, even the apparently passive audience member responding to an apparently apolitical artwork. It is bound up in ‘the realization of a capacity that belongs to everyone’ (2009: 81) and potentially can be developed in relation to any artwork (or any story). There is a clear overlap between such ‘reader response theory’ and what I have laid out in previous chapters as fundamental values of storytelling: the reciprocal, intersubjective relationship between storyteller and listener, and the imaginative freedom of the listener to make of the story what they will. While Matthew Reason suggests that the concept of the emancipated spectator is ‘too easily idealistic’ (2015: 275), he and Kirsty Sedgman (2015) perceive a need for a shift in focus from artists’ intention to audience reception, to analyse ‘the manners in which actual audiences engage with different kinds of audience-performer relationships to produce different kinds of experiences’ (275). Dialogic storytelling is aware of this complex co-production, and the fact that a storyteller’s choice of story

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or activities for a participatory artistic process will influence but cannot predetermine the themes or meanings which participants might find in it. Finally, the emergence of dialogic storytelling perhaps mirrors the journey of narrative in literature. Hanna Meretoja (2014) discusses the ‘crisis of narrative’ in the literary avant-garde of the mid-twentieth century, when narrative came to be suspected as limiting and even oppressive—incidentally, this is roughly the period in which ‘storyknowing’ came to be marginalised in education, and then resurrected within social movements. She then documents the ‘return’ of narrative in the literature of more recent decades, facilitated by a more nuanced, hermeneutic understanding of it. Within the hermeneutic view, an account is never either objectively true nor wholly fictional, but the structuring of reality into something that addresses the questions of the current moment. Richard Kearney (2002) suggests that story (understood in this hermeneutic sense) has become more important to people’s sense of meaning as the grand religious and political narratives which previously made sense of human experience have weakened and fractured. Thus, the dialogic or syncretic relationship between fiction and reality is somehow present in the cultural air we are breathing in the twenty-first century, and the skills of playing with this interaction perhaps come more ‘naturally’ to contemporary young people than to previous generations. The mechanisms and strategies by which storytelling achieves this interplay are explored in detail by Tom Maguire (2015); he discusses the ‘metaxic’ devices by which the past event represented in the story is overlaid onto the present of the storytelling event, and the meanings of the past with the needs and interests of the listeners or tellers in the present. There is abundant evidence in storytelling practice that young people can readily grasp the syncretism involved in dialogic storytelling. Reason and I (2016) discuss our work leading multi-art form storytelling workshops based on traditional stories at the International Centre for Arts and Narrative. We found that a significant proportion of participants, particularly adolescent ones, spontaneously ‘transposed’ the stimulus story to incorporate their own personal, political or metaphysical perspectives. Similarly, Christine Garlough’s study of the storytelling of both teachers and students in US Indian diasporic schools found that they used traditional Indian stories as ‘inventional resources’ (2013: 143) for ‘rhetorical work and critical play’ (149) to reflect on current issues, gender roles and changing identities within their communities. Garlough notes that teachers told the old stories not to reinforce the mother

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culture’s authority—indeed they ‘actively attempt to disrupt […] a nostalgic, diasporic gaze back to India’ (147)—but to be enriched by it. Both the young people and their teachers understood the dialogic nature of the task. A Reinvention of the Everyday Chronotope? Much of this discussion of the roots of the dialogic chronotope recalls the portrait presented in Chapter 2 of narrative knowledge or ‘storyknowing’, namely that stories convey perspectives and experiences rather than messages; enrich listeners’ imaginations gradually and cumulatively; allow for multiple and conflicting layers of meaning; and are jointly recreated in and for the time, place and context where teller and listeners are gathered. I argued early in this chapter that the nature and value of storyknowing was tacitly understood by storytellers of the everyday chronotope. Late-twentieth century movements aiming to reshape society harnessed storytelling to different goals—to heal or to restructure society—and to some extent, twisted it into their own image, overemphasising either its magical or its dynamic potential. The efficacy claims of both the magic and dynamic chronotopes have left them particularly vulnerable to co-optation by the state with its often narrower, instrumental view of the arts. In contrast, storytellers working within a dialogic chronotope are casting off hardened views of what story ‘is’ or ‘does’. In fact, in being aware of all the roles and functions story can fulfil and seeking to make them all available in the moment, they are reclaiming the values of the everyday chronotope, albeit in a more conscious and knowing way. In one sense, storytelling was always dialogic. It is just that, where storytellers of the everyday chronotope may have claimed to be ‘just telling stories’, their dialogic successors, no longer able to lean on quotidian storytelling practices embedded in young people’s settings, may often make a more self-aware invitation to their participants to co-create these stories. However, as before, storytelling is creating an additional channel for dialogue between young people and adults, in a time when many of the other channels available may be congested, over-mediatised or ridden with other goals. We can represent the relationships between these chronotopes, their chosen repertoire and their aspirations, in a diagram (Fig. 3.2). Our final imagined storytelling encounter is less a workshop than a particularly challenging evening at a youth club.

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Fig. 3.2  Relationships between chronotopes of storytelling with young people

Imagined workshop 4: The dialogic chronotope

An LGBT youth club and mainstream youth club are forced to amalgamate because of funding cuts. The two groups have very different cultures, not just because of sexuality per se: the LGBT group are a very cohesive, bonded group, who feel comfortable talking about issues such as mental health, and sometimes use sessions to run their own book group. The mainstream group are slightly younger on average, and prefer to stick in small friendship groups using the computers, making crafts or jewellery with youth workers, or playing football in the hall. The youth workers are not just angry about the cuts, but apprehensive that it’s going to be a challenge to all concerned to share the space, let alone to make friends. The LGBT group need to feel

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that they can bring their interests to the mainstream group, and the mainstream group that they won’t be overtaken by an earnest subculture. One youth worker is known in both groups for his ghost stories, and wonders if some storytelling could be a way of breaking the ice. The amalgamated group gathers for the first time and the atmosphere is cagey and uncertain. He starts with a quick chain story game, each person adding one word to improvise a shared story. He has to remind the young people not to ‘kill off’ each other’s characters. Gradually a surreal story starts to crystallise about a naked giraffe in the Arctic Circle. A girl from the LGBT group now feels she has done enough storytelling for one night, but offers to draw this giraffe while the others carry on. She takes herself off into a corner. The youth worker then tells a short Inuit tale (he points out, appreciatively, the coincidence of the Arctic link) of a girl who falls in love with a whale. She is forced to marry a hunter but goes to meet the whale every night secretly, until she is drowned by a mysterious storm. The story is both queer (strange) and ‘queer’, he thinks. And indeed the young people, of both groups, find the ending too weird for their liking. “It was a good story until then,” someone says critically. “Well then,” he says, “Make up some alternative endings.” Surprisingly few of the young people drift back to football. Most form clusters, largely along existing friendship lines, and rewrite the story. One group goes to the jewellery table and makes hybrid whale/human babies from clay. Another version, possibly influenced by Philip Pullman, features the girl harnessing the power of the Northern Lights to create a portal through which she can go and meet the whale in safety. A pair of boys has written a tragic poem from the betrayed husband’s perspective, which they read with exaggerated pomp and ceremony. The session gradually descends into a comfortable disorder and regular activities recommence, while the girl with the giraffe picture circulates showing everyone her work. Several others want to sign it, as it was a group creation. It is hung on the wall.

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Like Conquergood’s ‘dialogical performance’, dialogic storytelling practice is perhaps a guiding star to aim for, rather than a model of practice we can reliably implement. No maps are available for the unpredictable terrain which we traverse with young people. Part II of this book seeks to provide the next best thing, allowing the reader to sit on the shoulder of a storyteller (i.e. myself) as she crosses this landscape, aspiring to work dialogically with young people in a variety of settings and circumstances.

Notes 1. Here, the complexity of the landscape I am describing comes to the fore: many of the same storytellers also work in diverse education and community projects, often bringing elements of the magic chronotope with them, but the complex influences acting on these settings mean that this work is better discussed within the ‘everyday’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘dialogical’ chronotopes. 2. The storytellers of oral cultures often operated within the constraints and texture of everyday life. For example, Ed Bauman (1986) documents the changing practice of Ed Bell, a storyteller celebrated in the USA. His stories became longer, more detailed and more ‘spellbinding’ as he moved away from the fishponds where he used to work and tell anecdotes to fellow fishermen with a limited tolerance for verbosity, onto the stages of storytelling festivals.

References A Bit Crack. (2016). Events Archive: The Magician’s Apprentice, with Sally Pomme Clayton. Accessed January 2017. http://www.abitcrack.com/themagicians –apprentice. Allum, C. (2016, April 22–23). Digital storytelling with young offenders. Paper at Storyknowing: A Festival and Symposium of Storytelling and Theatre with Young People, York Theatre Royal/York St John University. Alrutz, M. (2013). Sites of possibility: Applied theatre and digital storytelling with youth. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 18(1), 44–57. Anderson, M. (2007). Making theatre from data: Lessons for performance ethnography from verbatim theatre. NJ: Drama Australia Journal, 31(1), 79–92. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas.

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Bauman, R. (1986). Context, performance and event: Contextual studies of oral narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, W. (1973). The storyteller: Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations. London: Fontana. Bishop, C. (Ed.). (2006). Participation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Blake, J. (2016, April 22–23). Speak me the future: Disenchanting contemporary storytelling. Paper at Storyknowing: A Festival and Symposium of Storytelling and Theatre with Young People, York St John University/York Theatre Royal. Boal, A. (2000). Theatre of the oppressed (2nd ed.). London: Pluto Press. Burns, G. W. (2005). 101 healing stories for kids and teens: using metaphors in therapy. Hoboken , NJ: Wiley. Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. New York: Pantheon Books. Cogswell Tyler, A. (1921). Twenty-four unusual stories for boys and girls. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Cohen-Cruz, J., & Schutzman, M. (2006). Redefining the private: From personal storytelling to political act. In J. Cohen-Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), A Boal companion: Dialogues on theatre and cultural politics (pp. 103–113). London: Routledge. Colwell, E. (1980). Storytelling. Stroud: Thimble Press. Conquergood, D. (1985). Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance. Text and Performance Quarterly, 5(2), 1–13. Cordi, K. (2003). Listening is the other half of telling: Teaching students with story. In A. Cox & D. Albert (Eds.), The healing heart—Families: Storytelling to encourage caring and healthy families (pp. 164–168). Canada: New Society Publishers. Cox, A. (2003). The Odyssey Project: Adolescent pregnancy prevention through storytelling. In A. Cox & D. Albert (Eds.), The Healing Heart—Families: Storytelling to encourage caring and healthy families (pp. 154–161). Canada: New Society Publishers. Crawford, R., Brown, B., & Crawford, P. (2004). Storytelling in therapy. Cheltenham: Nelson Thomas. Davies, H. (2016, April 22–23). Within this landscape: Girlhood, grief and (self) narrative. Paper at Storyknowing: A Festival and Symposium of Storytelling and Theatre with Young People, York Theatre Royal/York St John University. De Vos, G. (2003). Storytelling for young adults: A guide to tales for teens (2nd ed.). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited Inc. Dickson, M. (Ed.). (1995). Art with people. Sunderland: AN Publications. Eliade, M. (1969). Yoga: Immortality and freedom (2nd ed.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Fox, J., & Dauber, H. (1999). Gathering voices: Essays on playback theatre. New Paltz, NY: Tusitala Publishing.

96  C. HEINEMEYER Garlough, C. (2013). Savitri’s stories and girl power: Rhetorical approaches to feminism(s) in Indian American ethnic schools. Storytelling, Self, Society, 9(2), 143–168. Gersie, A., & King, N. (1990). Storymaking in education and therapy. Sweden: Stockholm Institute of Education Press. Gersie, A. (1997). Reflections on therapeutic storymaking: The use of stories in groups. London and Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Goodman, R., & Newman, D. (2014). Testing a digital storytelling intervention to reduce stress in adolescent females. Storytelling, Self, Society, 10(2), 177–193. Haggarty, B. (2011). Assessment criteria for performance storytelling. The Crick Crack Club. Accessed September 2016. www.crickcrackclub.com. Harvey, H. B. (2008). On the edge of the storytelling world: The festival circuit and the fringe. Storytelling, Self, Society, 4, 134–151. Hatton, C. (2003). Backyards and borderlands: Some reflections on researching the travels of adolescent girls doing drama. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 8(2), 139–156. Heinemeyer, C. (2017). Embracing indeterminacy in participatory storytelling. In M. Reason & N. Rowe (Eds.), Applied practice: Evidence and impact in theatre, music and art (pp. 238–245). London: Methuen Drama. Howe, A., & Johnson, J. (1992). Common bonds: Storytelling in the classroom. The National Oracy Project. Sevenoaks: Hodder and Stoughton. Hughes, J., with Ruding, S. (2009). Made to measure? A critical interrogation of applied theatre as intervention with young offenders in the UK. In T. Prentki & S. Preston (Eds.), The applied theatre reader (pp. 217–225). London and New York: Routledge. Inchley, M., & Baker, S. (2016, April 22–23). The Verbatim formula: Responding to testimony from looked-after young people and adults in the UK care system. Paper at Storyknowing: A Festival and Symposium of Storytelling and Theatre with Young People, York Theatre Royal/York St John University. Jeffers, A. (2016, October 11). Voices and sources: Who gets to hold the umbrella? At Cultivating Research seminar, University of Manchester. Kearney, R. (2002). On stories: Thinking in action. London: Routledge. Kester, G. H. (2004). Conversation pieces: Community and communication in modern art. Berkeley: University of California Press. King, R. (2016, April 22–23). Playing with each other’s lives: Exploring ‘verbatim theatre’, storytelling and ethics in the drama classroom. Paper at Storyknowing: A Festival and Symposium of Storytelling and Theatre with Young People, York Theatre Royal/York St John University. Lacy, S. (2010). Leaving art: Writings on performance, politics and publics, 1974– 2007. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Lines, A., & Gallasch, G. (2009). The rite journey: Rediscovering rites of passage for boys. THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, 3(1), 74–89. Maguire, T. (2015). Storytelling on the contemporary stage. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McAdams, D. P. (1993). The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York: The Guilford Press. Mead, G. (2011). Coming home to story: Storytelling beyond happily ever after. Bristol: Vala Publishing. Medlicott, M., & Jones, D. (Eds.). (1989). By word of mouth: The revival of storytelling. London: Channel 4 Television. Mello, R. (2001, August–September). Building bridges: How storytelling influences teacher/student relationships. Paper presented at the Storytelling in the Americas conference, St Catherine’s, ON. Meretoja, H. (2014). The narrative turn in fiction and theory: The crisis and return of storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mutnick, D. (2006). Critical interventions: The meaning of praxis. In J. ­Cohen-Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), A Boal companion: Dialogues on theatre and cultural politics (pp. 33–45). London: Routledge. Nicholson, H. (2005). Applied drama: The gift of theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Parfitt, E. (2019). Young people, learning and storytelling. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Prentki, T., & Preston, S. (2009). Applied theatre: An introduction. In T. Prentki & S. Preston (Eds.), The applied theatre reader (pp. 9–15). London and New York: Routledge. Ranciere, J. (2009). The emancipated spectator. London: Verso. Reason, M. (2015). Introduction to Part 2: Participations on participation: Researching the “active” theatre audience. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 12(1), 271–280. Reason, M., & Harrison, M. (2013). “You wouldn’t be able to learn without stories”: York Theatre Royal Storytelling Residency Evaluation. York Theatre Royal/York St John University. Reason, M., & Heinemeyer, C. (2016, November). Storytelling, story-retelling, storyknowing: Towards a participatory practice of storytelling. Research in Drama Education. Reason, M., & Sedgman, K. (2015). Editors’ introduction: Themed section on theatre audiences. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 12(1), 117–122. Rosen, B. (1988). And none of it was nonsense: The power of storytelling in school. London: Mary Glasgow Publications.

98  C. HEINEMEYER Rosen, B. (1993). Shapers and polishers: Teachers as storytellers (2nd ed.). London: Harper Collins. Ryan, P. (2008, May 29). Narrative learning/learning narratives: Storytelling, experiential learning and education. At George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling, Cardiff. Ryan, P., & Schatt, D. (2014, Fall). Can you describe the experience? Storytelling, Self, Society, 10(2), 131–155. Sawyer, R. (1962). The way of the storyteller (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. (Original work published in 1942.) Shedlock, M. L. (1951). The art of the storyteller (4th ed.). New York: Dover Publications. (Original work published in 1915.) Shoba, N. (2016, April 22–23). Power and possibility; Using counter narrative with young people. Paper at Storyknowing: A Festival and Symposium of Storytelling and Theatre with Young People, York Theatre Royal/York St John University. Sobol, J. D. (1999). The storytellers’ journey: An American revival. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Sobol, J. D. (2008). Contemporary storytelling: Revived traditional art and protean social agent. Storytelling, Self, Society, 4, 122–133. Stern, J. (2014). Loneliness and solitude in education: How to value individuality and create an enstatic school. Oxford and New York: Peter Lang. Sunderland, M. (2000). Using story telling as a therapeutic tool with children. Milton Keynes: Speechmark Publishing. Thompson, J. (2011). Performance affects: Applied theatre and the end of effect (2nd ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Traditional Arts Team. (2010). Young tongues young storytellers’ projects and the young storyteller of the year award. Accessed March 2016. http://www. tradartsteam.co.uk/images/youth_summary.pdf. Vice, S. (1997). Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Village Storytelling Centre. (2016, April 22–23). Look back, step forward. Paper at Storyknowing: A Festival and Symposium of Storytelling and Theatre with Young People, York Theatre Royal/York St John University. Walcon, E. (2012) Vital spaces/vital signs: Young people, performance, identity and dialogue (PhD thesis). University of Exeter. Walcon, E. (2016, April 22–23). Making grit: Devising theatre as a space for resilience, resistance & revelry. Paper at Storyknowing: A Festival and Symposium of Storytelling and Theatre with Young People, York Theatre Royal/York St John University. Wales, P. (2012). Telling tales in and out of school: Youth performativities with digital storytelling. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 17(4), 535–552.

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Wilson, M. (1997a). Performance and practice: Oral narrative traditions among teenagers in Britain and Ireland. Aldershot: Ashgate. Wilson, M. (1997b). Telling it as it is: Storytelling in the China Clay villages. In E. Westland (Ed.), Cornwall: The cultural construction of place (pp. 143–153). Penzance: Patten Press (published under the name Mike Dunstan). Wilson, M. (2004). Storytelling with older children: A reflection on practice. Teaching and Learning, 2(1), 20–21. Wilson, M. (2006). Storytelling and theatre: Contemporary storytellers and their art. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Yates, Y. (2011). Human givens therapy with adolescents: A practical guide for professionals. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Zaluczkowska, A., & Robinson, L. (2013). Bolton storyworld—You make the story? Assessing a transmedia narrative/work in progress. Journal of Media Practice, 14(4), 257–277. Zipes, J. (1994). The trials and tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the tale in sociocultural context. London: Taylor and Francis. Zipes, J. (1995). Creative storytelling: Building community, changing lives. London: Routledge. Zipes, J. (2004). Speaking out: Storytelling and creative drama for children. New York and London: Routledge. Zipes, J. (2012). Fairy tales and the art of subversion (3rd ed.). London: Routledge Classics.

PART II

Telling Stories

It is time to look again at the triangle of listener, teller and story. It sounds so simple—a rough sketch of an infinitely portable theatre that can be assembled, with very little notice, in almost any setting. Yet its apparently static nature belies its inherent drama, challenges and complexity. It creates gaps: interpersonal and imaginative spaces which never feel the same twice. It is perfectly possible (and probably advisable) for anyone to start telling stories with young people without worrying about this complicated landscape; as an experienced human, intuition will carry you a long way. However, the process of developing a dialogic practice of storytelling is one of tutoring one’s intuition: sensing and becoming curious about these gaps, realising the impact of choices made consciously or unconsciously and becoming aware of a wider range of ways to navigate them. My practice and research have made me alive to three spaces in particular: The space between teller and listeners: Firstly, there is a complex, dynamic, sometimes ­semi-unconscious conversation going on between storyteller and listeners, both during the telling of a single story and throughout a workshop as a whole. My experience is that storytelling practice with adolescents raises the stakes in this space. The territory of story: Secondly, the story itself becomes a territory on which tellers and listeners meet. Whether the story has been brought from ‘long ago and far away’ by an adult storyteller, or shared by a young person in a workshop, how do we use and inhabit this territory?

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What are the ‘rules’ and how do we communicate them? There are more possibilities than immediately meet the eye. Dialogic fora: Thirdly, rather than floating in a kind of dreamtime, tellers, listeners and stories always come together in a particular time and place (as our explorations of the chronotopes of storytelling have made clear). A storytelling exchange in a school history class will be very different from one with the same young people around the craft table at a youth club. Some settings abound in opportunities for dialogue, whereas in others dialogue struggles to flourish. If we erect a storytelling forum like a kind of tent, what traces, if any, does this leave on the setting after we have struck camp? Later, Part III of this book will navigate these gaps in detail, one chapter for each. It will offer ways of understanding what is happening in them, and of harnessing their potential for unusual and productive conversations with young people. Yet of course, any understanding I have gleaned of storytelling is embedded in particular experiences with particular groups of young people. It cannot be abstracted from these contexts without losing something. So this middle part of the book proceeds somewhat differently. It sticks to telling stories—working through ‘storyknowing’. It consists of three stories from my practice which respectively illustrate these three gaps, or dimensions of a dialogic storytelling practice with young p ­ eople, from the ground up. The first involved a group of young women in a residential adolescent mental health unit (Maple House) over several weeks. The second was a longer-term project, developing a collaborative performance with two young people who were leaving Maple House. Finally, the third story documents the challenges of carving out a space for storytelling in a secondary school (City School). The stories raise overlapping issues, but each illuminates one of the above dimensions. Each story of practice is followed by a practical thinking exercise, to invite you to consider the issues raised in relation to your own practice.

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Fig. P.1  The gaps in the storytelling exchange

CHAPTER 4

Pushing It Too Far at Maple House: Or, The Space Between Teller and Listeners

I often felt my instincts to be lacking at Maple House. The population of young people (aged 13–18) was ever-changing, and because of their mental ill health and circumstances (some were in the setting against their will), the common area where we met was often filled with silences and ‘elephants in the room’. At one point, the group of inpatients were all young women, several of them fiercely intelligent, and they seemed to suspect my agenda. Although I explained that I was a practice researcher, seeking to develop my storytelling practice with adolescents, perhaps they thought that I was trying to analyse or ‘heal’ them, or perhaps they simply sensed my uncertainty as to how to engage them. Whatever the cause, I would feel my stories taking on a strange shape as I told them to these girls. There would often be an awkward, painful gap after I’d finished. It seemed impossible to establish a real connection with the group, or convince them of my readiness to hear whatever they might bring. They would join in some games but then withdraw into silence. I knew I needed to base my workshops on fluidity, flexibility and a lack of expectations, but felt at a loss as to how to do so. My field notes recorded: I am bouncing against the walls of a three-dimensional space whose walls are injunctions. I must avoid assuming the young people’s consent, but I must also not impose on them the obligation to state it. I must be led, © The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6_4

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106  C. HEINEMEYER but not into dark and harmful places, and yet I must not skate over darkness. I must develop the relationship between them and me, but not ­over-structure it. (November 2014)

Searching for some guiding purpose or structure, I decided to try to create a booklet of collaborative stories with the group based on paintings. I planned to elicit the ‘back story’ of a painting from the group, taking inspiration from Alida Gersie’s ‘assisted storytelling’ (1997: 102) in which she guides groups to make stories through asking questions such as: In which landscape does the story take place? What kind of dwelling place is there in this landscape? Who (animal, person or creature) lives in this dwelling? What kind of predicament does this one presently experience? Who unexpectedly offers help? How does the character use the help offered? Which further minor obstacle surprises the character? How is this additional difficulty overcome? What is the final outcome? What does the character gain from the experience, if anything? Gersie’s questions will tend to generate a classic ‘hero’s journey’ story and are a good way of creating a satisfying story out of nothing. I felt that, starting with a painting, less leading, more open questions were needed. I brought three books of paintings to the first session and was amazed how quickly and unanimously the girls fixed on Degas’ ‘Girls Combing Their Hair’. My questions to them then included: • How old are these girls? • What is each of them like? • Why did they come to this place? • What would we see if we could look to the left and right of the frame? From that point, the story started to flow freely. To my surprise, all of the group were emphatic that the girls in the painting were not enjoying a sense of idyllic peace, but being keenly scrutinised by a group of men. They developed this theme in some detail (Image 4.1). Enthused, I typed up their story in my own words: Three sixteen-year-old girls walked down together to the banks of the river, which divided their village from the wide world beyond. They had been friends since birth, but the thoughts of each were now running in different directions.

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Image 4.1  ‘Girls Combing Their Hair’ (1875–6), Edward Degas, The Philips Collection, Washington, USA. Available at https://artsandculture.google.com/ partner/the-phillips-collection?hl=en, accessed March 2020 They wore white shifts, to symbolise their virginity. Their hair was loose and their feet bare. They walked close together and they remained close together as they sat down and started to comb their hair. At a little distance stood their mentor, who had been through all this a year earlier, her hands on her hips as she supervised. There gathered around them an audience – of men – watching them, sizing them up as they combed. The men held gifts of dresses and jewellery in their hands. The first girl stood up, so the men could see her standing tall and ready. She had been waiting for this event for years. The second turned her face away and hunched up so they could not see her resentment. She did not want to choose or be chosen. She trembled a little with nerves. The third pulled her dress halfway down her arm and chest to give the audience a better view – especially the older guys, the ones with the most valuable gifts. And there was a fourth girl, or there had been. She had disappeared this morning – where to, no-one knew. They’d all thought they knew her but now they were not so sure.

108  C. HEINEMEYER They could not brush their hair forever – soon the ball would begin. The second searched the crowd for her friend, a boy who was not like the other young men and wanted to get away from all this. It was essential that he chose her first to give his gift to, and that they then move quickly. While her two friends mingled among the men, receiving dresses and comparing jewels, the second girl found the boy. Together they made for the shore and the little rowing boat that lay there. They had planned this escape, but actually crossing the river felt terrifying. They’d never crossed it before. As they were rowing they heard shouts behind them. Their two friends in their white shifts, their mentor, the crowd of men – all their village standing there called them back: ‘Where are you going? You can’t cross the river.’ The boy said to the girl, ‘Do you realise we won’t be able to go back? – at least not for a long time, not as we are now.’ The girl said quietly, ‘I realise. Let’s go.’ On the other side, in the woods, they met the runaway girl, though it took them a while to recognise her. Her beautiful long hair was gone and her face looked masculine. ‘Where’s your hair? Weren’t you a girl the last time we saw you?’ She replied with a smile, ‘I sold it. We’re going to need something to live on.’ And so the second girl, the boy, and the one who was yet to be defined, moved on together. They didn’t know what they were going on to – they felt fear – but they realised what they had to do was start living their lives, and see where it went from there.

The story was intriguing, a complete transformation of how most adults would view this painting. I was struck by how it seemed to offer a glimpse of the world through the participants’ eyes—suggesting a feeling of being under scrutiny, of bucking against gender expectations that seemed far more rigid than when I was a teenager in the 1990s. I didn’t want to ‘analyse’ the girls, but it seemed they were keen to use the exercise to make some powerful points. So I prepared the above written version of it to bring back the following week. Yet after reading this aloud at the next session, I was met by a tense and stony silence. Nonetheless, undaunted (or pretending to be undaunted), I brought out the books of paintings again. Two girls showed a small flicker of interest in Chagall’s painting ‘The Dream’; the rest said nothing. Without another idea in my head, I chose to interpret the atmosphere of resistance as uncertainty or apathy, and to pursue my plan. The same two girls made some contributions that enabled us to bring together a story about an angry, isolated woman (Image 4.2).

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Image 4.2  ‘The Dream (The Rabbit)’ (1927), Marc Chagall, https://www. marc-chagall-paintings.org/The-dream-The-rabbit.html, accessed March 2020

A moment arose when the character was stuck, immobile and proud, in the air, and I pushed them with questions: ‘What happens next? Does she land on the ground anywhere? What does she do there?’ One girl responded that the woman wanted a different way of life, to ‘change’, in some unspecified way—but it was clear that most of the others preferred to leave her there—in arrogance, or perhaps uncertainty. In fact, I should perhaps have taken warning from the ‘One Word Round the Circle’ game we had played beforehand as a warm-up. In this simple and well-known game, participants sit in a circle, each adding a word to the story in turn (e.g. ‘Once’ ‘there’ ‘lived’ ‘a’ ‘girl’ ‘who’ ‘always’….). The girls were talented players of this, and had collaborated to create an angry heroine. At a certain point, they had paused and collectively decided to leave their heroine to be eaten by a predator. Should I have listened to this declaration of mood, and allowed them

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to leave their Chagall antiheroine hanging in the air? There was a clear message in their silence and reluctance and yet—in a session focused on open two-way storytelling communication!—I chose not to listen but to plough ahead towards a somewhat redemptive ending.

The Reckoning Later that week, I was sent the results of an informal feedback exercise which the teacher had run with the girls, after sensing their dissatisfaction. I could take heart from the fact that almost all the girls mentioned that they enjoyed working together as a group, particularly the warm-up games I started with, even if only because it was ‘something to do and passes the time’. However, there was a strong shared view of where I was going wrong: one girl wrote that storytelling ‘could be a bit childish’, another that ‘it seems quite immature’, another ‘I found it a bit patronising with the stories, it seems a bit babyish’. The teacher suggested that by ‘childish’ the girls meant something more, or other, than simply age-appropriateness: My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that rather than the sessions being ‘childish’ in fact the girls find it easier to detach themselves from a challenging creative task which they feel embarrassed by and excuse their difficulties in engaging by criticising the task. There is a sort of critical mass of intelligent young women in the unit at the moment and maybe this extra-curricular activity is a chance for them to display some frustration with what is a very difficult personal journey for each of them. (Maple House teacher, November 2014)

This kind interpretation hinted at two aspects of the storymaking activity which were problematic. Firstly, its sense of expectation: was I so delighted with the feminist allegory they had produced the first week that I thought I could shoehorn future sessions into a neat, safe, comfortable package with a clear outcome for me? Was I offering a gift with strings attached? Secondly, its earnestness: the girls had produced one lyrical story with undertones of resistance and hope, but that did not mean they wished (or felt able) to continue in this vein. The accusation of ‘childishness’ may have been comprised of resistance to this earnestness and expectation.

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In fact, I was surprised to discover that I was genuinely grateful and relieved for their feedback. The process of negotiating what we did in our sessions had become thorny and shadowy with this group; their honest feedback had brought it into the light. It had never occurred to me to ask them openly for guidance; that they might not say ‘go away’, but actually give me useful advice. Indeed, their feedback also included suggestions of how we might develop some of our warm-up games into stories, and that we could try starting with ‘a more exciting stimulus’. It occurred to me too that, even where their guardedness made such a direct conversation impossible, I could communicate, through my telling of stories, my own perception of what was happening between them and myself, and give them a chance to respond in kind. So at the following session I thanked them for their feedback, admitting that I was usually too shy to ask for it, but would leave a notebook in their living room in case they wanted to give more at any point. I went on to tell them about how Charles Perrault and the Grimms stripped out everything that was ‘indecent’ from fairy tales, giving them a certain message for a certain market. Perrault and the Grimms had an earnest, worthy agenda—and in discussing them, I was tacitly apologising for a similar fault. The girls told me the fairy tales they knew and I told them what I knew of their bloodier, more sexual, more vigorous peasant antecedents. I shared with them my source for some of these ­stories—Angela Carter’s ‘Fairy Tales’ (1991, 1993)—and one girl (who had seemed particularly angry with me the previous week) read out some of the bawdiest ones with great dignity, to the other girls’ delight. I asked the girls if they would like to make up a possible ‘peasant version’ of another fairy tale they knew. There was no reply. The previous week I would have just started and hoped to pull them along. But this week, I just said, ‘Maybe you wouldn’t like to’, and waited quietly. Several of the girls were keen on knitting and making friendship bracelets, and I had brought wool. (I often found a handwork task—shelling beans, doodling and collaging were other popular alternatives—to be a good fit with storytelling sessions, improving the flow and taking the pressure off people to join in intensively.) So we kept on with our handwork in fairly companionable silence. And then one girl did make a start—on ‘Sleeping Beauty’. She ­proposed the strictures of ‘One Word Round the Circle’ as a way of composing our story, but after a few rounds I loosened the rules to

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‘One Sentence’, ‘One Paragraph’, and further loosening then occurred, without any discussion, so that individuals threw in ideas as they occurred to them, often speaking on top of each other. The resulting story was earthy and vengeful, in the spirit of many of the Angela Carter stories. I asked whether they would like me to write it up in ‘PG-cert’ and add it to our compendium of stories. ‘But if you make it PG, you’ll have to cut out half the story’, the girls replied. So in the end I agreed to stop being like Perrault, and undertook to type up their version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ as it was: Once upon a time there lived a king and queen and they had a daughter who was very beautiful. When she was born a fairy came, who hated this princess. The fairy could not love anyone, because she did not eat anything but peanuts. She put a curse on the princess, and said that she would never be able to cry tears, but only peanuts – which the fairy would then consume. Now the fairy was in an incestuous relationship with her twin brother. The king and queen banished him far away with their own magic, but he managed to escape from the bonds they had put him in. He surfaced in the castle gardens where the princess was standing, holding something in his hand. He said to her, “Pretty girl, would you like to touch this lovely spindle? She reached out and cut off his penis, and he ran away howling. (But her curiosity overcame her and she did touch the spindle.) In that moment she herself was transformed into a vast spindle. She spun around wildly and came to rest. She was able to speak. Thorns grew up around her. So she became a kind of oracle and people came to ask her for wisdom. Eventually the fairy and her brother, who did not know what had become of her, came one day to push through the thorns and ask for advice. “I have been living without a penis all this time. What can I do?” The spindle oracle advised him to affix a peanut to himself. He did so, but it remained in the shape of a peanut and he was unable to carry on his relationship with his twin sister the fairy. She became the town whore and that was the end of it.

The teacher expressed his wonder at the girls’ bawdiness, and how empowering this seemed to be after a difficult week at the setting. It was striking to me that he used the word ‘empowering’ in relation to such an X-rated, absurd and playful story—that the sense of creativity and empowerment I wanted to engender came not from an earnest parable but from some seriously committed silliness.

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In their feedback and their participation, the girls had given me their permission to keep working with them, along with some tacit rules: to play, to let anything go, to hand over the reins, to let their silence speak. This relationship renegotiated, I felt one step closer to being able to work without a sense of ‘purpose’ or ‘outcome’, relying on my ­ever-fallible instinct. I sought to express some of this in an autoethnographic poem: So we’ve written these stories together. I’m not going to say they’re ‘your’ stories, because you won’t say they are. Are they orphans or abortions? Just one-morning stands? Brief meetings of minds? Was it wrong to crystallise them? Do you not want to look into the mirror they make? Do you fear I am going to capture you with them? Or… is it OK for me to poke you with them? Read them out…. Scribble all over them… Chop them up and start again and say WE ARE NOT THERE TODAY! We are not even the same ‘we’ today. ‘Is everyone here obsessed with sex?!’ ‘You had to be there…’ Well I’ll make another offer then. ‘This reminds me of that,’ but you don’t bite that. But out of that silence you say, ‘What about the other?’ and I reel with gratitude. Thank you for saying no to my offer. And thank you for making the other. How can I do anything without you? So do we have an understanding? Is it OK to exchange shy gifts? For today anyway…. Don’t take us for granted…. I won’t.

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Practical Thinking—‘Assisted Reflection’ This exercise responds to the fact that storytelling with young p ­ eople sometimes generates moments of tension or silence, when it’s difficult for both storyteller and young people to read what each other are ­thinking, hoping or expecting. Perhaps such moments are a necessary condition for real dialogue to occur. Think of the last time you told a story or anecdote to a young person or group—whether formally or in conversation. Try and remember how the story ended, and what happened immediately afterwards. If you rarely tell stories, imagine what it would be like if you did. And if you can’t remember this moment, guess or imagine what it was like! Write quick notes on these questions: • Was there a silence after you finished your story or activity, or did you or someone else rush to speak? • Did everyone realise that you had just finished a story? Did they feel you were trying to make a point? What point? • Did you think you were making a point? • Did someone else follow it up with another story or anecdote? • What did you feel in this moment? What were you hoping for or fearing? • What do you think your listeners were thinking, hoping or fearing? • Did it feel like a risky moment, a satisfying moment, or….? Shape some of the writing you have just jotted into a prose poem, ­perhaps addressed to your listeners.

References Carter, A. (1991). The Virago book of fairy tales. London: Virago Press. Carter, A. (1993). The second Virago book of fairy tales. London: Virago Press. Gersie, A. (1997). Reflections on Therapeutic Storymaking: The use of stories in groups. London and Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

CHAPTER 5

The Arresting Strangeness of Wormwood: Or, The Territory of Story

Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness. J.R.R.Tolkien, 1966, ‘On Fairy Stories’

There were plenty of new patients at the adolescent mental health unit Maple House. As a starting point for a creative writing workshop so they and I could get to know each other, I chose a folktale, ‘Wormwood’, from Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales. It was perhaps an odd choice to tell to mentally unwell young people; it was anachronistic, intriguing, unfair and quite simply bizarre in places. Yet it appealed to me because of its provocative surreality; I could not imagine any of the young people finding it satisfactory as it was, and thought it might stimulate some imaginative gap-filling. I deliberately sought to keep my initial telling sparse and simple, with a lack of ‘psychological shading’ (Benjamin 1973), and suggest no answers to the story’s enigmas. It ran roughly as follows.

SYNOPSIS of ‘Wormwood’ (Based on Calvino 1956) A queen gives birth to a seventh daughter and is ordered by her husband to kill the baby, as he only wishes for a male heir. She gives it instead to a servant who hides it under a wormwood bush in the forest. The baby’s cries alert a deer, which begins to suckle her every day. A hermit who shares his cave with the deer follows it and finds the baby, deciding © The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6_5

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to adopt her and call her ‘Wormwood’. She grows up with him, loved but without material comfort, until the day a young king from another kingdom becomes lost in the forest while hunting. The hermit, out laying traps for small animals, offers him refreshment in the cave, which he accepts. There the young king notices Wormwood’s grace and offers to take her to the palace and marry her, an offer the hermit accepts. The young king and Wormwood are happy together. One day on a trading trip the young king meets a knight who boasts of his prowess with women. He bets the young king he could seduce even his virtuous wife. The knight travels to Wormwood’s city where he finds her impossible to even meet, until an old woman offers to help him by insinuating herself into Wormwood’s trust, then cutting three hairs from a mole on her back while she sleeps. The knight presents these to the young king as false evidence of Wormwood’s infidelity. The young king rides home and wordlessly takes Wormwood to the edge of the city where he throws her off the horse and leaves her for dead. There she is found by a doctor and his wife, on pilgrimage. They take pity on her and bring her home to care for her, taking her on as nurse to their little daughter. However their long-time servant Ali becomes jealous of Wormwood. When the doctor and his wife next go on pilgrimage, he kills the child and bloodies Wormwood’s clothes to incriminate her. When Wormwood awakes, she does not wait to defend herself but flees. Wormwood comes to a plain with a ruined castle in its centre, where she flings herself onto a bed. Meanwhile, the king her father has been experiencing pangs of regret, and on quizzing his wife and discovering Wormwood was not killed but abandoned, goes searching for her. He comes to a plain with a ruined castle in its centre, and there he waits. Meanwhile, the king her husband experiences pangs of regret for mistrusting his wife so swiftly. He goes searching for her and comes to a plain with a ruined castle in its centre, where another king is sitting ­waiting. He sits beside this king. Meanwhile, the doctor and his servant Ali go searching for Wormwood to avenge the death of the little child. They come to a plain with a ruined castle in its centre, and two kings sitting there waiting, and they wait beside them. Into this gathering come a little pot and a little cruet who talk to each other, revealing to the men the whereabouts of Wormwood upstairs in

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the castle. They go to her and wake her, and she must decide which of them to go home with. She chooses her husband.

The Creative Writing Process This story, to me, resembled a wheel with no centre, its heroine Wormwood not a true character but a mere undeveloped ‘figure’ (Rorty 1976), ensnared in relationships with others but making no reply to their actions. So I started the workshop by observing that Wormwood has major interactions with six characters or pairs of characters: the king her father and the queen her mother, the hermit, the king her husband, the knight and the old woman, the doctor and his wife, and Ali. In true patriarchal style, the male characters were the main ­ decision-makers throughout. I decided to draw attention to this by laying the names of the six males out in a ‘wheel’ shape around Wormwood’s name (see Appendix 2 for details of this activity, ‘Wheel of Correspondence’). I asked the young people to choose one of these characters’ perspectives and write Wormwood a letter from it, in prose or poetry. After reading these letters, they swapped papers and wrote replies, from Wormwood back to the character in question. The resulting dialogues were forceful. THE KING HER FATHER I am not a man. I am a force of nature, and the winds demanded from me a son. You cannot blame the winds for blowing. WORMWOOD: It was your decision. You faced every parent’s dilemma – nature vs nurture – and chose neither.

Two of the young people were particularly interested in the story and were interested to develop it into a performance, as one of them— Imogen—describes in a blog post: Cath then asked myself and another patient to continue working on the story with the aim being to perform at a local festival celebrating arts and mental wellbeing. We met several times in various cafés and bookish environments - poring over many sheets of paper and fine-tuning the tiny threads of each relationship within the story. Week by week we

118  C. HEINEMEYER worked together to make the story into a script, which would later become our performance. I felt a connection with Wormwood and after looking through my poems I found some that I hoped would bring emotion to the character that we knew very little about. In the end it was just Cath and I who did the performances. We were aided by the little hand sewn puppets we created and we also had the fantastic input of a local theatre director. The audiences for all three performances were fantastic and listened throughout. Many admitted that they found the story strange but fascinating. (Godwin 2015)

Extracts from the performance, which we called Wormwood in the Garden, can be seen at https://www.storyknowingwithadolescents.net/the-arresting-strangeness-of-wormwood.html# along with documentation of audience feedback. It was by turns quirky, odd and intense (Image 5.1). The devising process which Imogen describes threw up strong differences of opinion between us as to the apportioning of blame among characters in Wormwood’s story, and their very status as characters— disagreements that were allowed to remain visible in the script. An illuminating example arose when I wrote some lines from the perspective

Image 5.1  Imogen and I performing Wormwood in the Garden

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of Wormwood’s mother. The two young people objected to how I had let this character ‘off the hook’ by assuming she had no choice in the matter of abandoning her daughter and had done her best in the circumstances. This became a very complex discussion, as I realised that, as a mother myself, I was all too familiar with the compromises life forces on parents. As a storyteller, I was also used to accepting the rigid conventions and gender roles that constrained characters’ actions. For the young people, neither of these excuses was adequate. This led to further debate as to just what status our characters had: Were they simply representatives of cultural forces of their time, or human beings answerable for their actions? Wormwood’s reply to her mother (puppeteered by Imogen and myself, respectively) goes to the heart of this dilemma: WORMWOOD: Mother, you put yourself first. Together, we could have stood up to the King. It isn’t thanks to your kindness that I have survived.

The differences of perspective between us which remained visible in the script felt important in the light of Claire Bishop’s (2004, 2012) criticism that much participatory artmaking seeks to iron out dissensus, antagonism and provocation. In fact dissent is an essential part of the energy of a collaborative piece of work and is certainly a driving force of folk- and fairytales. Under the quiet exterior of our storytelling performance, with its small, childlike puppets, a great deal of this energy bubbled—as was reflected in prevalence of words like ‘Thought-provoking’ and ‘Honest’ in audience members’ feedback. Yet, by interspersing the narrative with dialogues between characters in a sort of ‘time out of time’, we could experiment with making their perspectives comprehensible to each other. Surprisingly those whose crimes against Wormwood initially seemed greatest (Ali, the servant who incriminated Wormwood) became most forgivable, while others, for their refusal to transcend their social role (Wormwood’s royal parents), were never reconciled with her. In fact, it became clear that we were, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) sense, ‘novelising’ the story, introducing multiple voices, creating dialogues between characters, giving them psychological depth and challenging their motives. We were also claiming the right to render it into what we considered a good story. A key moment in this process was when we decided to change the story’s ending from Calvino’s version. Now that we had taught Wormwood to speak, and conferred

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emotions of fury, despair, frustration, love and loss upon her, we were not going to send her back home with her husband. Rather we relocated the reckoning between Wormwood and her antagonists from the rather Beckettian ‘ruined castle’ to a beautiful garden where she found a temporary stronghold of peace and control. The other characters, with the exception of the hermit, could not enter it, but only converse with Wormwood at its gate. Overlaying Imogen’s autobiographical poetry onto moments in Wormwood’s story, as she describes above, gave voice to the character of Wormwood. When she reached the garden, Imogen’s own poem ‘I Am Exhaled’ seemed to crystallise the realisations Wormwood had reached by this point. The poem began: I started letting things inhale me; Books, films, documentaries and albums. They restrained me from thinking for myself. Entrenched me in the lives of others. Whether they were humble, Bewitched Or powerful. I was inhaled….

In the process, therefore, it became clear that while Wormwood was a character in her own right, there was overlap between herself and Imogen—as there was between the other young person and the characters he ‘adopted’, and also between me and the characters to whom I gave voice. Yet, the post-show discussion made it evident that while audience members perceived this, it was difficult for them to discern exactly where the boundaries lay. An interesting duality emerged between Imogen’s poetry and the words of ‘her’ character, Wormwood. The poetry communicated her empathy with the perspectives of ‘others’ implied by the figures in our performance (e.g. the doctor character implicitly stood in for ‘mental health professionals’), although the character was not capable of this empathy. In this ambiguity was great freedom, as Imogen describes: I wanted to stop people thinking on. I didn’t want to bare all emotionally. It was nice to have the boundaries of Wormwood to drop it into. I wanted the ambiguity of them not knowing whether it was all about Wormwood or about me.

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The way we were given it, she was such a blank canvas, it was Wormwood versus the world. I think that’s how a lot of us feel. The way she was treated seemed almost ridiculous, unjust. We had a bird’s eye view of her situation, we could see it for what it was, build on it and almost take sides. And eventually I came to feel very close to her. I liked the personality we gave her during the work on the story – she almost didn’t have one to start with. It felt quite empowering to make her a character who could fight back. We didn’t come to agreement about lots of elements of the story, but Wormwood had her voice and it was clear, and it gave us as a group a mutual thought space. By the end of it we could tell what Wormwood would think of pretty much anything. She gained self-esteem and so did we. Both in the story and in the process, starting with nothing and being able to build Wormwood out of that situation, had a recovery connection. Every patient in the room was in a situation like Wormwood.

I felt that this project escaped what James Thompson (2011) identifies as the ‘imperative to tell’ one’s own personal story of trauma, prevalent in much storytelling and applied theatre work in mental health. Rather, the story itself made a summons to resolve its perplexity by whatever means we had available to us. Each of us made our own free choice how much of ourselves to bring to this task, and how visible to leave the seams. To me this demonstrated something of the value of fairytales as a playground for the imagination in contemporary culture (as will be discussed in Chapter 8). Imogen described her feelings when first invited to a storytelling workshop at Maple House: I thought they (stories) were going to be used as a means of filling us with ‘happily ever afters’ and detaching us from the ‘nasty’ real world.

Yet she soon found that It was nice to have all the characters ‘there’ from the start. We didn’t have to make them or be psychoanalysed over them!

Equally important was that each of the young people decided how long to remain with this project—most participating only in the initial workshop but allowing their contributions to it to feature in the performance, two continuing to write the performance, and only one choosing to appear in it. The entire group were keen to act as audience for

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the debut performance, so we set up their dayroom as a theatre and received enthusiastic feedback to what we had made. The completely voluntary, ‘off-curriculum’ nature of the collaboration effectively raised ‘Wormwood in the Garden’ out of being an ‘applied theatre project’, to being a collaborative creative process, whose outcome was what we collectively decided to make it.

PRACTICAL THINKING—Fragments and Gaps This exercise explores the potential of what Tolkien calls the ‘arresting strangeness’ of folktales and fairytales—the lack of detail (or the intriguing details) they tend to give, and their embeddedness in other times and places, forcing us to use different muscles and resources to interpret them than those we might use with novels. Read the following Scottish story, a synopsis of Duncan Williamson’s version in his collection Land of the Seal People (1992): Just by the shore of a fishing village lived a man named William and his wife, but they could not make enough of a living from fishing. William gazed out at the rocky island in the bay where seals gathered to rest at sunset, and decided to have a go at seal hunting. He soon learnt how to creep up on the seals and kill them with a blow in just the right spot on the back of their necks, and craftspeople and traders from the city started to come to him for sealskins to make sleek boots and bags. But in a hard year, the trade tailed off, and William started to build up more and more sealskins unsold in the corner of his house. Still he did not stop hunting – though he never took a young seal. Once, he missed his mark and wounded a seal’s shoulder without killing it. He watched it flail into the water and swim away, trailing blood. He sat up late that night in his house, alone. Late in the night came a knock at the door and a tall dark man in a long smooth coat asked to do business with him. His master was waiting on the cliffs to see William’s best skins, he said. William accompanied the man in the darkness up onto the cliff, but couldn’t see anyone there. When he craned his neck over the cliff to search, the stranger grabbed him and jumped with him into the ocean. They fell impossibly deeply underwater until they reached a cave in the cliff face, and in there William found he could breathe. The stranger took him to a large chamber lined with people, all with sleek dark hair and deep brown eyes, of all ages and sizes. In a side chamber lay a young man, a huge gash in his shoulder, pale and unconscious. The stranger asked William to heal the wound. William

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stood before the man, trembling, and eventually raised his hand to touch the gash. To his amazement it healed over and the young man’s breathing slowed. William then turned around to face the stranger and the other dark-haired people, and wondered what his fate would be. They advanced towards him slowly. Then, to his surprise, the stranger tossed him a purse of money, grabbed him again round the waist, and then William knew only darkness until he woke at dawn, face down on the beach near his home. He never hunted seals again.

Now ask yourself the following questions and note down the answers: • Which moment of the story sticks most strikingly in your head? (sketch it?) • How old do you think William was? What did he look like? • What was the interior of his house like? What could he hear when he sat up late? • What was his wife’s opinion of the seal hunting? • What was the cave like inside? • What was he thinking when asked to heal the young man’s wound? • What were the expressions on the dark people’s faces as they advanced towards William? • Why did they give him money? • What would he do instead of hunting seals after this experience? Now tell the story to someone else, without reading the text, and then ask them the same questions. How similar or different are your listener’s answers to your own? What did each of you use to ‘build’ William’s appearance or house interior—memories of relatives, other houses you have seen in real life, or on TV? In your different accounts of William’s wife’s views, do your own values come through? What about your explanations of the seal people’s inscrutable behaviour—do they reflect your own experiences in any way? If there are surprising similarities, did any of this owe to the way you told the story—did you give any details that weren’t in the written version? Did your telling explain any enigmas in the written version, or did it leave them sketchy? Were you conscious of your listener’s reactions as you told it, and how did this affect your telling? Think of a group of young people you have worked with, and plan how you would explore this story with them, or use it as a springboard

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for further storytelling, drama, writing, art, discussion or any other approach. Think about harnessing the different range of associations and responses they might have to it.

References Bakhtin, M. (1981). Epic and novel. The dialogic imagination (pp. 1–45). Austin: University of Texas. Benjamin, W. (1973). The storyteller: Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 83–109). London: Fontana. Bishop, C. (2004). Antagonism and relational aesthetics. October Magazine, 110, 51–79. Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London: Verso. Calvino, I. (1956). Italian folktales. London: Penguin Classics. Godwin, I. (2015). Project Wormwood (Blog post). https://upsidedownchronicles.com/2015/07/04/project-wormwood/. Accessed August 2018. Rorty, A. O. (1976). A literary postscript: Characters, persons, selves, individuals. In A. O. Rorty (Ed.), The identity of persons. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thompson, J. (2011). Performance affects: Applied theatre and the end of effect (2nd ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1966). On fairy stories. In The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books. Williamson, D., & Williamson, L. (1992). Land of the seal people. Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd Publishers. Zipes, J. (1995). Creative storytelling: Building community, changing lives. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

No Space for Stories at City School: Or, Dialogic Storytelling Fora

I conducted a feedback exercise among teachers at City School after my pilot project with all the Year 8 classes. Respondents were broadly in agreement that it had been valuable: ‘the pupils need a creative spark, we’ve been very methodical this year’. Some observed that pupils’ ‘creative writing is wildly unrealistic’ and benefited from the inspiration of storytelling. Yet there also emerged a general consensus that it would be difficult to allocate further class time to it. Some expressed regret at this, while others observed that storytelling didn’t ‘support skills’, nor did it ‘seem especially useful in terms of being focused on assessments, etc.’. The teachers were flat out trying to help the pupils achieve the exam results they had been predicted, and staffroom discussion often circulated around their lack of time or opportunity to respond to pupils’ interests. Their comments confirmed my own sense that there would be a great value in establishing an informal storytelling space outside lesson time for pupils, and the English department agreed to support this initiative. Current lunchtime activities were restricted to a games room for ‘vulnerable’ pupils to escape the hurly-burly (and sometimes the bullying) of the playground. There were very few after-school activities and the lunch break itself was so short that pupils had little time left over from eating their lunch to follow their own interests. I felt a storytelling club could open up what Nicolas Bourriaud (1998) calls an ‘interstice’, a space © The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6_6

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Image 6.1  Poster for ‘Liars’ Lunch’ at City School

within which different kinds of communication could occur—among pupils, between me and the pupils, and between pupils and teachers. ​Perhaps from this basis, outside the confines of the curriculum, interested pupils could form different alliances and projects, and even exercise their own small influence on the texture of school life. I did not know what they might want to do with stories. Yet I was ready to facilitate whatever it might be; reading Felix Guattari’s Chaosmosis (1995), I recognised his desire to ‘re-singularise’ institutions like schools through the arts: ‘How do you make a class operate like a work of art? What are the possible paths to its singularisation, the source of a “purchase on existence” for the children who compose it?’ (132–133) (Image 6.1).

Beginnings The group, which I called ‘Liars’ Lunch’, started running one lunchtime a week at the beginning of the autumn term of 2014, and was well attended from the start. However, establishing it was a fraught process. Early on, it became evident that there were two main sets of young people who were attracted to ‘Liars’ Lunch’: a group (or rather, a number

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of individuals from different year groups, who quickly made friends) of earnest and sensitive young people interested in literature, folktale and myth, and a large cluster of restless, ‘naughty’ girls who roamed the school looking for an interesting place to be. There were also a small number of other young people who fitted into neither of these, but it was these two groups that set the tone. Both ‘tribes’ were sparky and full of ideas, and perhaps both, in different ways, were awkward fits in the school environment. Neither needed any convincing that this was ‘their’ space to shape how they wanted it. The problem lay in the diametrically opposed ways they wanted to interact with story. The former group, the ‘old guard’ as I called them secretly, loved the language of fairytale and the ‘magic’ of stories— though they rarely listened quietly, preferring to take over the telling, suggest changes, tell or read out their own stories. Sessions dominated by them led (on their initiative) to retellings of stories in the form of drama or creative writing—like this extract from their retelling of the Northumbrian folktale ‘Tam Linn’, which was a fluent pastiche of the version I had told them, blended with irony, plot twists and joyous imagination: He said, ‘Tonight is Halloween, and tonight the fairy queen with all of her horses and riders will ride all around the woods. AND THE WERE-CAT WILL BE WITH THEM TOO. DO NOT FORGET THE WERE-CAT CALLED DORIS.’ […] So Janet waited til midnight, and she came into the woods with her robe around her so no-one could recognise her. […] And she grabbed him! I should point out that Janet by this time was pregnant by Tam Linn. She seized Tam Linn off the horse […] She held him and the queen turned him into the worst thing she could possibly imagine – a black cat. Janet hated black cats, especially ones with sharp claws. It hissed at her but she grabbed it by the neck and turned it around so it couldn’t look at her. And then the queen turned him into a dragon, a purple, pink and blue dragon, breathing fire. He threw her up into the air and breathed fire at her, but she found that the fire was just like water, and she seemed to be swimming through it. […] Then she turned him into a torch, thinking that she was going to be scared of fire, because Janet at this point was just twelve. And she was scared but she didn’t let go. So they were falling through the air, head-on, into the well. As soon as the torch hit the water the flame went out and Janet came out with Tam Linn. Now she’d lost the baby. But Tam Linn hugged her and thanked her.

128  C. HEINEMEYER There are some people who say that Janet and Tam Linn remained human, and that they just grew old and died together. But other people say that in fact they both became immortal – she became a fairy, but she didn’t know that til the very day she died. But she hadn’t really lost the baby. When she hit the well, it disappeared from her womb and fell to the bottom of the well, and it lived there for five long years in the water, and became a mermaid. And you’re going to see what happened to it in Part Two.

The authors of this story had high ambitions for it, and the other work they planned to produce—storytelling in old people’s homes, story treasure hunts for visiting primary school children, making booklets and short films—and wanted my support making these a reality. They quickly grabbed hold of any stories I offered them and bubbled over with them, as if they only needed an outlet for their abundantly fertile imaginations. The ‘naughty-but-needy’ group, in contrast, had almost no interest in my stories. Yet there was no lack of imagination in them either. They wanted to make stories out of nothing, play games, mixing the fantastical, the subversive and the downright rude into crazy concoctions. When they got their way, there was no room at all for magic. Rather there were howls of laughter, limbs clambering over furniture and voices clamouring for attention. My field notes record the strain between the group members: Late November: OH DEAR – very different ways of having fun. The ‘old guard’ want to do great things: create a walkabout storytelling performance round school, make a film. The ‘naughty-but-needy’ girls launch into the middle of this (usually late) with a crash. They do genuinely want to hear and tell stories, play games, but keep breaking down into teasing, uproar. When they had gone I tried to assure the ‘old guard’ that we would make it work for everyone. We decided on some wording for the school newsletter like ‘All serious storytellers and storylisteners welcome’.

Meanwhile, the staff were becoming concerned about the behaviour and motivations of some club attenders and suggestions were mooted that membership should be limited to pupils classed as ‘vulnerable’: Early December: Ms S (teacher) said N told her she is only going ‘for the free biscuits’ and had nearly banned her for this – but in fact N was attentive, visibly struggling with her own need to be listened to, desire to seek

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attention, wildness of limbs… It might be this very diversity that makes Ms S nervous – the potential for bullying of the ‘vulnerable’ kids, volatility and meanness… I hope there is potential for the group to soften some of these social barriers, give individuals a role and recognition. But maybe this is pie-in-the-sky.

To my eyes, all the members seemed vulnerable in different ways. It was just that it seemed impossible to accommodate all their vulnerabilities simultaneously.

Making Space Nonetheless, by the end of the first term, a tentative mutual respect or modus vivendi had begun to build. We needed to establish a shared vernacular—our own customs, habits and ways of telling stories together, games and activities which encompassed both the subversive and the earnest drives in the group. We started to find some common ground on which to build this. Our common currency was, in fact, interruption. Both groups of young people loved the interrupted story—the insertions of their ideas into mine or into each other’s. I played with this in the games I proposed, and often the young people led the way. On one occasion a few of the ‘old guard’ had turned up early, one girl, W, bringing along a ghost story she had written and declaring her intention to read it to the whole group. The others found it so chilling that we invented the rule that anyone could raise their hand to interject a comic aside or sarcastic comment. W: She heard a strange low creak on the stairs outside her door…. Interruption: That floorboard had needed mending for months!

Halfway through, the ‘naughty-but-needy’ group crashed into the space. I told them what was going on and that they could prepare themselves to be alarmed. Taken aback by the warning, they sat down quietly for long enough for W to resume reading, and were initially stunned into silence by her command of the room. However, they quickly got the hang of the game and a noisy peace descended. In moments like these, groups whose social roles were normally antagonistic were sharing space, to the English teachers’ surprise. At the risk of sounding grandiose, we were inhabiting an interstice, described by

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Bourriaud as ‘a space in social relations which…suggests possibilities for exchanges other than those that prevail within the system…’ (1998: 44). My field notes record: Mid-December: It has taken 12 weeks but we are getting well-established. Some of the new girls came in, and when challenged by Miss S said, in a tone of ownership, that they ‘always come’. When A struggled to speak, there was a visible tussle between the forces of kindness and the forces of mockery – and kindness won – and she managed to say something. In fact almost all of them did. Nobody turned the story round to rude themes; E did sound effects and, even when the teacher was not in the room, this did not get out of control.

The Interstice Squeezed Such moments were, however, the exception and not the rule. I felt that, if we could contain the tensions between the young people, an exciting cross-fertilisation of ideas between them would result, and that this was achievable given time and lateral thinking. Yet the school’s lunch breaks were kept very short to limit the potential for disruptive behaviour and often further shortened by detentions. Too often, a promising start with the faithful ‘old guard’ would be thwarted by noisy and subversive late arrivals, or the former would sulkily refuse to enter if the latter were already present. Mid-January: It is getting very difficult to handle these two different constituencies!… I don’t want to make it a group for the ‘vulnerable’ kids alone, rather I want to use storytelling to bring these disparate groups together to really listen to and respect each other… Can it though? If one group is passing the door and checking whether the other has arrived before they decide whether to come in? The best sessions have been those where everyone has turned up early, where a teacher has been present or looked in sometimes. Where the kids have built on my introductory activity by suggesting something constructive themselves, like asking someone (usually W) to tell one of her stories….I have to remember that the pupils have very limited experience of self-organising or doing open-ended tasks together… I don’t want to impose discipline – at least, no more than providing activities and allowing them to go off on tangents if they are constructive.

I realised that, in order to give the group a holding structure, I needed the full half-hour of lunch break, so everyone needed to arrive punctually. This would enable us to close the doors and establish a routine of a

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warm-up game, followed by whatever main activity the group had agreed on. I felt this would encourage the young people to choose whether they really wanted to be part of the group. However, my attempt to establish this pattern did not result in any marked improvement in timeliness, because this was essentially beyond the pupils’ control. They were frequently given detentions at short notice or were unable to bring packed lunches. Moreover, each project the group conceived was frustrated by the lack of time, or the school’s inability to facilitate it (as the teachers were too busy and the curriculum was too tight). Thus, for example, although the pupils worked for some time towards a performance for feeder primary school children visiting City School, staff did not get around to making the arrangements necessary for them to occupy some space on the visit programme, or have some additional rehearsal time. Afternoon and weekend sessions were dismissed as impossible because of the keenest members’ caring and homework responsibilities. I came to see the lack of time as something more than an inconvenience. It was a ‘choice’ imposed on the school by the demands of the curriculum and the pressure to suppress rather than respond to the challenging behaviour of their pupils, which straitjacketed both pupils’ and teachers’ time, and limited their potential to develop their own interests and initiative. While the teachers did see the need to actively nourish the social environment, this goal was simply incommensurate with their key drivers as a mainstream secondary school. As Habermas (1987) observes, it is the impulse of authorities to take over the ‘lifeworld’—people’s spaces, time and thinking—with an ‘instrumental rationality’ in the name of governance or market forces. It was a source of disappointment to me during my doctoral practice research that all my successes in establishing long-term storytelling with young people were in non-mainstream, ‘protected’ or ‘special’ settings, where staff are at liberty to use their own discernment and put the young people’s interests first.

PRACTICAL THINKING—Mapping the Force Field This exercise encourages you to think of your practice setting, or one of your settings (whether it is a school, an arts project, a youth club or another kind of environment), as a ‘lifeworld’ with different kinds of spaces, flows and blockages of communication and energy, and to consider where you intervene in these. It brings some of the theory alluded

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to in this ‘story of practice’ into relation with the everyday working environment. Warning: this is not a precise activity but an artistic one! Don’t worry if it seems confusing. You’ll need a set of colouring pencils/pens. Feel free to depart from the instructions in order to represent what interests you about your setting. For instance, you might want to focus entirely on what governs how time is spent, rather than how people interact. • Colour 1: Firstly, draw the boundaries of the setting as a circle, square or whatever shape seems appropriate. • Colour 2: Within this shape draw boxes or segments which represent the groupings of people—whether young people or adults— within the setting. How thick and rigid are the lines between them? Draw dashed lines or gaps to represent any ‘interstices’ in the ­system—spaces or times where individuals of different groups meet with greater freedom, or where the usual rules of interaction are altered. • Colour 3: What is your position in this system? Add a symbol for yourself—either as an outsider or an insider. Draw arrows emanating from yourself to indicate where you have an influence (or would like to). How do you relate to the interstices in the system? • Colour 4: Mark in other individuals or groups who you see as important sources of energy, or who bring about surprising interactions across boundaries. • Colour 5: Draw the most important external pressures or drivers which you think make the system tick, keep it going or define/ limit what it does and how. These might be financial, bureaucratic, competitive, democratic, ethical, idealistic…. Draw them as arrows outside the boundaries, or another shape. • Colour 6: Draw in, as arrows, any ways in which the lifeworld within the circle resists these external pressures and drivers, for ­better or for worse. Look at your map as a whole and consider what it means for your ­long-term aims in your practice.

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References Bourriaud, N. (1998). Relational aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du reel. Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm (P. Bains & J. Pefanis, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and system—A critique of functionalist reason (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press.

PART III

Story Gaps

The three stories of practice in Part II suggest that it may be the cracks, tears, pauses, holes and questioning looks that really make a s­torytelling experience—that we should focus not just what is caught in the net of a story, but what is allowed to pass through it. They raised at least three senses in which storytelling opens up ‘spaces’ or ‘gaps’. Chapter 4’s account of my efforts to achieve genuine dialogue with young patients at Maple House drew attention to the gap between listener and teller. Chapter 5 explored the potential of the ‘gaps’ in a story itself (Calvino’s threadbare, perplexing Wormwood) to provide space and stimulus for creative collaboration. Chapter 6 identified the gap which a s­torytelling forum can create within the structures of a setting, in which unusual dialogue can occur (while simultaneously highlighting how difficult this can be). This part gives a chapter to each of these three gaps, cumulatively building a three-dimensional picture of a dialogic storytelling practice. It stands with Richard Kearney, who argues that a full understanding of the storytelling exchange relies on us refusing to prioritise one aspect of it over another: Every act of storytelling involves someone (a teller) telling something (a story) to someone (a listener) about something (a real or imaginary world). Different approaches to narrative emphasise one or other of these roles, sometimes to the point of exclusivity. Romantic idealists and existentialists often overstress the intentional role of the ‘teller’, structuralists

136  Part III: Story Gaps the linguistic workings of the ‘story’ itself, post-structuralists the receptive role of the ‘reader’, and materialists and realists the referential role of the ‘world’. (Kearney 2002: 150–151)

Kearney argues instead for a “critical hermeneutics” (151) which holds teller, story, listener and surrounding world in balance. Thus, as we progress, we will be in a position to amplify and develop the triangular model of dialogic storytelling introduced in Chapter 1. Each chapter refers back to its corresponding story of practice in Part II, together with other examples from practice, to suggest what such an approach to storytelling can offer young people.

CHAPTER 7

Mapping the Space Between

Image 7.1  The space between storyteller and listener

Storytelling is profoundly, uncompromisingly reciprocal. A busker can keep singing in the street even if the audience drifts away, but—as my experience at Maple House in Chapter 4 made only too clear—a story can only exist with the active consent and collaboration of both the storyteller and the listeners. For this reason, the point of departure for an exploration of dialogic storytelling with young people must be the intersubjective, interdependent relationship between storyteller-facilitator and participants (Image 7.1). © The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6_7

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Buber, Levinas and the ‘Between’ My starting point in this task is the complementary thinking of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, two key figures in a lineage of thinkers interested in the meaning created between individuals (Tallon 2004). Buber (1958) proposes that every human encounter can be understood as expressing a fundamental relationship (or ‘primary word’) between Self and Other—either ‘I/It’ or ‘I/Thou’. If our concern is technical and monologic—to convey information to, or bring about change in another person—we are treating her as ‘It’. If, however, our interest is open-ended and mutual, we can meet her as ‘Thou’: The relation to the Thou is direct. No system of ideas, no foreknowledge, and fancy intervene between I and Thou […] No aim, no lust, and no anticipation intervene between I and Thou […] Every means is an obstacle. Only when every means has collapsed does the meeting come about. (Buber 1958: 9)

Buber defines a space he calls the ‘Between’ (in German the Zwischen) and declares that this space between individuals is where meaning is made, rather than inside the head of an individual thinker (Tallon 2004: 50). The Between is, for Buber, a real, tangible, pre-cognitive, affective domain where the Self is no longer in charge. Two people can only enter into real conversation with each other if they respect the real existence and texture of this unique entity, their encounter or relationship, and allow it to affect them. Levinas (1969) critiques aspects of Buber’s conceptualisation of I/Thou relations—its lack of economic realism and respect for difference—but he shares an essential common belief that our first ethical duty as human beings is meeting the Other in dialogue, a dialogue in which we are vulnerable to him and give fully of ourselves. Although we can never really ‘know’ another human being, he claims, we must do what we can to transcend our ego and reach out across the divide, by giving a meaningful, generous response to his ‘questioning glance’ (1969: 14). We cannot prepare our answers. Both Buber’s and Levinas’ visions of human interaction may seem idealistic to the point of otherworldliness—how can we communicate without trying to achieve certain intentions? Yet this reaction may reflect how far our culture has swung in the opposite direction. For Buber, human history, and the history of the individual, involves ‘a progressive augmentation of the world of It’ (Buber 1958: 27). Similarly, Levinas sees Western culture as dominated by ‘totalistic thinking’, which is ‘outwardly

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directed but self-centered’ (Wild 1969: 17), and concerned with rational systems which suppress the inner life. That is, a young person growing up in the twenty-first century spends much of her time in institutions which have explicit goals for her development, broken down into ever-smaller units of achievement and assessment. A great deal of her contact with the adult world is framed by instrumental purposes—to teach her something, to sell her something, to help her market herself to someone—and she knows it. She will speak in return (in person, in writing or online) to set into motion her own agendas for this world; that is, she will situate others as ‘It’ in her turn. If genuine dialogue in Buber’s or Levinas’ sense is so rare, how can we recognise it when it does occur? For both thinkers, the essential criterion is that those in dialogue are ready to be affected by what the other party brings to the exchange. Hence, Julian Stern, writing about how Buber’s thinking applies to education, suggests that true dialogue is characterised by the possibility of ‘surprise’. A teacher asking questions of his class is only in dialogue with them if he is ready to be surprised by their answers, and follow the thread of their interest. Stern goes on to quote Buber: In a real conversation (that is, not one whose individual parts have been preconcerted, but one which is completely spontaneous, in which each speaks directly to his partner and calls forth his unpredictable reply), a real lesson (that is, neither a routine repetition nor a lesson whose findings the teacher knows before he starts, but one which develops in mutual surprises), a real embrace and not one of mere habit, a real duel and not a mere game − in all these what is essential does not take place in each of the participants or in a neutral world which includes the two and all other things; but it takes place between them in the most precise sense, as it were in a dimension which is accessible only to them both. (Buber 2002: 241– 242, cited in Stern 2013: 45)

Likewise, Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof propose the presence of surprise as a marker of a ‘real encounter’ (2016: 3) in live performance— one which leaves both performer and audience somehow changed.

The ‘Between’ and the Art Form of Storytelling This model of a pure I/Thou dialogue seems to go to the heart of some of the most dearly held tenets of oral storytelling and to resonate with the idea of storyknowing. To tell a ‘real story’ (to extend Buber’s point) would be to meet the listeners in the ‘Between’ and be wholly at their

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mercy. This is an idealised position, which many performers may rarely attain, but it is important to an understanding of the dynamics of storytelling, in at least two ways. Firstly, as discussed in Chapter 2, it is an anchor point for many storytellers that story is a counterpoint to the communication of both facts, and lessons. As Walter Benjamin (1973) expresses so succinctly, story does not convey ‘information’, pre-packaged in interpretation and with a predetermined purpose in mind, but ‘experience’—particular, wandering and strange. Thus master storyteller Ruth Sawyer recalls first hearing her favourite stories from her nurse Johanna and feels that a lot of the stories’ strength and memorability came from the fact that Johanna ‘pointed no moral and drew no application’ (1962: 18). While there exist religious and moral traditions of fable- and parable-telling which do aim to teach lessons, there remains a widely held objection among storytellers to the misuse of storytelling for propaganda purposes. This is clearly articulated by Anthony Nanson (2005), who trained NGO workers and businesspeople in storytelling, and became frustrated with their tendency to view story simply as a compelling way of disseminating their core— propositional or scientific or even marketing—messages. Johanna’s, Sawyer’s and Nanson’s reluctance to preach can be understood as an aversion to positioning the audience as ‘It’. For both authors, the listeners must be given the teller’s experience and trusted with it as equals, to interpret and respond to it as they will, in freedom. Joe, a young boy in the focus group at City School, expressed this distinction pithily: Well facts are, for example, you’re about to walk into a wall…that’s a fact. And a story is where you just – put your head down and listen. (18/05/2015)

Secondly, the storyteller often does not know, when starting to tell a story, exactly how it will take shape. The story is not simply made up by the storyteller, nor is it taken word-for-word from a text—rather the story happens in the space ‘between’ the storyteller and the listeners, in an unspoken dialogue between them. Sawyer describes sensing this for the first time when she told stories in a seamen’s mission: In the process of the story’s leaving my lips and reaching across the hall to the men out in the darkness it had become, by the grace of God and the power of imagination, living substance; it was feeble, limping substance, but life was in it. (1962: 88)

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The audience’s role in creating the action in their imaginations is further magnified by the fact that storytellers primarily tell, rather than enact, their stories, and often with a large degree of improvisation. It might be said of all live theatre (as will be discussed below) that the audience have a power over the layers of meaning a performance attracts, through the quality of their attention or inattention, the expressions on their faces and reactions of their bodies. Yet the use of diegetic (suggestive) rather than mimetic (representative) strategies (Maguire 2015; Haggarty 2011) in storytelling means that the audience’s imaginations also become effectively responsible for the scenography of the performance. The s­emi-improvisational nature of most storytelling performance sets into motion an even more powerful intersubjective feedback process: the audience’s responses shape the words in which the story is clothed, or indeed whether it can be told at all. This might be most notably true of informal performances (you will be most at your audience’s mercy when you are trying to tell a story to easily distracted friends in a noisy pub), but it applies to some extent even in virtuosic, rehearsed performance storytelling. Ben Haggarty gives as one of the criteria for a performance to be considered storytelling, that the storyteller’s ‘deep structural composition’ is built on ‘a clear understanding that the story is not the words – it is the plot’ (2011: 12), and thus that storytellers must ‘improvise the retelling of the story uniquely and specifically for the listeners’ on each occasion (14).

Is Storytelling an Especially Dialogic Art Form? How unique this reciprocity, or intersubjectivity, is to storytelling is a point which has been keenly debated among writers on storytelling. Begging the patience of reflective practitioners reading this who are ready to take inspiration from a variety of art forms without over-thinking the subtle differences between them, a summary of this debate gives a valuable introduction to the overriding dynamic of storytelling. Live theatre also depends on a dynamic reciprocity between performer and listener; Erika Fischer-Lichte describes this as a ‘feedback loop […] a self-referential, autopoietic system enabling a fundamentally open, unpredictable process’ (2008: 39). Despite this, as Tom Maguire (2015) points out, debates about storytelling have focused around often oversimplistic binary oppositions—between live storytelling and literature (as in Benjamin 1973) and between storytelling and theatre. The Western storytelling revival, with its rejection of advanced capitalist modes of

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communication and spectacle, made a point of emphasising these distinctions. The descendants of this movement, for example, the h ­ igh-profile storytellers interviewed by Wilson (2006), still often see clear blue water between their own improvisational work and the art of acting, which carries the implication of scriptedness, meticulous rehearsal and the ‘fourth wall’. Wilson himself (1997) critiques this idea as resting on an essentially Victorian conception of naturalistic theatre. He discusses many performances which cross over the boundary between storytelling and theatre, and proposes instead a ‘Performance Continuum’ operating across theatre, storytelling and indeed everyday life (Table 7.1). Wilson’s continuum has much in common with Richard Schechner’s distinction between framed, conventionalised ‘is-performance’ and informal, everyday ‘as-performance’ (2006: 38), and Michael Kirby’s continuum between ‘non-matrixed performance’ and ‘complex acting’ (1972). Kirby observes that while, in a performance, we usually know when a person is acting and when he is not, […] there is a scale or continuum of behaviour involved, and the differences between acting and not-acting may be quite small. (1972: 3)

Maguire too denies any clear boundaries around storytelling as an art form, citing in particular the recent trend of ‘the return of the storytellers’ to the Irish theatre stage (2015)—performers like Little John Nee, Donal O’Kelly and Tinderbox Theatre Company who directly engage with the audience in telling their narratives. Nor is this a new phenomenon; Walter Benjamin (1998) describes the theatrical ‘byway’ past naturalistic acting throughout history identified by Bertolt Brecht, in which ‘the actors can at any moment stand outside themselves and show themselves to be actors’ (xiii): That byway led via the medieval mystery play, German baroque drama, certain scenes of Shakespeare, Part II of Goethe’s Faust, to Strindberg, and finally Brecht and “epic theatre”. (xiv) Table 7.1 Wilson’s ‘performance continuum’ (1997: 28)

Conversation Low intensity Informal Subconscious Low risk Low rewards

Cultural performance High intensity Formal Conscious High risk High rewards

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Post-dramatic theatre (Lehmann 2006) too may be seen as a more recent calling-point on this byway. All of these forms challenge any binary distinction from storytelling in their consciousness of the co-presence of audience and actors. All are highly reciprocal; all celebrate the interdependence of performer and audience. Nonetheless, genuinely dialogic performance remains relatively rare on the stage. Fischer-Lichte suggests that theatre, during its period of naturalistic acting, has learnt habits of suppressing the audience’s influence on the performance which may die hard. Modern directors may ‘aim at making the functioning of the feedback loop visible by foregrounding certain factors and variables, whilst minimizing, if not fully eliminating, others’ (2008: 40). Perhaps for this reason, Maguire sees a residual particularity in storytelling, driving him back to investigate ‘what it is that takes place between such tellers, the people to whom they are performing and the tales they present’ (2015: 2). He concludes that storytelling is ‘a fundamental act of intersubjectivity’ and that the story ‘is created within and modulated according to the act of telling’ (11). In fact he gives ‘the immediate reciprocity of the relationship between the teller and the audience’ (11) as one of the defining characteristics of the form, which makes the relationship between the teller and the spectator far more central to the experience of the storytelling event than the relationship between an actor and the spectator whose presence he has been trained to ignore, or appear to ignore. (18)

In practice, storytellers, just like actors, work within commercial and institutional structures which may often hinder the realisation of such a relationship. A theatre may want to promote a well-rehearsed, highly structured storytelling show rather than an evening of stories of unpredictable quality; a musician collaborator will need reliable cues. A storyteller working in schools may need to guarantee that certain curriculum topics will be covered, rather than following pupils’ interests and questions wherever they lead. Nonetheless, despite all these caveats, I feel confident in arguing that it is this ideal, the overriding impetus towards an unmediated, surprising and reciprocal dialogue, that characterises the form of storytelling more than anything else. It is akin to Jacques Derrida’s idea of ‘the impossible’, an inaccessible but nonetheless defining and guiding principle, as discussed by Lee Higgins (2012) in relation to community music. Accordingly, the intensity of engagement and degree of responsiveness

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this requires is perhaps the defining difficulty of storytelling. It lies in the basic, irredeemable, emotional complexity of everyday human interaction. We can envisage a parent, teaching assistant, or youth worker, trying to find just the right words to share a particular episode from his own life with a young person, dimly aware of why he has chosen this story to tell this individual at this moment, constantly aware of her reactions and emotions, realising new things about his own story as he proceeds, instantly realising when he has struck a wrong note. Perhaps the key lesson to learn from the mutuality of the storytelling exchange is that we should allow our listeners and participants to help us find the form of a dialogic storytelling practice. It may seem strange to claim that storytelling is a highly dialogic art form and then seek to articulate a particularly dialogical form of it. Yet, as I contend in Chapter 1, our practice often unconsciously operates within particular paradigms or chronotopes, which may limit its dialogic potential, by partially predetermining the terms of the participant’s involvement. There are many routes to escaping ingrained patterns, and dialogic storytelling can be seen an emergent trend across practice with all age groups. Yet for me, it is my work with adolescents, with their low tolerance for bullshit and their particular developmental needs, that has led me to recognise and develop it. It has been a refining fire, forcing me to honestly challenge my own earlier work and try to meet young people face-to-face.

Exploring the ‘Between’ Therefore, the young people involved in my practice research have influenced not only the words of my stories, but the manner I tell them, the ways I explore them, and the very kind of storyteller I aspire to be. What they have taught me is that working dialogically in the ‘between’ with young people involves four key awarenesses: A.  making the potential for interpersonal connection visible and tangible; B. being alive to the significance of the process of ‘contracting’ to tell a story; C. becoming sensitive to dynamics of gift and coercion in storytelling encounters; and D. balancing the storyteller’s role as guide with that of partner in dialogue. The rest of this chapter will explore each of these themes in turn.

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Connection For various reasons, there may be a particular need for dialogic encounter during adolescence. Adolescence is a period in which young people are developing the ideological setting for their ‘personal myth’ (McAdams 1993), ‘questioning the contradictions in their environment’ (Vaucelle and Davenport 2004: 9), and articulating progressively more sophisticated accounts of their own selfhood (Chandler et al. 2003). These are conversations and arguments with the world which require discussion partners. Henderson et al. (2007) and Plante (2010) suggest that the creation of a healthy identity, or self-narrative, is a markedly more demanding task for twenty-first-century adolescents than for most previous generations. For Henderson et al., rapid economic, social and technological change quickly renders redundant any templates young people may have for their lives or future biographies, thus they must devote energy to making conscious choices as to which relationships and areas of life are the most fruitful basis for their identities. Adolescents are therefore likely to seek opportunities for exploration of alternative roles, stances and beliefs, and for testing the reactions of others to these. More specifically, essential to forming a healthy identity are certain ‘self-capacities’, including the ability to ‘maintain a sense of connection to others’ (Plante 2010: 37). Achieving connectedness emerges from the literature on adolescent development as both vital (Baumeister and Leary 1995) and dogged with challenges. Since the 1960s it has been clearly understood that adolescents often subscribe to a ‘personal fable’ (Elkind 1967): a perception that they are outsiders, whose feelings, difficulties and inner lives are unique and incommunicable. The emotional impact of this ‘self-othering’ by young people may be exacerbated by a cultural ‘othering’ by adults of an adolescent world seen as deviant and problematic (Offer et al. 1981, cited in Coleman and Hendry 1990). There is some evidence that the challenge of achieving connectedness has acquired an additional layer in the era of social media. The current generation of teenagers is, in the online sphere, more socially connected than any other, yet the consequences of this for the quality of their relationships, as Danah Boyd’s (2014) research concludes, are complex. Boyd finds that for many young people, social media interactions are a compensation for reductions in freedom and free time which prevent them from meeting friends in person. While emphasising the

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opportunities offered to teenagers by participation in ‘networked publics’, she discusses how ‘social media alters and amplifies social situations’ (13), creating dynamics many find difficult to navigate. Within my own practice, participants often discuss social media as a sphere where they must maintain a convincing performance at all times, a situation both perilous and personally demanding. Disconnection is, however, intricately interconnected with many other aspects of mental health and life experience. Youth mental health campaigner Natasha Devon (2018) refutes the idea that social media has a greater impact on young people’s well-being and relationships than fundamental structural factors such as poverty, austerity and academic pressures. Whatever the causes, a recent study by Relate (Marjoribanks and Darnell Bradley 2017) found that young people aged 16–24 were the most likely age group to report feeling lonely, with 32% feeling lonely often or all of the time, and 65% some of the time. The challenge of connectedness was identified by Kate Collins (2015) during her dialogic artmaking project connecting urban adolescents with student artists. At the broadest level, the collaboration revealed ‘the insularity and occasional isolation in all our lives’ (2015: 120). She also perceived a particular lack of genuine listening and dialogue in the students’ and teenagers’ lives, which was reflected in the slow speed at which skills, trust, empathy and confidence were incrementally developed during the semester-long project. For these reasons, a storyteller may wish to seek to create within a storytelling session a space within which listening and speaking occur on a more attentive level than is customary in everyday life, education or the online sphere—even if the communication is about a fictional story. We may seek to make visible and realizable this possibility of connection with both other young people and adults. The following activities are some of the simplest and most effective means I have found of achieving this. Chains: On the simplest level, an ever-expanding series of oral and written games modelled on the ‘chain story’ have become a key part of most of my storytelling sessions: One Word Around the Circle, Three Words, Give and Take, Consequences, Letters in a Landscape, Exaggeration (some of which are sketched out in Appendix 2). It is surely no coincidence that similar games are often played by adolescents among themselves. The collaboratively invented story (no matter how trivial) makes tangible to young people the acceptance and development of their ideas by others, momentarily overcoming the ‘personal fable’ and

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bridging the gap between the individuals present. Forms of such games have evolved as the property of specific groups: In the adolescent psychiatric unit Maple House, the reluctance of some young people to express even innocuous ideas out loud gave rise to a private and lyrical variant. Each young person wrote half a story, stopping mid-sentence at the story’s crisis point, and chose someone else to finish it and resolve the crisis. Those that wished passed the resulting stories to me to read out loud. The gratitude young people felt for the sensitive responses made by others to their cautious beginnings rapidly built up a sense of trust and connection.

‘Returns’: Some of the most powerful moments in my practice have been when I have ‘returned’ to a group of young people a story they have themselves created by telling it back to them, showing I have heard their nuances and understood their meanings. In some cases, this returning helped to enshrine the story as a sort of myth in itself: One small intervention class of 12–13-year-olds at City School created their own legend using the ‘hero’s journey’ structure they had uncovered by comparing different mythic and true stories. Their hero, ‘Mr Imagination’, was an uncompromising and isolated character who first took shape in a ‘chain story’ game. His story was built up through numerous ideas, discussions and fragments in the class until he resembled a map more than a person. After synthesising this material into a single, written story and presenting the pupils with clean copies the following week, which they read aloud, the story seemed to have become a worthy member of the canon of hero stories. The group still spontaneously referred to this story a year later.

Interweaving: A drama devising process which begins with stories brought and told by individual group members and explored in turn by the group through improvisation can be particularly powerful. This is because dialogic storytelling is concerned with both interpersonal dialogue and syncretic dialogue between stories or genres. By interweaving these stories and the themes the group finds in them, a facilitator can create and sustain an embodiment of the space between individuals, laying a stepping stone by which adolescents may move towards connection with others:

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The lead practitioners at Acting Up!, a youth theatre for 14–­19-year-olds with additional learning needs, scripted the play Mythic, rich with allusions to folk and fictional stories, ideas and characters the group had brought or devised during the preceding term. Both the group’s facilitators underlined that achieving a ‘meeting of minds’ with others is a key developmental challenge for their members. Showing them that their own meanings had been heard, and incorporated in the storyworld, enabled them to move beyond identifying with their own characters to connecting with others. One practitioner, Jenna Drury, explained: ‘Because they were interwoven, and they could see the threads relating to other people, there was that trail back to someone else in the story’ (09/07/2014). This was particularly evident in the ‘Ten years later’ reflection exercise we led with the young people after the production was over, in which each of them was in role as their character in the play, ten years in the future. Actors improvised not only their own characters’ ongoing lives and aspirations, but also envisaged their developing relationships with other characters, mirroring the process they had experienced as a troupe.

Contracting If the magic and the dynamic modes of engagement co-exist in a storytelling session, they correspond loosely to the states of absorption in a story and more outwardly active phases of responding to or challenging it. In a performative talk I described and enacted the conflicting pulls of the dynamic and the magic, and the moment of paralysis that often results in adolescent groups just after a telling: Now comes this sort of awful silence. I have tried to keep you ready to spring, but now you are absolutely left hanging, dependent. I was able to lead you in respectfully but you have been silent for a long time now, and coming out again feels very hairy. I don’t know what this moment is but it contains demands and discomfort on both sides – from me, the desire to see a response; from you, an awkward sense that something may now be demanded of you, a request for time and quiet. (Heinemeyer 2014)

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In a focus group at City School, 13-year-old Mary showed her empathy with this moment of crisis: Don’t you feel shy when you, like, stop and everyone just stares at you? (15/03/2016)

As she recognised, the points of beginning and then ending a story are particularly revealing and difficult moments in a workshop which negotiates both magical and dynamic forms of engagement. Storytellers from many cultures have used code-switching devices to signal the transition from normal conversation to storytelling: their ‘Once upon a time’, or their ‘Crick – Crack!’ at the commencement, their ‘That’s another story for another time’ at the end. Individuals and families may have their own idiosyncratic versions of these cues; my German mother-in-law always announces ‘Jetzt kommt es!’ (‘Now it’s coming!’) before she launches into a particular juicy or funny story. Around these verbal cues might be established social patterns of seguing into story-time, as Ben Haggarty (2014) describes in his concept of the ‘ladder to the moon’: a particular community may understand that in certain circumstances (e.g. winter evenings at a friend’s house), tellings of personal anecdotes might give way in sequence to established family or local memories, wonder tales and legends, and eventually to important cultural myths. Where no such accepted vernacular codes or devices exist—where as a visiting storyteller (in a culture or setting ill-at-ease with storytelling) you are seeking ways of negotiating the entry and exit points with an audience—the process is more challenging. Many storytellers, such as Haggarty (2011) and Mead (2011), as well as theatre practitioners including Walser and Etchells (2012), have described this entry into story as a ‘contracting’ process. A storyteller needs the audience’s consent to begin a story; an implicit agreement must be struck in which the storyteller offers signs of their trustworthiness to carry the audience through the story, and the audience indicates their readiness to listen to the end. Haggarty summarises the audience’s considerations in deciding whether to embark on this journey: Is the audience in a safe and appealing pair of hands? Will they be returned from wherever they might be taken to? Will that journey have been worthwhile? (2011: 17)

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When this end is reached, there is often another hiatus in which storyteller and audience step back into ‘normal’ conversation, often with a feeling of uncertainty as to their next interactions with each other. It is at these points that I feel most conscious of my hopes or even expectations of the listeners, and my desire to connect with them, yearnings which Levinas sees as essential to human encounter. Yet these moments simultaneously impress upon me his assertion that ‘we shall never know [the Other]’ (Levinas 1969: 18). These moments of contracting and leaving a story, especially with an adolescent audience, are often charged with significance and tension. They can feel painfully exposing and vulnerable; yet ironically, it is perhaps in them that the storyteller is most at the audience’s mercy and so genuine I/Thou, or face-to-face, encounter can occur. The Storyteller’s ‘Authenticity’ or ‘Identity’, and the Contracting Process It is in these moments of contracting that I have most strongly experienced a challenge to my ‘authenticity’ as a storyteller. I recognise the almost shamanic expectations which audiences, absorbing ideas of the magical chronotope, can invest in a storyteller; Sobol refers to these as ‘the mediating image of restored wholeness, a prism of heightened presence through which these idylls of past and future can shine’ (1999: 29). It is tempting for a storyteller, particularly (as in my case) one with an Irish accent performing in a culture which still exoticises the Celtic fringes, to seek to live up to this image and sometimes even believe in one’s own myth for the duration of the story. Yet in fact my construction of my identity, repertoire and skill set as a storyteller has been a ­decade-long process, drawing only on vestiges of inheritance and ‘folk art’, and consisting in large part of purposeful learning, research and trial and error. While authenticity may be a problematic term, invoking essentialist notions of selfhood and culture, Haggarty suggests that presenting one’s identity honestly remains a vital, ethical, though complex and subtle, task for storytellers: Is the storyteller his or her ‘self’ (albeit an enhanced or ‘super’ self)? Are they playing an intentional and purposeful role in a consensual game? Or have they adopted a false persona? Where is the truth in all this? Are they deceitful? (2011: 18)

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This construction of identity is inescapably located within a chronotope—thus Sawyer’s (1962) frank description of her own long and sometimes humiliating self-training process is typical of the everyday chronotope. Each chronotope also comprises approved performance styles and repertoire, and characteristic strategies of contracting. For example, in my earlier freelance work, operating to some extent within the magical chronotope, I sometimes introduced my stories without revealing my sources for them, particularly if these were written collections of folktales. As Wilson points out, an ‘uncritical reverence for tradition’ (2006: 24) in some parts of the storytelling movement (those I call magical) is tied in with belief in the story told as an ‘Ur-text’ with a fixed meaning, rather than a historically situated, ‘ever-changing entity’ (28)—a belief I never held. Yet my lack of transparency may have implied that these stories were in some sense my inheritance, feeding the myth of their and my own ‘authenticity’, and disguising the compositional processes I and others had exerted on the material. Working regularly with adolescent groups, particularly the intervention classes at City School, has brought me to a different understanding of authenticity, and thus new forms of contracting to tell. In the initial sessions, the pupils’ most frequent immediate response to stories was to ask if they were true or not, perhaps an expression of their uncertainty as to my authority. However, as their familiarity with me and storytelling grew, their emphasis shifted to my research and compositional processes. Danny repeatedly asked me at the end of my stories: ‘How do you get to know this stuff?’, asking for my sources and trying to discover my process; I developed the habit of bringing in books and images I had used in research to show him. His classmate Sam was interested, both as a listener and a practitioner, in the craft and sources of storytelling: We get to listen to a good story, that someone’s made up, or they’ve got from someone else, or they’ve learnt, or they’ve taken their time to, like, remember that story… (15/03/2015) I went to the theatre and I told stories to the little kids there…(The sessions) have made me want to be a storyteller when I’m older. (15/03/2015)

Indeed, discussions about the work involved in bringing a story to readiness for telling, and the wider process of becoming a storyteller, sometimes occupied a significant part of a session at City School.

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The episode described in Chapter 4 demonstrates that with the older and more cautious teenagers in Maple House, contracting acquired an additional layer: not only did they question a story’s relationship to ‘the truth’, but I often felt an implicit challenge as to my reasons for choosing a particular story. This was perhaps unsurprising in a setting where, in the words of their teacher, ‘they feel they are permanently under the microscope’ of mental health professionals (17/07/2015). In order to ‘sign’ the contract and enter into the story, they needed to be clear as to whether I had an undeclared therapeutic or analytical intent, and what they were signing up for. This view of authenticity, in which the young people demanded that I ‘show my working’ and clarify my motives, rather than claim an automatic right to tell a certain story, gave a new cast to the contracting process. Rather than the code-switching phrases so redolent of tradition, my entry point to a story became an explicit discussion of my relationship to it, and why it might be of relevance to my listeners: ‘I thought I might tell you this one today because Mrs X told me you had been asking about whether the Plague came to York. Some of what I’m about to tell you I found out from this history pamphlet about the common just behind my house – some of you cross it on the way to school…’. Contracting became a vital part of modelling the storyteller’s role and starting off the dialogue.

Gift and Coercion The storytelling exchange involves lavish gift-giving on both sides: the storyteller chooses the best words to give of herself; the listener undertakes to listen for an unforeseeable length of time. Both Buber and Levinas hint at the reciprocity, the uncertainty and the vulnerability involved in gift-giving. Buber reminds us that ‘The Thou meets me through grace – it is not found by seeking’ (1958: 8). For Levinas (glossed by Wild), Responsible communication depends on an initial act of generosity, a giving of my world to [the other] with all its dubious assumptions and arbitrary features. They are then exposed to the questions of the other, and an escape from egotism becomes possible. (1969: 14)

If young people are to be granted a share of the power and responsibility, met in a face-to-face relationship throughout a storytelling session, we

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need to consider the storytelling exchange in relation to the complexities of ‘the gift’. Gift-giving has at least two faces. On the one hand, as Marcel Mauss (2002) warns, it can incur obligations and reinforce status difference— think of Victorian charitable giving. On the other, it can be a form of ‘empathetic dialogue’ (Fennell, cited in Nicholson 2005: 164) which may disrupt normal economic relations by replacing them with ‘the heterogeneity of generosity’ (Nicholson 2005: 162). It goes without saying that the structure of a project, or the setting for a storytelling exchange, will influence which of these faces will dominate. If a project funder or institution demands certain results, and practitioners must assess participants’ progress against these objectives, the gifts they offer will come with coercive strings attached. The fact that much of the practice discussed in this book took place as part of a funded PhD left me freer than usual to engender ‘empathetic dialogue’ with young people and settings, to some extent outside economic constraints or even transgressive of them. This is a role for which storytellers may have an affinity, as will be discussed in greater depth in Chapter 9. Hierarchical differences between myself and participants were often disrupted by long-term mutualism; for example, workshops often relied heavily on the generous and reliable participation of one or two individual young people (such as John whose story opens this book). I was dependent on them to co-create a structure within which the reticent majority could participate, thus these individuals were actively caring for me, as well as for the others in the room. Nonetheless, any storyteller must negotiate with both faces of the gift. The following vignettes describe occasions when I have succumbed to the temptation to lessen the power of the listeners, and circumvent the intense demands of the ‘between’, through coercive tactics. It will become evident that these are often the result of my having a conscious or unconscious purpose or agenda, which is not shared by the young people. These violations of the spirit of face-to-face encounter are invariably resisted by teenage listeners, bringing me to an understanding that I must make myself vulnerable to their responses—and how the nature of facilitation makes this a guiding, but ever elusive goal. The consequences of coercion at Global Youth Club: It is possible on occasion to ensnare a group of young people in a story almost against their will. During the penultimate session at the Global Youth Club, when the young people had become more and more reluctant to give up

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their free play and socialising to join in with the storytelling and drama led by myself and another practitioner, my field notes record: They drifted in for a drink before drifting off to sport, and I thought, this is the moment for a ‘proper’ performance if there ever was one, i.e. I consciously decided to grab them by the scruff of the neck. I got out my tin whistle and played a show-off jig, then as the applause died down I started into my ­highest-impact version of Tir na nOg. Gradually turned down the volume as the story proceeded but kept the telling tight and efficient. And everyone stayed til the end (they didn’t have to, the hall door was open behind them) BUT then almost all took their freedom, drifted or even marched off […] Was my telling a breaking of our promise about free choice, a step backwards into coercion, an attack […]? (08/03/2014)

Indeed, the next session saw almost all the young people refuse point blank to engage with us, their trust of us apparently broken. ‘Empowerment or else’ at Maple House: Likewise, in the aftermath of a story, the difficulty for young people of leaving a session without seeming impolite often gives a facilitator a power advantage. I often run ­follow-up activities to facilitate young people’s own creative responses to a story I have told, yet they may have genuine reasons to prefer to simply listen to the story and leave it at that. Ironically, by seeking to ‘empower’ their voices in relation to mine, I may in fact be riding roughshod over their wishes—as I discovered during a period in which attendance at my storytelling sessions at Maple House was tailing off. The setting’s teachers pointed out that the young people invariably enjoyed listening to stories, but feared the performance element of subsequent activities as exposing and risky, as well as mistrusting the play space I was attempting to set up. I called my own motivations into question: Was I really concerned to give the young people a voice during the sessions, or was I ignoring the eloquence they were already expressing through their non-engagement? Was my persistence with follow-up activities a demand for something in return for my gift, to satisfy my own desire to see their creative response to my stories? In both these cases, I was not paying heed to the golden rule of the gift freely given, as expressed by the storyteller Ruth Sawyer: Experience…is like fairy gold: make use of it, and it serves you bountifully; hoard it, and it turns to dust. As with fairy gold, you can never trade it

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directly over the counter. It must be used with indirection; for who will take another’s experience in trade for one’s own? (1962: 81)

Empathetic Dialogue—The Balancing Act I was able to seize the young people’s attention (at Global Youth Club) or to some extent their participation (at Maple House), but was conscious even in so doing of the violation I was perpetrating on the storytelling exchange, and they responded on the next possible occasion by withdrawing their free consent. However, it would equally deny the possibility of dialogue to fail to step confidently into the role of storyteller and facilitator. As Donald Schoen (1983) points out, there is an interplay between structure and freedom; thus I might have a strong feeling a group would enjoy and benefit from creating their own retelling of my story through creative writing or drama, but that they will not be able to see this and judge for themselves until they have entered into it within a structure I provide. With sensitive and often reticent young people, it is difficult to distinguish between initial inertia or shyness, and a genuine preference to consider the story privately in their own time, or indeed to banish it from their minds. These are challenges faced too by other arts practitioners—Higgins for example discusses the ‘fine line between leading and controlling’ (2012: 148) in music facilitation—but the switches between the often liminal state of storytelling/listening and ‘normal’ communication give a particular intensity to these moments of contracting and negotiating young people’s participation. The difficult balance between these poles of coercion and fearfulness is struck through the perhaps unattainable ideal of empathetic dialogue—an attuned and responsive playfulness which offers boldly but does not demand, which opens the doors for an open-ended and enabling encounter with young people without having specific expectations of them. Schoen (1983) contends that any practitioner in any discipline depends on developing this kind of ‘knowledge-in-action’, a tacit ­‘knowing-how’ opposed to propositional ‘knowing that’. Alida Gersie describes how this operates in her work with storytelling in a therapeutic context: in each group I note members’ timing of contributions and their style of withdrawing from interaction as well as evident engagement with particular issues. I clarify patterns in habits of relating and listen carefully to the

156  C. HEINEMEYER spoken, the near-spoken and the unsaid […] This process welcomes experience in, integrates uncertainty as uncertainty and facilitates the bonding of informed not-knowing with secure knowing. (1997: 4)

The notion of empathetic dialogue contains Derrida’s ‘Impossible’, the sense that a storyteller may always feel in deficit of the alertness and repertoire of responses Gersie describes, climbing a glassy mountain with an invisible peak and seeking to bring others with him. Negotiating with ‘Purpose’ This aspiration towards empathetic dialogue is therefore essential to the giving of the gift, but to work solely through this intuitive improvisation, resisting any sense of desired outcome or agenda, is deeply challenging. In the notional communities of the slower-changing past described by Benjamin (1973), storytellers largely shared common conditions of life with their listeners, and thus the value of their exchange of experience and wisdom may have been self-evident to all parties. The apparent purposelessness of storytelling ceilidhs recalled by elderly Irish people interviewed by Lawrence Millman (1977) was in fact a multifaceted socially embedded usefulness, a necessary interlude of togetherness, as was tacitly understood by both teller and listeners: “It was not the story that was in it,” one old man told me. “Not the story really at all, but the idea you were passing your time with the others. ‘Twas like mass, you see, because we went to the chapel for the same reason.” (Millman 1977: 78-79)

No such shared understandings exist in the peripatetic existence of a ‘sailor’ storyteller, working with ever-changing groups of unpredictable young people in diverse institutional settings. The lack of a readily expressible, positive purpose—the need to rely solely on one’s instinct as a practitioner to sense what a particular encounter might be capable of generating—might be a defining characteristic of telling stories, but it can be a paralysing ideal. It is perhaps for this reason that it is tempting to seek shelter in the instrumental goals of the institution, such as education or therapy, and accordingly in heavily structured workshops which limit the ­open-endedness of the encounter. Often we are particularly driven to this

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by the stated goals of a funder or institution (e.g. to teach certain skills), but even where we are not, we may find ourselves planning storytelling sessions around learning aims and outcomes. Whether to do so is by no means a clear ethical choice. Arguments around instrumentalising storytelling and the arts are often repeated, but as both Nicholson (2005) and White (2015) discuss, in relation to applied arts with an aspiration to be ‘of use’, any distinction between intrinsic value and social purpose is oversimplistic. However, it is vital for any storyteller to be honest with herself as to her purposes, whether stated or sensed, and how she has arrived at them, as a brief examination of my two longest-term research settings will illustrate. In my work in City School, I matched my choice of stories to the pupils’ broader humanities curriculum (e.g. telling a class the legend of King Charles’ escape from Cromwell across the fens while they were studying the Civil War) and sought to give my workshops at least some similarity to a lesson in which knowledge is created and gained. This strategy accorded with my belief in the unassailable value of storytelling in education, enabling ‘lower ability’ young people to be knowledge creators through sharing experiential knowledge (Heinemeyer and Durham 2017); pragmatically, it also enabled the classes’ teacher to justify the time she allocated to the project. However, it was at times an artistic and even ethical compromise. While there remained abundant scope for ‘surprise’ to shape the sessions, the guiding structure allowed me to avoid relying on empathetic dialogue. In moving on from a telling to at least partially planned response activities such as poster making or drama, I adopted the education system’s coercive practices of demanding evidence from pupils of their new knowledge. In our focus group, Joe repeatedly sought to persuade me that the real creative work was in the listening, not anything the group created overtly at my request: It’s just – you know when you’re telling a story and some of us put our heads down like that – it’s only because some of us do it to, like, picture the images in our heads….I would prefer to hear another story [rather than do response activities]. (15/03/2015)

My insistence on my educational purpose, however loose, may even have denied the pupils opportunities to hear and engage with (or indeed choose not to overtly engage with) stories that might have been even richer and more meaningful for them.

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In Maple House, it was paradoxically the setting’s own staff who at times needed to remind me not to have therapeutic or instrumental goals, as my field notes record: Every guidance I have had from knowledgeable parties about my work at Maple House has pointed in the same direction. Right at the beginning, a year ago, the occupational therapist told me she liked the flexibility and responsiveness and playfulness of the sessions. She has been cautious about my attempts to do more ‘structured’ work as this might not respond to the individuals’ moods and needs on that particular day….More recently, when I asked the teacher what he wanted from the storytelling sessions – whether he wanted them to have a curriculum link – he said not at all, rather he wanted them to give a chance for the young people to experience some more happiness in their day. (25/11/2014)

Each time I think I have absorbed this lesson and accepted my own vulnerability, an incident has occurred at Maple House which has revealed that I was still searching for mechanisms, purposes or guiding structures. For example, following the episode described in Chapter 4, in which I was humbled by the clear indications and written feedback from a particular group of inpatients that they did not wish to deliver cathartic, feminist parables to my door on demand but simply to ‘do something creative together’, in subsequent months I focused on collaborative games and musical, creative writing, craft and puppetry projects based on story. Particular sub-groups of enthusiastic participants formed around some of these projects, notably a digital storytelling project and the performance Wormwood in the Garden (Chapter 6), such that by early summer 2015, I felt that artistic collaboration provided me with a sense of direction in my work at Maple House. However, collaboration itself became a ­too-rigid purpose and structure, however, dialogic and empowering it might sound. My blog recorded the possible risks to young people of entering into such self-revealing projects within the context of a mental health unit: No matter how low-key this seems to me, for some young people it is too big a risk to turn up at all. Perhaps they will be judged or assessed or analysed. I have to remember the framing of their lives here - being permanently ‘under the microscope’ as some of them rage - and their lifetime of school experience in which almost every activity has a measurable learning outcome. (Heinemeyer 2015a)

The Maple House teachers recalled me to other desires the young people might have, such as to find rest and relief from their difficulties in an

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absorbing story, or to avoid re-traumatisation. My collaborative agenda in fact enabled me to avoid attending to the covertly expressed wishes of many of the current cohort of young people, such as the young woman who felt the need to ask her mother to convey her wish to remain silent in my sessions. Rather than take my lead from the eloquent non-engagement of most of the young people, I had once more become enamoured of my own sense of purpose. I was offering my gift, but on my own terms. An Impossible and Necessary Ideal In the case of adolescents, avoiding coercion by paying attention to their non-explicit, non-verbal contributions to dialogue (such as their refusal to participate) may be particularly vital. The often troubled young people with whom I worked at Maple House and City School, and to some extent adolescents in general, can be considered a ‘subordinate people’ in Conquergood’s (2002) sense. Their individual crises of development and identity formation intersect with the gendered, class-based, cultural and political ways in which society makes them subordinate. To generalise, the predominantly female, highly sensitive, anxious, ­self-blaming young people at Maple House, and the predominantly male, poor, ‘challenging’, ‘disengaged’ young people in the intervention classes at City School, are both at the sharp end of our culture’s disservices to adolescents. Conquergood points out that to enter into dialogue with subordinate people we must attend to the ways in which they are able and willing to communicate: The state of emergency under which many people live demands that we pay attention to messages that are coded and encrypted; to indirect, nonverbal, and extralinguistic modes of communication where subversive meanings and utopian yearnings can be sheltered and shielded from surveillance. (2002: 148)

This observation underscores the difficulty of engaging in dialogue with vulnerable young people, but simultaneously suggests the value of seeking to do so. As Conquergood’s dialogical stance of performance (1985) suggests, where there is a possibility of entering with young people into territory where their ‘subversive meanings and utopian yearnings’ can find some expression, a fallible storyteller should certainly seek to do so, even, perhaps, at the risk that her instincts will be inadequate and she will find herself to have been coercive. Very rarely will I or any

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other storyteller attain the fullest expression of empathetic dialogue with young people in a storytelling encounter. Nor is there any stable ground on which I can pitch my tent, by saying, for example, that I let my stories speak for themselves, or that I facilitate young people to do their own storytelling, or that I collaborate with them. One of the Maple House teachers pinpointed the fuzziness of goals we needed to accept by observing that, while neither he nor I were trained therapists or had any therapeutic goals, There is nursing in all we do here. (15/07/2015)

My conclusion to my blog post about Maple House inpatients’ ­non-engagement was perhaps an articulation of yet another structure or purpose, but a more humble one that accepts the shifting sands that are dictated by the gift-giving exchange of storytelling. I needed to make undertakings, explicitly or implicitly, that young people could listen to stories without anything being demanded of them: Thus the storyworld and its potential for free-floating will be available to everyone. And (this is a bit Zen) by giving up any hope that we will get into the play space that lies beyond, I will therefore make it possible that just sometimes we will. Some people will drift off and those few who have the will and ability to pass the many barricades will stay. And we will fail and fail again, and see what happens! (Heinemeyer 2015a)

Storyteller as Guide An aspiration towards open-ended, surprising dialogue between storyteller and adolescent listeners may suggest a goal of democratic equality between them, but as Stern (2015) suggests in an educational context, dialogic interaction between diverse young people and the adults working with them is grounded in a relationship more complex than equality. While a visiting storyteller has none of the institutionally sanctioned authority of a teacher, at least for the duration of the story she is in a guiding role, in some sense responsible for everyone present. Benjamin (1973: 86), while always emphasising the agency of the listener, does not shy away from words like ‘wisdom’ and ‘usefulness’ in relation to stories; storytellers provide counsel based on their experience. Storyteller Jo Blake expresses a similar understanding of the role:

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(T)here is, to me, some kind of inherent link between the storyteller and wisdom. When I think about the storyteller, what makes the storyteller different from the dancer or the actor, I associate the storyteller with wisdom, which is a depth of knowing which only comes through experience – through knocks and difficulties and stuff that life throws at you. (Appendix 1)

Further, the whole persona of the storyteller may communicate a sense of responsibility for the listener, as has most richly been explored by Arthur Frank in relation to illness narratives. The Suffering Storyteller Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller (1995) has helped shape a narrativist understanding of how illness and recovery are constructed, suggesting that by bearing witness to their own path through illness, sufferers may help others after them chart their route. This witnessing stance, says Frank, makes the storyteller’s own body ‘communicative’, and is thus an ethical position of care and responsibility for others, the choice to ‘be a body for other bodies’ (37). A communicative body is dyadic, embodying a recognition that ‘the other has to do with me, as I with it’ (35). Storytelling allows this communication to be healing or helpful to both parties: Storytelling is one medium through which the dyadic body both offers its own pain and receives the reassurance that others recognise what afflicts it. Thus storytelling is a privileged medium of the dyadic body. (36)

Thus, for example, countless blogs and online fora which curate sufferers’ and survivors’ personal stories offer themselves as a valuable resource to other sufferers (although it is important to note that the counsel of wounded storytellers is as fallible as any—there also exist many pro-eating disorder blogs, for example). Adolescent and young adult bloggers are prevalent in these communities—see, for example www. upsidedownchronicles.com. In its introduction to the ‘best eating disorder blogs of 2015’, Healthline writes: These 14 blogs are a wonderful place to begin your journey toward recovery if you have an eating disorder, or if you’re caring for a loved one who does. Each blog is unique in its own way. You’re likely to find at least one that speaks to you. (2015)

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Frank suggests that illness may present a particular opening to enter this kind of mutualistic relationship with others. However, the ethical choice he identifies applies to all storytellers, amplifying both Levinas’ ideal of ‘responsible communication’ and Benjamin’s of conveying experience. A storyteller may seek to put all of herself, including the suffering she has endured in her life, at the service of her listeners, making herself vulnerable and co-dependent with them. This need not entail telling true personal stories: in constructing imaginative worlds, a storyteller inevitably draws on her own experiential knowledge, and thus acts as a guide through difficult emotional territory she has traversed before. Jo Blake expresses this as follows: (I)n terms of the telling of fairytales and myth, for me those stories really come alive when you get a sense that the storyteller has somehow lived them in some way. So when people ask me, ‘How do you find stories, where do you get stories from?’, I really believe that you have some stories that are really personal to your life experience, that really ring true or resonate for you. When you’re sharing those stories, you’re sharing a deep understanding of them, so it’s a rich experience. That, for me, is what really marks storytelling out from an actor in a written play. It’s a story that you’ve lived with. (Appendix 1)

Indeed, where the past experience of the storyteller differs widely from the present and likely future experiences of the listeners, fantastical stories may have something to offer that personal stories do not. As the adolescent experience has changed very rapidly in the two decades since my own teenage years, my personal memories may fail to resonate with my listeners’ experiences, and this may result in what Benjamin (1973) identified as a rupture in the mechanisms of counsel. In contrast, the timeless and archetypal worlds of folktale and myth, with their vocabulary of ‘wood and stone, blood and iron and earth, fire and bread’ (Tolkien 1966: 10), may be an open enough meeting ground for me to offer meaningful counsel. The salient point here is that surely I must express my own values and beliefs, won through experience, in my storytelling. To do otherwise would be to be a blank slate, not a partner in dialogue. Yet, in this acceptance of the guiding role lies a challenge to the idea of storytelling as dialogue: in both my choice of stories and my manner of telling them, I have a curriculum. I have felt the need at least to clarify this agenda

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to myself. By studying the themes I gravitate towards and the stories I reject, I was able set this out in a prose poem: A Storyteller’s Agenda These things that are inside you – Your anger, your uncontainable longings, your lostness, and your newness to yourself – They are heavy and good and necessary. The world would stop turning without them. So cup them carefully in your hands; Do not sell them, Or spill them on the ground for the world to spin twisted fables from. We face terrible things and awesome challenges. You may have a poor inheritance. So resourcefulness is everything; Feel it resonate in others here present. Keep your eyes and ears open and your instinct tuned, See the human in everything. And be persistent! Don’t aim to please but to endure; Don’t consume but generate… It is these things that will enable us to prevent – or transform – the deluge. Arrogance is a hindrance, Prejudice is a burden. People are complex systems but every cause has an effect. What you give will come back to you, What you take will be taken in double measure. No matter what surrounds you, even in the closing moments of your tragedies, you always have these choices. But first rise above that ‘you’, that ‘choice’, Float high above them and view the whole landscape. See its lofty vantage points and its sullen swamps, Its mires and its traps set by the powerful. But others have trod this country before and left signs. The things that are inside you are good and true – Even the unspeakable things – Here in this moment we will cup them in our hands together. After that it is up to you.

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Guiding While in Dialogue It then becomes necessary to articulate the relationship between being a vulnerable guide to experience, and a storyteller in dialogue with young people. The tension between leading and following is one to which that all arts practitioners need to be alive. Dorothy Heathcote, whose groundbreaking drama practice with young people was based within a fictional storyworld created by herself, was keenly aware of the responsibility that attended the decision to work in this way. Gavin Bolton, in his foreword to a collection of Heathcote’s writings (O’Neill 2015), noted that: She was sometimes regarded as a manipulator, interfering with the children’s own creativity as she initiated the fictional world of the drama in role, supported and affirmed the students’ contributions and profoundly altered the classroom relationship. However, Heathcote’s ability to launch the work in the essential ‘now’ time of drama was impressive, as was the active response of the students as they joined in, opposed or transformed what was happening. (2)

Predetermining young people’s creative outputs is one risk to working with story, but it is another aspect of it which I wish to discuss here, namely the risk of inadvertently leading listeners into difficult territory. The ethical stance here is complex and, once more, dialogic, held in magnetic balance between two poles, with varying degrees of success. On the one hand, I am entering into open-ended dialogue with my adolescent listeners, making myself available to co-create a story with them both in my telling and in other workshop activities. On the other, I am passing on my experience and values, standing as a solid responsible adult, providing counsel. Within the latter role lie both the positive responsibility to offer the listeners something of use and value, and the negative responsibility to lead them into no harm. Herein lies one of the most challenging tensions for any storyteller working with vulnerable and sometimes distressed young people. There is a danger in underplaying the guiding role, becoming too receptive to dialogue. This is particularly the case given the distance discussed above between some groups’ experience of adolescence and my own; I have written in field notes on several occasions that ‘there are elephants in the room which I cannot even see’. Allowing a story to be rewritten in the space between myself and my listeners, without premeditation, can lead into dark and dangerous

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places, as I discovered at Maple House when I told one of my favourite stories, The Twelve Wild Swans: This is a story I know in many forms…A young girl’s brothers are transformed into swans, and only she can save them by sewing them suits of nettles, keeping silence for seven long years while she does so. Even when she is taken as a bride by a prince, and then narrowly escapes death for witchcraft by her mother-in-law the queen, she remains silent and dedicated to her work to the last. To me, the story centres on the endurance and steadfastness of a young woman, who is interested not in pleasing men but in accomplishing what she feels to be her mission in life. Knowing the group fairly well, I felt this was useful territory for them to explore. Perhaps, on another day, had the young people been in a different frame of mind, it would have been. And yet on this particular morning, as I was telling the story, I was horrified to feel it take shape as a tale of original sin, isolation, and hopelessness. The girl seemed like a victim powerless to resist the iron will of her society – just as some of the young people in the room undoubtedly felt about their own lives. The context had retold the myth, in a place of darkness from which I could not readily pull it out, and I had allowed it to happen. (Heinemeyer 2015b: 2–3)

Nicholson (2005) describes a similar experience, in which a light-hearted storymaking workshop developed in a UK setting gave rise to explorations of traumatic conflict and loss in a Sri Lankan group. The learning from such occasions is that, precisely where a story appears to be ‘useful territory’ for a particular group, I need to remain a skilled and yet still responsive guide to it. I must fully explore in advance and remain aware of in performance, all the possible twists and turns it might take, and the layers of meaning it might attract. This is not to say that I should steer away from dark areas, should they require exploration, or even ensure a happy ending. However, my positive responsibility is to keep hold of the wisdom I have gained from this story, rather than let it be wrested from my hands. As Tallon suggests, Levinas’ philosophy of ‘being for the other’ is needed as a corrective to the danger inherent in Buber’s idealising of the encounter in the ‘between’, namely that we avoid a dominant role ‘to such a passive extreme as to be incapable of the ethical responsibility commanded in the face of the other’ (Tallon 2004: 64). Even more importantly, in respect of the negative responsibility to do no harm, I need to be ready to guide the listeners to a place of hope or safety—in Haggarty’s words, to return them home from where the

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story takes them. This requires some perception and understanding of the resonances it may have for them. One demand of the encounter in the ‘between’ is to perceive where one’s own experience has the potential to show listeners one way of charting an emotional trajectory through difficulty, and follow their interest through it. This recalls Bruner’s celebration of a teacher who passed on not just information, but her relationship with this information: ‘She was […] negotiating the world of wonder and possibility […] She was a human event, not a transmission device’ (1986: 126). The example cited in Chapter 2 of a storytelling session themed around rainforest destruction in City School is apposite. The ‘suffering’ I was offering was my own encounter with disillusionment and loss of hope; the counsel was the suggestion that there are always choices as to how to respond to these. In the process, I felt a recuperation of some collective sense of possibility in the room, and a sense of a thickening of our knowledge of each other.

Conclusion: Articulating the ‘Between’ In this chapter, I have argued that the teller/listener axis of the storytelling triangle is a ‘between’ space, which contains the potential to attain the ideal, held up by Buber and Levinas, of I/Thou or face-to-face encounter. The exchange of gifts—a story for the gift of listening—is an apparently simple ‘empathetic dialogue’ in which each party makes herself vulnerable to the other and the surprise of the exchange. However, for a storyteller inhabiting this space with adolescents, coming to it in a spirit of responsible openness is no simple task. There are myriad temptations: to fortify oneself with structures and purposes, to expect gifts in return or to abdicate responsibility for what may occur. Seeking, and often failing, to resist these temptations has brought me closer to an understanding of what adolescents need from a storyteller. These resist easy summary, but an attempt at doing so is worthwhile. Dialogic storytelling entails setting out, as far as possible, without an inflexible purpose or desired endpoint in mind. To serve the needs of young people, whether these are expressed overtly, covertly or unconsciously, storytellers may need to avoid aspiring either to enchant or to empower, but to remain alive to both of these potentials of storytelling. In the subtle process of contracting to tell stories to adolescent listeners, deceptive layers of authority based on appeals to tradition may create suspicion rather than confidence, and real dialogue is rather begun by

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sharing and modelling the craft of storytelling as authentically and generously as possible. Each of us may have a hidden curriculum of values and experience we repeatedly seek to share with adolescent listeners through our choice of stories, and clarifying this for ourselves may lead us to more honest dialogue. Finally—particularly in view of the gap between our own experiences and understandings and those of the young people with whom we work—there is a difficult balance between guiding young people through sometimes risky territory, and meeting them in openended dialogue through story. The aspects of storytelling practice discussed in this chapter foreground the encounter and dialogue between storytellers/facilitators and young people. Chapter 8 turns to the role—or rather, overlapping roles—of story itself in creating and shaping this triangle of ‘between’ space in which we meet. In so doing, its focus shifts to a large extent away from a storyteller’s intentions, to the dialogue between the voices of the young people themselves, and the creative outputs they generate.

References Baumeister, R., & Leary, M. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497–529. Benjamin, W. (1973). The storyteller: Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 83–109). London: Collins. Benjamin, W. (1998). Understanding Brecht (2nd ed.). London: Verso. Boyd, D. (2014). It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou (2nd ed., R. G. Smith, Trans.). London: Bloomsbury Revelations. Chandler, M., Lalonde, C., Sokol, B., & Hallett, D. (2003). Personal persistence, identity development, and suicide: A study of native and non-native American adolescents. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development (Serial No. 273) 68:2. Wiley. Coleman, J., & Hendry, L. (1990). The nature of adolescence. London: Routledge. Collins, K. (2015). Don’t talk with strangers: Engaging student artists in dialogic artmaking. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 20(1), 117–224.

168  C. HEINEMEYER Conquergood, D. (1985). Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance. Text and Performance Quarterly, 5(2), 1–13. Conquergood, D. (2002). Performance studies: Interventions and radical research. TDR: The Drama Review, 46(2), 145–156. Devon, N. (2018). A beginner’s guide to being mental: An A–Z. London: Bluebird Books. Elkind, D. (1967). Egocentrism in adolescence. Child Development, 38, 1025–1034. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). The transformative power of performance: A new aesthetics (S. I. Jain, Trans.). London: Routledge. Frank, A. W. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness and ethics. London: University of Chicago Press. Gersie, A. (1997). Reflections on therapeutic storymaking: The use of stories in groups. London and Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Haggarty, B. (2011). Assessment criteria for performance storytelling. www.crickcrackclub.com. Accessed March 2020. Haggarty, B. (2014, July). The ladder to the Moon: The progression of stories and narrative sequencing in performance. http://www.crickcrackclub.com/ MAIN/LADDER.PDF. Accessed March 2020. Healthline. (2015). The best eating disorder blogs of 2015. http://www.healthline. com/health-slideshow/best-eating-disorders-blogs. Accessed March 2020. Heinemeyer, C. (2014, March 11). A meta-narrative of a storytelling workshop with adolescent young people. At Narrative and Adolescence. York Theatre Royal. Heinemeyer, C. (2015a). The eloquence of non-engagement. Storytelling with Adolescents—Research through practice. http://storytellingwithadolescents. blogspot.com/2015/07/the-eloquence-of-non-engagement.html. Heinemeyer, C. (2015b, May 13). Neither potion nor plaything, but a provocation: teenagers’ engagement with myth. Myth in the Social Sciences Symposium. University of York. Heinemeyer, C., & Durham, S. (2017). Is narrative an endangered species in schools? Secondary pupils’ understanding of “storyknowing”. Research in Education, 99(1), 31–55. Henderson, S., Holland, J., McGrellis, S., Sharpe, S., & Thomson, R. (2007). Inventing adulthoods: A biographical approach to youth transitions. London: Sage. Higgins, L. (2012). Community music—In theory and in practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirby, M. (1972). On acting and not-acting, The Drama Review (TDR) 16(1), 3–15. Lehmann, H. (2006). Postdramatic theatre (K. Juers-Munby, Trans.). London: Routledge.

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Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Maguire, T. (2015). Storytelling on the contemporary stage. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Marjoribanks, D., & Darnell Bradley, A. (2017). You’re not alone: The quality of the UK’s social relationships. Relate. https://www.relate.org.uk/sites/default/ files/the_way_we_are_now_-_youre_not_alone.pdf. Accessed March 2020. Mauss, M. (2002). The gift (W. D. Halls, Trans.). London: Routledge Classics. McAdams, D. P. (1993). The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York: The Guilford Press. Mead, G. (2011). Coming home to story: Storytelling beyond happily ever after. Bristol: Vala Publishing. Millman, L. (1977). Our like will not be here again: Notes from the west of Ireland. Saint Paul, MN: Ruminator Books. Nanson, A. (2005). Storytelling and ecology: Reconnecting people and nature through oral narrative (Papyrus series 2:1). Pontypridd: Society for Storytelling/University of Glamorgan Press. Nicholson, H. (2005). Applied drama: The gift of theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Neill, C. (2015). Dorothy heathcote on education and drama: Essential writings. Abingdon: Routledge. Plante, L. G. (2010). Bleeding to ease the pain: Cutting, self-injury and the adolescent search for self (2nd ed.). Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. Reason, M., & Lindelof, A. M. (2016). Experiencing liveness in contemporary performance: Interdisciplinary perspectives. London: Routledge. Sawyer, R. (1962). The way of the storyteller (2nd ed.). New York: Penguin Books. Schoen, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books. Sobol, J. S. (1999). The storytellers’ journey: An American revival. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Stern, J. (2013). Surprise in schools: Martin Buber and dialogic schooling. FORUM, 55(1), 45–57. Stern, J. (2015). Children’s voice or children’s voices? How educational research can be at the heart of schooling. FORUM, 57 (1), 75–90. Tallon, A. (2004). Affection and the transcendental dialogical personalism of Buber and Levinas. In P. Atterton, M. Calarco, & M. Friedman (Ed.), Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and difference (pp. 49–64). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1966). On fairy stories. In The Tolkien reader. New York: Ballantine Books.

170  C. HEINEMEYER Vaucelle, C., & Davenport, G. (2004, September). An Open-ended tool to compose movies for cross-cultural digital storytelling: Textable movie. At Digital Culture and Heritage Conference. Berlin. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.169.4626&rep=rep1&type=pdf. Accessed March 2020. Walser, D., & Etchells, T. (2012). What is the audience’s role in performance?: A conversation with Tim Etchells of forced entertainment. http://www.forcedentertainment.com/notebook-entry/what-is-the-audiences-role-in-a-performance/. Accessed March 2020. White, G. (2015). Applied theatre: Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury. Wild, J. (1969). Introduction. In A. Lingis (Trans.), Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority, by E. Levinas (pp. 11–20) Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Wilson, M. (1997). Performance and practice: Oral narrative traditions among teenagers in Britain and Ireland. Aldershot: Ashgate. Wilson, M. (2006). Storytelling and theatre: Contemporary storytellers and their art. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

CHAPTER 8

Defining the Territory of Story: With a Special Focus on Young People’s Mental Health

Image 8.1  The territory of story

Imagine a story begins like this: There was once a girl, who left her home one morning and headed into the forest behind it.

Where are we? What can we see in our mind’s eye, and what do we deduce from it? For a start, there was once the girl—she’s in that other world of the story, untouchable and not available for questioning. It is up to us to surmise © The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6_8

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what we can. So: she was a girl, a specific girl. She seems to be alone— was she alone in the world? She left, one morning—we must assume that a moment came when she decided to leave. She left her home—a familiar place and a fixed point in that world, but was it a safe place, or a restrictive place? A timeless cottage or a suburban semi? She headed—this is certainly no casual journey—into the forest. She must have had a reason to go, but was she moving away from something or towards something, in fear, determination or hope? Into the forest suggests that the forest is a world unto itself; it cannot simply be wandered in and out of, it is a stark alternative, one must head into it. Indeed, it is behind her home, out of sight of the well-lit, everyday social environment (Image 8.1). And for heaven’s sake, it is a forest. But what kind of forest? A sharp-smelling pine forest with little undergrowth and trees planted in straight rows? A leafy beechwood carpeted in bluebells? A rich, moist, abandoned wilderness of fallen trunks, moss and creepers? We are already wondering what she will find there. Does it contain dangers, adventures or the hope of redemption? Or all three?

Metaphors of Territory and Storyknowing This chapter deals with the role of story itself in the triangle which also comprises storyteller/facilitator and adolescent participants/listeners. The story can be imagined as the third element which pulls the bilateral, I/Thou or face-to-face encounter out to create a more complex territory for exploration. Because this territory will often be seen as a parallel or metaphor for everyday life, this aspect of storytelling also opens the door to different ways of understanding the role of story in mental health-linked work with young people. Story is very widely used in therapeutic work because of its ability to enable an oblique look at subjects and experiences which are too difficult or painful to discuss directly. Emily Dickinson, a poet for whom everyday life was a raw and often overwhelming experience, expressed this powerfully: Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased

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With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —(Dickinson 1998)

Dickinson’s words draw attention both to the human need for indirectness and metaphor, and for enough time to digest new understandings (‘must dazzle gradually’)—concerns vital to the concept of storyknowing as discussed in Chapter 2. However, exactly because metaphors exert such a power over us, it is worth taking some critical distance from Dickinson’s use of the word ‘truth’. If visionaries exist, Dickinson was one of them, and as such may well have experienced insights not accessible to most people. For her, the truth existed as a revelatory intrusion into her consciousness; perhaps there was indeed occasionally a direct line of communication between her, a helpless mortal, and someone or something which knew the truth and disclosed it to her in flashes. We need to be cautious around such metaphors when applying them to the interaction between, say, storyteller and listener. As storytellers, teachers and facilitators, we very rarely have access to clear flashes of truth about the issues our listeners may be facing and the understandings towards which we can help them. We are half-blind, stumbling about just like them, albeit perhaps with more life experience. Thus we cannot in any simple way offer stories as ‘metaphors for the truth’. We are talking once more about the messier and more unfathomable practice of empathetic dialogue, and the story is the territory for this meeting. In fact, as this chapter will explore, there are several competing senses in which story can be territory. A reading of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life suggests that to understand story, we need to appreciate the ways these contradictory senses interlock. In the first place, ‘every story is a travel story – a spatial practice’ (1984: 115) that takes us on a journey as we listen to it. Other words de Certeau uses for this are a tour or an itinerary. Thus whether on a literal or a metaphorical level, stories ‘organize walks’ (116), in the above example from home into the forest. Secondly, de Certeau observes that a story can also ‘found’ a territory as a ‘theatre of actions’ (123). It does this by marking out the frontiers of the territory, an act it accomplishes (paradoxically) by transgressing these frontiers. We know that the real ‘theatre of actions’ in our story will be the forest itself, because the girl starts outside it and has to enter it so that things can begin. Yet this is linked to the third sense

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of territory as well, that of the story as frontier land. Interesting things happen at the margins between two kinds of land. The frontier land of the forest’s edge, when crossed by the girl, becomes ‘an ambiguous third element […] a “space between”’ (127), for which Certeau also uses the German term ‘Zwischenraum’. These territorial metaphors evoke aspects of narrative knowledge and sense-making. The journey suggests intentionality and causality, partiality and subjectivity: we are not interested in everything that happens in the landscape, just in the experience and perspective of one person on one particular journey, and what happens as a result of their actions. The ‘theatre of actions’ suggests a world which is complete unto itself and insulated from other places, enabling us to make sense of what happens there. The frontier zones suggest ambiguities, which are fertile ground for interpretation. This chapter will explore how on different occasions storytelling practice can rest on these three different metaphors: A.  The story as a walk through an unknown territory of human experience; B. The story as a founder of a territory—a theatre of actions or ‘safe space’; and C.  The story as a half-completed map of frontier territory or No-Man’s-Land. Each of these has affinities to different chronotopes of storytelling, and activates storyknowing in different ways. Each also suggests a different relationship between three worlds: the storyworld, the workshop space and the ‘real’ world beyond it. As H. Porter Abbott (2008) points out, that in any narrative there are at least two worlds in play, the storyworld and the world of narration where the storyteller and listeners are gathered. Always present too is a third world, the wider world outside the workshop or storytelling encounter. The spatial metaphors above suggest different assumptions about how participants bring their experiences, attitudes, hopes, fears, affiliations and enmities from the outside world into the workshop space, and how they see them reflected in the storyworld. This chapter will also evidence how the exploration of the territory of a story can be heightened by the often sparse and timeless style of

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narration associated with the repertoire of folktale and mythology, as illustrated by the story opening above, lacking in either adjectives or detail. I have found that dialogic storytelling with young people, responsive to their interests and needs, requires fine-tuned awareness of how the story is defining the territory, and of when, too, it is time to switch metaphor.

Story as Walk Through Unknown Territory Perhaps the simplest model of storytelling practice is that, when we tell a story to adolescent listeners, we share our life experience (both first- and second-hand) with them, which may help them understand and navigate a world they are coming to recognise as complex and perplexing. We are saying to our listeners: I went this way, and this is what I found there. This is the aspect of the storyteller’s role most celebrated by Benjamin (1973): the gatherer of experience, who shares it as counsel for the listeners, by taking them on an imaginative walk through it. There is a natural affinity between this metaphor and the everyday chronotope, in that anyone who has accumulated life experience has something worth passing on to young people. De Certeau and Jerome Bruner both argue that story precedes abstract though in human development and learning. Both subscribe to a cumulative rather than a totalising view of knowledge (as discussed in Chapter 2 in relation to storyknowing). Terry Pratchett, famously, puts the point more pithily: The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’) […] In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee. (2002)

For example, Bruner contends, scientists often rely on stories or metaphors in the early stages of developing a theory to explain natural phenomena, then deny or forget this at a later stage: ‘their salvation is to wash the stories away when causes can be substituted for them’ (1986: 13). De Certeau (1984) concentrates his analysis on maps. The early maps of many cultures made no attempt at completeness, but rather showed the landmarks of significant routes or itineraries, or

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documented the events of past journeys, either for the purpose of posterity or to guide future travellers. He cites the Aztec map of the exodus of the Totomihuacas people fleeing Spanish colonists, but one could also consider orally transmitted ‘maps’ such as the Australian Aboriginal songlines (Chatwin 1987), or any sketch made on the back of an envelope by one traveller for another. As more and more journeys were made, and ambition to know the world increased, the gaps were gradually filled in. Maps typically evolved from these partial histories into ‘a totalising stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form the tableau of a “state” of geographical knowledge’ (De Certeau 1984: 121). As with science, the traces of the experiential knowledge which had built up these maps were eliminated. Both de Certeau and Bruner make the case for stories to remain on stage in all their complexity and multiplicity, challenging oversimplifications and rehumanising abstractions. Like cultures, individual children start developing their knowledge of the world through perception, experience and narrative, and usually only develop the capacity for abstract or ‘formal operational’ thought during adolescence (Coleman and Hendry 1990). This can be seen in the focus group of City School pupils cited in Chapter 2, in that the 12–­ 14-year-old pupils grasp for concrete examples to reach towards abstract points. According to a narrativist, cumulative view of knowledge, abstract thinking starts to look less like a qualitatively different way of thinking, than like a gradual filling in of the ‘map’. Lev Vygotsky (1990), discussing how young people develop creativity, emphasises the growing vocabulary of experiences that a young person of this age has assimilated, and the expanding number of ‘combinatorial possibilities’ that then become possible to them. We could take from his view that young people cumulatively interpolate the gaps in their experience, and thus formulate their apparently ‘abstract’ understandings of life, by making more and more unique, irreducible crossings of the intricate territory of human existence. In that case, the role of a storyteller with young people becomes straightforward: to guide them along routes they have not yet traversed. Vygotsky (1990) proposes that the narrations and lessons of others are as valuable as first-hand experience in building this repertoire of crossings, providing both additional images and new ways of combining them. In other words, the more stories, the better.

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A Corpus of Stories Within this understanding, whereby stories work in flocks to build understanding, one of the most important roles of a story is to generate more stories. Whether in a workshop or a conversational situation, telling a story is often enough to spark off others present to tell of their own experiences in the same territory. Mike Wilson (1997) found that a ‘primer’ story from him was enough to trigger off a fertile process of story-sharing in a secondary school classroom. Such an exchange may support the process Boal calls ‘ascesis’—‘the movement from the phenomenon to the law which regulates phenomena of that kind’ (Jackson in Boal 1995: xx). However, it may be truer to say that, rather than adducing laws governing life, young people listening to and telling stories are making various forays across an unknown landscape, and thus gradually building up a three-dimensional picture of its complexity, diversity and contours. We can express this exploration visually as follows (Fig. 8.1). The ‘primer’ story from the storyteller (represented by the thick black arrow coming down into the valley from the uplands) simply needs to open up an area of human experience for further exploration; then we

Fig. 8.1  Story as a walk through unknown territory

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might simply place our trust in the storytelling exchange to take its own turns and run its own course. Other stories (the slim arrows) and conversation will follow naturally, and gradually the landscape will be revealed in all its complexity. The primer story is like the first crossing across new snow, giving permission and inspiration to others to contribute their own stories, modelling the storyteller’s role and a certain tone of significance. Almost any interesting story can fulfil this function; this metaphor has no interest in genre boundaries. Emma Parfitt (2014, 2019), in her storytelling research with young adolescents in schools, found this to result in ‘sharing conversations’ on personal issues which would not have occurred without the stimulus of the story and the free-flowing discourse it generated: Creating a space where the students could talk off-topic resulted in insights into young people’s lives, and random conversations led to deeper conversations surrounding suicide, loss and love. (2019: 50)

For example, in my work with the ‘intervention classes’ at City School, some individuals emerged as confident storytellers with their own repertoires, which complemented my own. I told a class of 13–14-year-olds stories of the Second World War from perspectives other than the British: the rescue of the Jews by many of the Christian population of occupied Denmark, and my mother-in-law’s disrupted and often frightening early childhood in Nazi Germany. When I mentioned the billeting of Allied soldiers in her house in 1944, just after their bombing campaign on her region, Louis looked avid. He claimed the floor as soon as I was finished to tell of his great-grandfather’s wartime experiences doing dangerous work, manufacturing the bombs for that very year’s bombing campaign. The story had been passed down to his grandfather and in turn to him. As well as sharing his very vivid family experience he was, I felt, making a subtle point about not embracing the perspective of the ‘other side’ too fully—although he later contributed a cartoon of a German village being bombed by an English fighter plane. His story triggered off other pupils’ stories of their great-grandparents’ wartime hardships and endeavour, until the room thrummed with their atmosphere. We had rapidly created a set of intersecting stories across a complex environment, and there was no need to extract general principles from them (such as that conflicts are many-sided), or indeed to tussle out the differences between our own perspectives. These awarenesses were

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present among us and caused no discomfort. Indeed, in the resonances between individual stories, I felt an excess of meaning that such abstractions could not have contained. The teacher and I came to describe this cross-fertilisation by the pupils as a process of ‘stitching knowledge to experience’, corroborating a view of storyknowing as encompassing the complexity, multiplicity and irreducibility of human experience. By making their own experiences each other’s, they created a unique shared map. The teaching function of a body of stories is surely one of the most time-honoured understandings of the purpose of storytelling, existing in all religions. None of Jesus’ parables was revelatory on its own; it is the woven textile of all of them that is presented in the Gospels as a guide to life. Similarly, Shonaleigh Cumbers, the main tradition-bearer for the Jewish drut’syla storytelling tradition, tells cycles of orally transmitted stories which are intertwined with each other in a complex lattice structure or ‘entrelacement’ (Heywood 2018). The specific relevance of such bodies of stories to young people on the cusp of adulthood is reflected in the ‘curriculum’ of most mythological cycles, which focus disproportionately on young men or women heading out to face challenges and gain maturity. The Welsh Mabinogion cycle of legends may derive its name from ‘mab’, meaning a young man, and even de Certeau’s language of journeys, liminality and transgressing boundaries strikingly evokes our culture’s discourses around adolescence. Jack Zipes (2012) proposes that exposure to many stories, in the long term, has a ‘civilising effect’ on young people (albeit one they have the agency to reject). Italo Calvino passionately defends the value of the corpus of Italian folktales he has gathered, although they are individually fantastical and apparently unrelated, in guiding young people through the difficult process of emotional maturation. He makes no claims of wisdom for any one story, but rather that: Taken all together, […] they offer, in their oft-repeated and constantly varying examinations of human vicissitudes, a general explanation of life […] especially for that stage in life where destiny is formed, i.e. youth, beginning with birth, which itself often foreshadows the future; then the departure from home, and finally, through the trials of growing up, the attainment of maturity and the proof of one’s humanity. (Calvino 1956: xviii)

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Developing a Discourse In one story the queen may forgive the peasant; in another apparently similar one she may throw him into prison. What forms of understanding, then, are developed by exposure to many overlapping, contradictory and idiosyncratic stories? Among other things, it brings about an exploration of the nexus of intentionality, causality and responsibility. Calvino goes on to discuss how his corpus of stories documents the inequality that riddles society, and to confirm that individual lives are ‘predetermined by complex forces’, which can appear arbitrary. Yet rather than teaching a fatalistic acceptance, This complexity pervades one’s entire existence and forces one to struggle to free oneself, to determine one’s own fate; at the same time we can liberate ourselves only if we liberate other people. (1956: xviii)

Calvino seems to be suggesting that stories generate an understanding of our freedom and responsibilities within social, biological and political constraints. And of course, to be able to exercise their freedom meaningfully and shoulder these responsibilities, young people first need to make sense of the constraints; they need to develop a flexible sense of how the world operates. Bruner (1986) finds evidence that young people build their understanding of the many possible chains of causality by first grasping the conflicts between intentions and reality in many narratives. A similar point is made by Patrick Ryan (2008), who argues that stories ‘provide our catalogue of building blocks for metaphor, simile and so in our thinking (narrative and otherwise)’ (2008: 5). On occasion the route a story describes can project a group well beyond their own life knowledge into the heart of a different territory of human experience, onto higher ground from which their own stories can set out. It becomes possible to explore chains of causality and forms of agency that might not have been accessible within a workshop drawing only on their own personal stories. Some ways of opening up such an exploration are given in Appendix 2 (Story Games for Dialogue). While any story might in theory fulfil this role of breaking new ground for exploration, there may be a particular value (particularly for young people) to the relentless focus of myth and folktale on the dramatic outward consequences of inward decisions. As discussed in the previous chapter, adolescents often subscribe to an isolating ‘personal fable’, believing their own emotions to be incommunicable with others. Indeed,

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in recent decades many psychologists have discerned a shift in young people from outwardly rebellious behaviour towards internalisation of their frustrations or distress, resulting in high levels of self-harm, eating disorders and anxiety (Plante 2010; Press Association 2015, 2016). In this context, the dramatic plot-led nature of traditional stories can be very helpful. There is a commensurability between the epic concerns of such stories and some of the big worries which may dominate young people’s minds at times. Parfitt too found issues including ‘breaking the law, terrorism, parental discipline, suicide and taking risks’ to arise naturally among groups of young people following storytelling (2019: 24). The group of young women at the mental health unit Maple House, discussed in Chapter 4, were fascinated and delighted by Angela Carter’s earthy folktales (1991, 1993), with their exposition of the multitude of ways that sexual politics can be played out, if carried to the extremes of conflict. As the girls’ teacher observed in a reflective dialogue with me: Your stories are often on an epic scale, a bit like their lives, where life, survival and death are genuinely pressing concerns. They recognise themselves. And then as well, stories name things, in a symbolic language. They allow you to name the taboos and the extreme emotions, if only symbolically. (17/12/2015)

The teacher’s observation gives as hint as to how, as Alida Gersie claims, the ‘sequential clarity’ of cause and effect in folk stories and myths ‘may facilitate the development of the ability to assume ever greater responsibility for one’s deeds’ (1997: 10). That is, by bringing incommunicable emotions and impulses up into the light and playing out their consequences, they may help young people gradually to join in dialogue with others and develop their own ‘discourse’, in the sense developed by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981). For Bakhtin such a discourse was a hallmark of maturity and citizenship: ‘An independent, responsible and active discourse is the fundamental indicator of an ethical, legal and political human being’ (1981: 349–350). The writings of the librarians, teachers and storytellers of the everyday chronotope, such as Betty Rosen (1988, 1993) and Ruth Sawyer (1962), are characterised by a trust in the story as journey. Rosen would tell her secondary pupils a story she had carefully prepared for them, in confidence that it would open up a territory for productive exploration simply by striking out into it:

182  C. HEINEMEYER What immediately follows I don’t need to plan for: the talk that emerges is usually spontaneous. It may meander on to the end of the lesson, or it may seem right to have the pupils move into groups to talk about some aspect of the story suggested by their first reactions to it. (1988: 61)

Such moments of commonsensical confidence in the storytelling exchange are frequent in my practice with young people. Yet on other occasions I have to take special responsibility for where such journeys may lead. I become conscious of a more rarefied or fragile atmosphere, and of a different metaphor in operation: the story as a ‘theatre of actions’, or even a ‘safe space’.

Story as Founder of a Theatre of Actions De Certeau’s suggestion that story ‘founds’ a territory by creating a boundary around a ‘theatre of actions’ (1984: 123) resonates with the use of story in therapeutic settings. Firstly, writers we might locate within the magical chronotope often emphasise story’s role as a protective metaphor (Gersie 1997). It is well attested that people often find it easier to approach the truth or explore alternative interpretations of a situation, through an oblique lens (Crawford et al. 2004). Play and story therapist Margot Sunderland urges fellow therapists working with children and young people to ‘stay within the metaphor’ of the story (2000: 18), rather than asking them to make overt links to their own difficulties. Secondly, a workshop itself may constitute what D. W. Winnicott (1971) defined as a ‘transitional space’ of play, or what Augusto Boal (1995) called a ‘transitive space’, in which the rules of everyday life do not apply and individuals can safely experiment with different ways of being. Within applied theatre the term most often used is ‘safe space’ (Hunter 2008). Such safe territories need not involve the use of a traditional or fictional story. Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (2000) and Rainbow of Desire (1995) techniques, like playback theatre (Fox and Dauber 1999; Rowe 2007) and much dramatherapy practice (Emunah 1994), use participants’ personal experiences as the raw material for exploration. What makes the space ‘safe’, and limits their vulnerability in sharing these stories, are the rules and practices of the setting. These may vary from one model of practice to another, but often involve ‘framing’ rituals (such as gathering in a circle at the beginning and end of a workshop), and

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approaches to building trust within the group, which suggest the sense of carving out a temporary territory from which the outside world is excluded. The imputed relationship to this outside world is that realisations (whether therapeutic, political or other) will be made about that world or one’s own role in it, which will be brought to bear when one leaves the workshop. Yet a storytelling workshop based not on true personal material but on fictional material, such as myth, may comprise a doubly safe space by providing two layers of insulation from everyday life: its content and its practices. In fact, the implication of ‘staying within’ the story is that the boundaries of the storyworld and the boundaries of the workshop may coincide. In the International Centre for Arts and Narrative workshops I co-delivered to community groups in 2014–2015 we explicitly made such an invitation to participants, to ‘spend a day within a storyworld’, exploring and retelling a traditional story: ‘Crucially, the workshops never asked participants to link the story to their own experience or to use it as an opportunity to tell their own autobiography’ (Reason and Heinemeyer 2016: 568)—although they were of course free to do so if they chose. In my workshops at Maple House I made the same undertaking implicitly, by re-introducing myself each week to young people as a postgraduate student and storyteller come to lead storytelling and arts activities, not a therapist with knowledge of their case histories or recovery processes. The visual representation of this ‘double-bubble’ way of working might be (Fig. 8.2). To work within such a double bubble is to seek to open up what J. R. R. Tolkien, in his essay on fairy stories (1966), calls a ‘secondary world’ or ‘sub-creation’, where the imagination is at least partially untethered from everyday constraints and anxieties about self-exposure. It resonates with the values of the magical chronotope, and the high value it places on the liminal and enstatic state of the storylistener. Obliquity and Indeterminacy As in therapeutic practice, participants may take something away with them from a storytelling workshop or encounter, back into the outside world—as I will myself. This ‘something’, represented by the dotted arrow exiting the double bubble, might be a realisation, an idea, a confidence, a skill and a question. Yet the key question is, what is the nature of this something, and how does a facilitator know what it is?

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Fig. 8.2  Story as founder of a ‘theatre of actions’ or ‘safe space’

This question hints at an important difference between a therapeutic understanding of obliquity, and an artistic storytelling practice. A therapeutic model of practice like Sunderland’s staying within the metaphor implies that the therapist may know, or at least discover, what the participants need to take away from the process of exploring the story— a recognition of their anger, say, or a range of strategies for dealing with it. It implies that the storyteller has some privileged access to the truth, in Emily Dickinson’s sense, and can allow the listener an oblique glimpse of it. This may be possible in the specific framework of a ­long-term therapeutic relationship, but I would argue that it is an inappropriate aspiration for the everyday practice of most storytellers, teachers or arts practitioners. In contrast, to undertake to remain within the story, and thus within the zone of narrative, non-propositional thinking, is to accept that I will probably never know what they have taken. As Geoff Mead says of the triangle between storyteller, listener and story, ‘All three are in relationship with each other but the crucial relationship between the audience and the story is beyond the storyteller’s grasp’ (2011: 39–40). In most cases I am only dimly and partially aware of what the story is ‘about’ for the various young people present, or what

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associations it may trigger. In particular, it is not possible to predict how it may intersect with their past and future life experiences and thus influence them over time. As Benjamin reminds us, a story ‘preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time’ (1973: 90). Within this understanding, storytellers must embrace a high level of indeterminacy in their work with young people, no matter how much they would like to help them overcome their specific problems. This may seem a counsel of hopelessness, but paradoxically, it may have ethical and practical benefits. One young woman with whom I worked at Maple House said that working within folktales had provided ‘the confidentiality we need’ (01/06/2015) in a setting where her thoughts and actions were otherwise under close scrutiny. It becomes participants’ own decision whether or not to link the story openly to their own experience. Such a promise, implicit in the structure of a workshop, not to intrude into personal experiences and thoughts may extend the freedom and range of narrative knowing which then becomes accessible to participants. Adolescents and Safe Space—Stories as a Leaky Container Despite these insulating properties, working with adolescents, and particularly with the sensitive and troubled residents of Maple House, has brought to the fore two strong challenges to the feasibility, and desirability, of creating a safe space using story. Regarding its feasibility, the boundaries of a storyworld undoubtedly offer less protection to adolescents than to young children, because they are often aware of its possible relationships to reality; recall Gersie’s anecdote (Chapter 3) of the perceptive young women who immediately saw through her story to the agenda behind it. In a reflective dialogue, the two teachers at Maple House suggested that some young people at that particular point in time were choosing not to engage in my workshops— often staying to hear a story, then rushing out of the room—because While the archetypes of myth and folktale might be an other-worldly common language, of great value in the right ‘transitional space’, they are just too obviously near to autobiography for some of these young people whose lives and emotions are in turmoil. (Heinemeyer 2015a)

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The story, as a theatre of actions, or a container for their perspectives or difficulties, was leaky. The interpersonal intensity of telling and listening, combined with the resonance of the themes of the stories I introduced, may have brought their personal issues nearer rather than further away, and this did not feel safe. I reflected that All of these things call into profound question my belief in the ‘other room’ of the story, that a meeting of minds is possible in that room separate from the conditions and anxieties prevailing in the world next door. (Heinemeyer 2015a)

It is notable that on occasions when I have felt stories to be successful ‘containers’ for the safe exploration of difficult or sensitive material, such as Project Wormwood (Chapter 5) or other collaborations at Maple House, young people have engaged with them not naively, but in a knowing attempt to facilitate their response to issues in the outside world. They actively chose to believe in the boundaries we have put up together, and recognised too when it was time to dismantle them. Regarding the desirability of safe space, it is important to broach some of the critiques of this concept. Noisy debates about political correctness have dominated the public discussion, for example, around the issue of ‘no-platforming’ of controversial speakers at universities, but the concept has been interrogated more intelligently by applied theatre and education practitioners honestly concerned to ensure that young people benefit from their practice. The most important objection, from the perspective of storytellers, is that safe space may have what Mary Ann Hunter calls ‘limiting protectionist connotations’ (2008: 7). Robert Boost Rom (1998) acknowledges the origins of important practices to create safe space in psychological understandings of trauma—something of which anyone working in mental health settings must be aware—but both he and Hunter find the term to be uncritically applied in educational and arts contexts, respectively. For Boost Rom, it carries unspoken assumptions that individuals’ isolation can only be breached by an unconditional acceptance which excludes critical dialogue or challenge; he prefers the term ‘agora’ (a public square) which encompasses these vital elements of learning too. Hunter values broader conceptions of safe space which allow for risk-taking and ‘the creative potential of tension’ (2008: 5), and whose boundaries are permeable, so that productive things happening within the theatre space can influence the wider community.

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Whether or not one adopts the terminology of safe space, it emerges from these debates as something which cannot be created unilaterally, and should not be aspired to unreflectingly. Such arguments helped me clarify how I should respond to the Maple House teachers’ observation that inpatients often did not experience my workshops as safe space and were choosing to disengage. I could not fully agree with the teachers’ suggestion that I should simply tell stories to the young people—the element of the workshops that seemed to give them a genuine rest and distraction from their difficulties. I felt that the teachers’ desire to guide me away from problematic areas led them to overemphasise the value of magical engagement in the storyworld, and restrict what the storytelling exchange had the potential to become. I felt too that, while they were right to urge me to establish conditions in which all the young people felt comfortable, I should defend the creative, adventurous projects (such as songwriting and collaborative performances) that a minority had risked entering into with me, and the interactions these had generated with the world outside Maple House. These differences went to the heart of the conflicted meanings of safe space. As Hunter points out, in performance contexts, it can be conceptualised as a structure or set of rules that in fact enables or even ‘invite[s] a greater degree of aesthetic risk’ (2008: 8). In this view, the disinclination of some Maple House residents to participate in storytelling workshops may have arisen from their lack of familiarity with the ‘rules’, and therefore, in such a transient population, I needed to mark out more clearly what these were. For example, I could ensure young people knew they could listen to a story or make crafts in silence if they wished, and then leave without causing offence. I could also centre sessions on more playful and relaxing activities—such as a series of workshops making story quilts, which young people greatly enjoyed. However, I felt that tension, risk, and the potential for dynamic engagement, could and should not be excluded. As Gersie puts it, ‘the evocation of a tolerable level of anxiety is one of the vehicles that carries a live and compelling storytelling’ (1997: 9). The face-to-face or I/Thou encounter carries small but inherent risks to both parties. Unlike Maple House’s mental health professionals, my role as a storyteller was surely to deal with the young people as if they were able to engage in dialogue and creative interpretation within a story, to give them many chances to accept this challenge. The ways that individuals and small groups availed of these opportunities over the coming months gave both me and the

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teachers a tentative confidence in the nature of the theatre of actions we created. In a later reflective dialogue, one of the teachers revisited the subject of the tensions and anxieties often circulating during storytelling workshops: The social contract that they are invited into set a high bar – but it is in appropriate interaction, in that it is spoken not written, keeps them in the realm of language – and if they lose that, they will lose their identity – even if week after week some of them cannot enter it. (17/12/2015)

In considering this invitation to language, dialogue and its challenges, this teacher and I reflected back on the group of young women whose raucous ‘peasant version’ of Sleeping Beauty is given in Chapter 4. The boundaries of the workshop were not delimited by any one story, but by a nervous, giggling sharing of audacious material, and a sense that our sharing of it was no more risky than that of the women who first told these stories in their own cultures. The girls themselves chose which stories to read out. In response to one particularly ‘deviant’ Inuit story of a same-sex relationship between an old women and her lonely ­daughter-in-law (involving the use of a sealbone as a dildo!), one young girl rejoiced quite earnestly in the language we were licensed to use in the room, saying: I am really glad that someone took the trouble to write that story down. (02/12/2014)

The space was safe enough for subversion; the stories had made clear their rules that today there would be no penalty for challenging authority. Thus the safe space a storyteller can create with sensitive adolescents may not feel otherworldly, or necessarily be demarcated by a ‘magical’ story, though moments of absorption may be a precious element of it. Rather, the story may help to define the space by acting as an attractor, an ‘interrelation of forces’, as Hunter paraphrases Henri Lefebvre’s definition of space (1991, cited in Hunter 2008: 7). Young people might knowingly choose to enter into this nexus, in full knowledge that it is not a territory hermetically sealed off from the world beyond. At its best, the storytelling workshop space may rather resemble that of Hunter’s hip-hop project (2008), where many young people lingered on the

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margins, the stakes sometimes felt high, and the challenges and opportunities of the outside world were always present; where the potential was not always clear, but the invitation was always warmly repeated to come and help shape it.

Story as No-Man’s-Land The third possibility is to see story not as a route of exploration through real territory, nor as a metaphor for real territory, but a map of contested No-Man’s-Land, Unknown Parts that can never belong to anyone or be definitively known. This recalls de Certeau’s image of stories defining frontiers by crossing them, or poet Antonio Machado’s line that ‘the road is made by walking’ (1912: xxix). Story, in this sense, is a map of border country yet to be made by habitation. It can become what de Certeau calls Spielraum—a liberating play area within a domain otherwise colonised by authority—precisely by ‘mak[ing] room for a void’: In that way, it opens up clearings; it ‘allows’ a certain play within a system of defined places. It ‘authorizes’ the production of an area of free play (Spielraum) on a checkerboard that analyses and classifies identities. It makes places habitable. On these grounds, I call such discourse a “local authority”. (1984: 105–106)

Teenagers, operating within a ‘checkerboard’ of authority and surveillance that is more tangible and comprehensive than that governing most adults, seek out borderlands where they can establish such ‘local authorities’: bits of land under bridges, landings outside arts workshops (Hunter 2008) and social media platforms (Boyd 2014). A story, if offered in a certain way, can serve the same purpose. We might equally call on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s category of ‘smooth space’—glossed by Shari Popen as ungoverned, ‘aesthetic’ and ‘deterritorialized’ (2006: 130) space, which although not liberatory in itself, holds the potential for new alignments and creations. In contrast to our second spatial metaphor of story as a theatre of actions, the story here is not a safe space in which to discover, rehearse or experiment with different approaches to reality, but a gap into which tellers and listeners can jump in order to make reality. This is exactly how Petra Kuppers (2007) describes the project she undertook as a member of a group of mentally unwell and physically disabled women: using local

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legend as an artistic Spielraum to inscribe their own marginalised identities and experiences onto the ‘master narrative’ of a national park. To offer a Spielraum, the story canvas must be partly blank, not carved up by predetermined meanings. It must be, in Roland Barthes’ sense, a ‘writerly’ text, which allows listeners a substantial share in the composition process. Indeed, more than that, it must ‘desire’ them (1975: 6). Joe Winston recognises this in relation to drama work with young people, which for him invariably must begin with a story. Stories and dramas, he says, are dramatically most effective when they are indeterminate and suggestive rather than precise and transparent […] when they contain a ‘creative gap’ for children to engage with, operating as clues rather than as reports. (2004: 25)

Playwright and theatre director Matt Harper-Hardcastle goes further: the crucial role of a story in a theatre devising process with young people is, for him, as a structure to hold the group’s ideas: It is the washing line for all ideas, or which all conversations for all moments of creative expression hang off – without the washing line you just have a pile of stuff on the floor. (Appendix 1)

The question of whether any text, story or artwork offers such a role to listeners is answered differently by Barthes, Umberto Eco, Jacques Ranciere and other authors who have shaped ideas of the ‘open work’ (Eco 2006) and influenced debates around participatory practice. To gloss their answers very briefly, Barthes considers some texts to be distinctly more ‘writerly’ than others, whereas for Ranciere, the intentions and style of the author of a work (poiesis) never determine how it is received and interpreted by its audience (aesthesis). Eco stands somewhere in between these positions. For him, while the sense made by an audience member of any work of art ‘is always modified by his particular and individual perspective’ (2006: 22), those works whose structures are ‘deliberately based on suggestiveness’ (28) make a more irresistible invitation to the audience. My own practice with adolescents reinforces Eco’s perspective, in that I have found that structure does matter to some extent, and that epic stories such as myth and folktale may make such an invitation

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more clearly than many other genres.1 When, for example, I started a workshop at City School by retelling the story of Barbara Smucker’s Underground to Canada (1977), a psychologically realistic historical novel about slavery, the young people did little, at least out loud, to interpret the story from their own perspectives; they listened avidly, then moved on to different stories of which it reminded them. The story was an invaluable ‘walk’ to bring them on, but never a Spielraum. Everyone’s actions made sense and were fully explained from the inside; there was simply no need or room for further amplitude. In contrast, epic stories, if sparsely told, belong to no-one and are full of gaps; they are just enough of a structure to hold open the crack for listeners to jump into. The ‘girl’ who headed into the ‘forest’ behind her ‘home’, at the head of this chapter, is making a fulsome invitation. Benjamin expressed precisely and powerfully the value of this initial sparseness: There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience. (1973: 91).

Telling a story sparsely is one form of assurance that a storyteller can give a group of young people that she has no agenda as to what ‘should’ occur in the No-Man’s-Land of the story—that she is listening as much as telling. The graphic representation of this way of conceiving the territory of story as No-Man’s-Land or Spielraum might be (Fig. 8.3). The teller and listeners can be seen drawing on the uncharted sections of the map, the story-arrows representing how they fill in its gaps with their own possible realities. This is the territorial metaphor which can be particularly powerful, yet challenging, in guiding practice with adolescents. It is in relation to this metaphor that I wish to argue most strongly for the especial value of epic narrative, by citing as evidence some of the ways young people have ‘written on’ it during these sojourns in No-Man’s-Land. I will then chart one journey I have observed many young people to make there, taking the epic apart and then carefully restoring its intactness. Firstly, however, I must address the case against epic stories.

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Fig. 8.3  Story as No-Man’s-Land

The Problems with Epic Mikhail Bakhtin makes a heavy charge against epic, namely that its world is ‘inaccessible to personal experience and does not permit an individual personal point of view or explanation’ (Morris 1994: 183). He finds it an ‘utterly finished thing’ (Bakhtin 1981: 17) offering no further role to the audience. Epics put heroes on pedestals, and appear to inhibit us from reaching alternative conclusions about any character’s actions or motivations. We might hear in his words an echo of contemporary concerns around the overweening power of archetypes of ‘hero’, ‘princess’ and ‘crone’ in shaping and limiting gendered identities, for example. Bakhtin’s view is extreme, an ‘epic view of epic’ (Vice 1997: 82), and as Vice points out, ‘His concern is with genre; with “epicness”, not particular epics, and this makes it difficult to argue against his position’

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(1997: 79). His essay ‘Epic and Novel’ also reflects its time of writing in 1941, when the literary world was re-evaluating its view of narrative as a whole. Modernist authors, later to be followed by postmodernist authors, were using their works to challenge the stranglehold of conventional narrative structures and affirm the chaos and complexity of inner lives (Meretoja 2014). Nonetheless, Bakhtin’s s position challenges my choice to centre much of my practice on myth and folktale. Any story, after all, can be told sparsely, or in a way designed to invite interpretation. If I do not subscribe to a belief in the healing wisdom of archetypes, why not choose stories of more direct relevance to young people’s lives? Indeed, why should storytellers cultivate their own repertoire of stories at all? Older children and teenagers, as Wilson (2004) points out, have their own repertoire; perhaps the storyteller’s role should be confined to helping them become ‘storytellers of their own lives’ (2004: 20). His words echo those of the community arts movement’s 1984 Campaign for Cultural Democracy, in what could be read as a direct critique of the less overtly political storytelling movement that was flourishing simultaneously: the demand that people should be ‘taking part in the telling of the story, not having a story told to them’ (Dickson 1995: 24). Owen Kelly’s (1984) argument in the same period was that community artists should break down the ‘citadels’ of culture in favour of new, bottom-up cultural forms. As discussed in Chapter 3, such cultural democracy, and the opportunity it offers for communities to tell their own stories, is a key inspiration for the dynamic chronotope of storytelling. Accordingly, the epic oral heritage may seem a strange starting point for developing a dialogic and culturally democratic performance practice. Not surprisingly, in my collaborations with theatre practitioners, inheritors of the community arts movement and often instinctive sympathisers with the dynamic chronotope, they have sometimes expressed an anxiety that the perceived high status of a myth might over-determine participants’ responses, or drown out their voices. Such concerns are partially justified and genuinely challenging, given the ever-present pull of the magical chronotope—that is, to perform storytelling as an act of homage to hallowed cultural traditions. Many young people clearly do not feel entitled to make syncretic use of their own experiences, favourite films, books and other cultural references in making sense of epic stories. I have noted elsewhere of workshops involving retelling or reversioning of stories that:

194  C. HEINEMEYER In shyer, inexperienced groups, where trust is yet to build up between the young people and with me, the renditions may stay extremely tight to my version of the story and its moral arc. (Heinemeyer 2014: 3)

This caution may partly result from the specific gravitas they perceive in the epic material, or the fact that its unfamiliarity exacerbates their lack of confidence in a workshop setting whose rules are not yet clear. Signalling Openness: The Epic as Invitation The challenge therefore becomes one of creating a genuinely dialogic practice based on traditional story: How to signal clearly to young people the status of a story as Spielraum, or in Barthes’ words, that my story ‘desires’ the audience? Matthew Reason and I note that ‘In a non-oral culture […] storytelling may need to do more than simply hold out the potential of participation’ (2016: 9). Rather, dialogic approaches are needed which explicitly invite young people to populate the epic with their own ideas. The lead practitioner at the youth theatre ‘Acting Up’ made this clear to the group before we worked together on a myth by assuring them: We will not be working with this myth ‘as it is’, in a pure form – it will be mashed and mangled, we will make it contemporary, we will pinch elements of it but create our own myth which may also include elements of Banulah (our own invented world). (20/01/2014)

On occasion, however, the epic story can make its own invitation. Adolescents I have worked with have made striking and unexpected responses to the ‘arresting strangeness’ of fantasy and fairy stories (Tolkien 1966: 6) and their freedom from the constraints of ‘the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar’ (9). That is, these stories often come to us stripped of their cultural ‘fit’; they seem dislocated from our culture, values and experiences, and need us to write this layer onto them. As Vygotsky (1967) perceived, we use our existing repertoire of images and experiences to perform this creative task of bricolage. Whether young people find their own way to inhabiting the no-man’s-land of epic, or we need to guide them towards it, Calvino reminds us of the Tuscan proverb: ‘“The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it” – in other words, its value consists in what is woven and

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rewoven into it’ (1956: xxi). Storyteller Shonaleigh Cumbers describes the process as ‘rehydrating’ a story, something which can be done in infinite ways. Some of these routes are as follows. Layering and Translating the Epic The fact that epic stories are also in a literal sense No-Man’s-Land, whereas both true and literary stories appear to belong to their teller or writer, makes them a useful vehicle for making sense of sensitive or politically charged stories. The youth theatre group Project J, with whom I collaborated to create a piece based on the refugee crisis in 2016, were intimidated by the ethical and emotional challenges of devising a play based on real people’s painful experiences. Like the young people participating in Helen Nicholson’s intergenerational oral history project, they were ‘concerned to tell the stories as “authentically” and “faithfully” as they could’ (2005: 89). While this aspiration showed a vital respect for refugees’ experiences, it made it difficult for them to explore them imaginatively. In their director Matt Harper-Hardcastle’s words (Appendix 1), ‘Speaking of real people in real, troubling situations was a daunting prospect for most of the young people – they were scared to cause offence or say the wrong thing’. In my experience, teenagers often have a particularly strong respect for the narrative property of others, which may inhibit them from feeling entitled to explore and interpret stories which appear to belong to specific people. The reasons for this may be both developmental and generational. That is, many young people may not have developed an understanding of memory as a contingent, socially influenced process (as Nicholson also finds in relation to her project). On top of this, I have reflected elsewhere that it is possible that the current era of social media, in which young people must maintain a performance of their identity, ‘one’s story is one’s life, perhaps, to a greater extent than in previous generations’ (Heinemeyer 2015b). Project J gradually gained in confidence when Harper-Hardcastle and I offered them a section of Virgil’s Aeneid, Dido and Aeneas—the story of Aeneas’ quest to find a new homeland for himself and his fellow Trojans—as a parallel narrative for their devising project. Having told them the story as sparsely as possible, we located some of their devising

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sessions in this distant storyworld, composed of figures about whose fates the young people felt entitled to speculate freely, while simultaneously pursuing a ‘real world’ research process of interviewing individuals actively involved in refugee camps. This allowed myriad resonances between the current refugee crisis and details of the myth to circulate, without having to come to rest in the true story of any real person. Harper-Hardcastle explains how his initial concerns were allayed: With the story of Dido and Aeneas, I was worried – because it’s huge. Was it going to throw them, overshadow their own stories? But in fact they needed it – I think they felt the right to play with it. They were quite conscious of the switch between storyworlds, the gradual moving away. (O)nce in the world of fiction, agency was given to say ‘that person should not act in that way’ or that ‘this person deserves this’. Eventually, after finding the grounding and vocabulary within a fictitious world, the conversations began to merge into those that discussed parallel real life scenarios. The end performance then became one that the company felt empowered to tell, rather than the very timid, somewhat superficial exploration that might have occurred without the initial, mythical story. (Appendix 1)

For example, in the child Askanios’ offering of his hand-carved toy boat to Queen Dido, the young people saw reflections of the resourceful play and gift-giving that help people keep their dignity in refugee camps; they then felt able to make wide-ranging dramatic explorations of the dynamics of gift-giving in intercultural encounters between refugees and hosts. An interesting contrast could be made between two projects I led with similar groups of young people at Maple House, The Story of Rob(i/y)n (the name was chosen for gender neutrality) and Wormwood in the Garden (see Chapter 6). Unlike Wormwood, a performance which interwove personal and epic stories, Rob(i/y)n was a digital storytelling project based on slightly fictionalised and anonymised versions of the young people’s own experiences, created to inform a consultation into mental health services for young people in the local health trust. Both projects were intended to convey the young people’s perspectives to influential adults in a public setting, but there the similarity ended. Rob(i/y)n had the advantage of clarity and specificity, but it arguably conveyed little that the audience of professionals did not already understand about what young people wanted from the system; it seemed to inhabit a fairly two-dimensional plane of familiar narratives already

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pre-packaged in interpretation. The young people were simply commended for their efforts and courage in telling their stories. In contrast, Wormwood provoked a much stronger reaction of surprise and a rich array of post-show questions. By infusing young people’s perspectives into an intricate and peculiar folktale, it kept the audience on their guard to catch their layers of meaning, and made it difficult to avoid an emotional and critical engagement. The arresting images of the complex plot summoned not just the young people’s mental health narratives, but their political views, other areas of their experience and imaginative resources. The Provoking Epic Where the strangeness of an epic story goes beyond unfamiliarity to suggest an utterly different worldview, the invitation becomes more intense: young people may be shocked, provoked or intrigued into wishing to rewrite it. Far from providing counsel, such a story may pose a scenario, an exercise in making sense of perplexity. In my second session with a new (and particularly difficult and conflict-ridden) intervention class at City School, I told a version of ­ Egil’s Saga, the life of a Norse antihero whose fierce temper and awesome strength propelled him around the Viking world and into dreadful trouble. When Egil vengefully killed the child of his enemy King Eric Bloodaxe, there was palpable shock in the room, from which the young people were still reeling after the story ended. It was clear that they were not sure whether to view the saga as history, fiction or something in between; I reflected that they were perplexed by the moral ambiguity of the story, and thus my moral ambiguity as teller. (08/10/2014)

I asked them what they would like to do with the story; they chose to make a poster of it. Apparently in an attempt to make sense of Egil’s character, one boy represented the moment when the five-year-old Egil was given a golden bracelet by the king—a rare moment when the character was shown any tenderness—drawing the runes that might have been carved on it. Another drew the nidstang, the pole of revenge which seemed to epitomise the brutality of the culture around Egil. We made Viking ‘kennings’ in boastful, emphatic tones to express his extreme

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behaviour, the resentment and life experiences which may have driven him to it, while some pupils remained vehement that these were no excuse. It is, as with most storytelling practice, difficult to determine or even guess at the ‘benefit’ of such work to this small class of mostly troubled 12-year-olds. However, their teacher’s difficulty at this time was in overcoming their individual withdrawal, lack of confidence in their own abilities, lack of interest in their curriculum and consequent retreat into bickering and mocking each other. While Vygotsky is surely not the most up-to-date analyst of teenage development, his diagnosis of one of the pitfalls of adolescence seemed apt to many in this class: a form of stunted or frustrated creativity in which the individual loses the will to complete the cycle of creativity and manifest its products into the external world. (1967: 32)

The epic story, with its anachronisms and unfamiliar morality, needed the group to resolve, explain, oppose and amplify it; it is possible that it threw their own discourses into relief and provoked them into action. The Epic as Grounded Aesthetic In stressing the unfamiliarity of myth and folktale, I am in danger of making inaccurate dichotomies between generations or genres. The popularity of fantasy fiction and film makes myth in particular a form of ‘grounded aesthetic’ (Willis et al. 1990) for some young people; ‘epics’ such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are founding texts of their own culture, common ground on which they are delighted to meet (including through spin-off fan fiction, computer games and role play). As one of the practitioners in the ‘Acting Up!’ youth theatre observed: I think that, for most of the boys, that sort of mythical world is their world, that they inhabit anyway, and that they’re very comfortable in it. You wonder how much time they spend in that world, rather than reality. (09/07/2014)

I have also met many young people, including in mental health settings, who have a natural fluency in the storylines and symbolism of fairytale. This may not simply be escapism, but an attraction to the economy of expressive power offered by these genres. Indeed, there are some young

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people whose ease with epic material goes beyond a familiarity with its content to a sophisticated command of its artistry. In a holiday storytelling activity based on Arthurian legend The Loathly Lady and other stories of forests, Felix and Oliver kept darting out of the ‘official’ activity to a corner of the room, to work on a drawing. They incorporated elements of all our games and stories into a surreal and fantastical world, which became the setting for our final performance (Image 8.2).

Image 8.2  Felix and Oliver’s storyworld

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The playfulness and humour of this storyworld only heightened some of the themes the young people introduced into it. Jenny, for example, developed a riff on the bad table manners and insatiable appetite of the bewitched ‘loathly lady’ Ragnell, whose moment of liberation could not come until she and Gawain could defy the gossip and judgement of all the watching ladies at court and he brought her another wild boar to eat, clearly referencing judgemental peer group dynamics. Yet all these insights were translated into the epic vocabulary of ‘wood and stone’ (Tolkien 1966), a unifying language in which the whole group seemed proficient. This was made evident when another group member, Robbie, improvised an introduction to our final performance, featuring silver fish ‘glinting in the sunlight’. When he repeated the passage later, leaving out this phrase, the others insisted he reintroduce it: ‘Silver fish have to glint in the sunlight!’ This is what Adam Nicolson (2014), in his analysis of Homer and of contemporary Balkan epic singers, calls ‘composition in telling’, improvisation aided by a set of inherited formulas that give fluency and authority to the teller. The group’s readiness to call on these tropes gave them great confidence to weave their own perspectives and subversions into the story of Ragnell.

Meeting the Epic—A Dialogic Journey The young people’s responses highlighted thus far in this chapter challenge Bakhtin’s notion of the closed epic world. Bakhtin perceived epic as immune from the dialogic processes he described as forming all human language, but it seems clear that, it offered with open hands to twenty-first-century young people, it is full of the ‘openendedness, indecision, indeterminacy’, and space for contextually embedded meaning, which he found it to lack (Morris 1994: 192). Indeed, these responses are classic examples of a process Bakhtin himself identified and called ‘novelisation’. In fact, both novelisation and Bakhtin’s concept of ‘heteroglossia’ prove invaluable in articulating one particularly notable way in which I have found teenagers to use the Spielraum of epic: namely, after taking stories down from their pedestals, they then raise their own experience up towards the epic plain. The following final section of this chapter traces this journey down to the ground, then back up to dignity.

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Downwards: Novelisation and Heteroglossia Whereas the epic, for Bakhtin, is characterised by an ‘absolute epic distance’ from everyday life (1981: 17), a ‘wholeness’ and ‘poetic harmony’ which cannot be breached (5), he argued that the novel introduces ‘an indeterminacy, a certain semantic open-endedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality’ (7). It does this by giving voice to multiple ‘social languages’, discourses belonging to different socioeconomic groups and ideologies, within a single text (Vice 1997), a strategy he calls ‘heteroglossia’ (‘many languages’). A work from another genre, such as an epic, can be ‘novelised’ by introducing multiple voices into it—‘dialogising’ it—which will satirise and challenge its monologic truth claim: The “absolute past” of gods, demigods and heroes is here, in parodies and even more so in travesties, “contemporized”: it is brought low, represented on a place equal with contemporary life, in an everyday environment, in the low language of contemporaneity. (Bakhtin 1981: 21)

Novelisation is thus a form of ‘uncrowning’ (23). What is more, Bakhtin claims that this has become an inexorable phenomenon: ‘In the process of becoming the dominant genre, the novel sparks the renovation of all other genres, it infects them with its spirit of process and inconclusiveness’ (7). There are clear resonances here with storytelling practice in the dynamic chronotope. Where Calvino sees a cumulative wisdom in the body of folktales available to a storyteller, Zipes (1994, 1995, 2012) rather emphasises the historical baggage of stereotypes, caricatures and oppressive ideologies they often carry. For this reason he proposes a range of strategies to dialogise and uncrown them in workshops with young people, such as by presenting canonical and satirical versions alongside each other, or retelling them from the perspective of the ‘baddie’ (1995). Such tactics effectively introduce heteroglossia, ‘“aimed sharply and polemically” at official languages’ (Bakhtin 1981, cited in Vice 1997: 20). Even if one does not subscribe to Bakhtin’s caricatured understanding of the monolithic epic, any storyteller surely needs to heed Zipes’ appeal to help young people discern the ideological freight of myth and folktale, which is not dependent on ‘epic distance’. Perhaps because of their very

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sparseness, these cultural texts become loaded anew with cultural (and especially dominant cultural) meanings in every era: Fairy tales contain within them deeply embedded traditional discourses of our culture and play a role in moving these discourses along from generation to generation. (Chambers et al. 1999: 398)

Recent Disney heroines, for example, may not conform to the ‘helpless female’ stereotype of earlier decades, but may be laden with currently dominant values which young people may need more help to perceive: consumerism, neoliberal doctrines of self-improvement or co-opted forms of post-feminism (Kinder 1991). Thankfully, as Bakhtin himself foresaw, the practice of novelisation has become a reflex, and young people’s birthright. For several generations we have been brought up primarily on the novel, rather than the oral heritage. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that today’s young people were brought up on the even greater intimacy, intertextuality and rapid appropriation enabled by interactive media, as Kinder observed as early as 1991. So, as long as our practice offers epic material in a way that signals openness, young people will have a confident tendency to novelise stories during a workshop, giving them the psychological interiority and inconclusiveness they need. Teenagers will bring to this process their own cultural references, personal experience and emotional understanding: when Imogen created the character of Wormwood (Chapter 6) to ‘novelise’ Calvino’s folktale, what came naturally to her was ‘looking to myself, and what I would do or feel’ (07/03/2016). Such experiential starting points are diverse, so novelisation cannot result in unison; it will necessarily be heteroglot. Storytelling workshops in the Spielraum of a story offer abundant scope for multiple perspectives to meet in dialogue, and for what Bakhtin calls the ‘“orchestration” of multiple social voices within an artistic unity’ (Morris 1994: 19). The disagreements between the ‘social languages’ of Wormwood and the other characters in the performance (Chapter 6)—from the authoritarian essentialism of the king, to the social Darwinism of Ali the servant, to the paternalism of the doctors, to Wormwood’s own uncompromising and wounded morality—were not ironed out but brought into sharper focus. The resulting dialogue is not an exercise of finding consensus or majority, nor a matter of simply learning to tolerate different views. As Stern points out, true learning is about the value of the

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‘messy, unpredictable’ (2015: 87) activity of dialogue between contrasting voices. As these languages enter into dialogue with each other, they relativise each other’s contentions, suggesting alternative worldviews or chains of causality. Bakhtin (glossed in Morris 1994) suggests that in this process of finding the ideological contours of the discourses we are taught to speak by their experience and culture, people can gain a degree of ‘outsidedness’ or critical distance from these discourses. Thus dialogues in story’s Spielraum may enable us as facilitators to resist the temptation to exclude ‘unacceptable’ views, and rather to give them time to test themselves in dialogue against others within the boundaries of the story. The No-Man’s-Land of the story’s map becomes a lively, noisy and densely populated territory. Upwards: Recrowning the Epic The first generation to topple the idol of epic may be dizzy on parody and polyphony. But what about a generation with few gods left— young people fluent in (or even floundering in) alternative perspectives and interpretations? Such a generation might not need to knock the epic down to peer closely at it. For them there is less epic distance to cross. They may be capable of a more delicate operation: to carefully take the epic off its pedestal, break it open, expose it and rearrange it and then choose to put it back together, restoring or transforming its magic. Jo Blake, in Appendix 1, calls such work ‘reverent irreverence’: ‘Honour tradition, but be ready to turn it all on its head. A bit of irreverence is really needed in our age – not flippant irreverence, but reverent irreverence’. In so doing young people are in harmony with the ‘narrative turn’ of our time—characterised by Meretoja (2014) as a move from emphasizing the profoundly problematic nature of narratives (taken to impose order violently on the chaos of reality) to a sensibility characterized by accepting storytelling as an irreducible aspect of human existence – an acceptance coupled with an awareness of the need to engage in critical reflection and reinterpretation of the cultural narratives in which we are entangled. (Meretoja 2014: 2)

This ‘critical hermeneutic’ approach to story embraces the human need for stories as a means of making sense, not in naïve submission but in

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a spirit of conscious crafting. The epic has an appeal for this task which the novel does not: a sense of wholeness and rightness. As I have written elsewhere: If, as Bakhtin rejoices, the novel is about polyphony – multiple social languages in wondrous, open-ended, unresolved dialogue (‘life’s fullness’, as Benjamin grants) – the flipside of this, mourned by Benjamin, is that it is about the irredeemably perplexing and ultimately lonely nature of life. (Heinemeyer 2015c)

Many of the experiences of adolescence (particularly one characterised by mental ill health) may be equally perplexing, isolating or humiliating—bitter learning to be borne rather than celebrated. In contrast, the epic story is associated with continuity, meaning, cultural celebration, the possibility of counsel and mutual comprehensibility. Despite my emphasis on novelisation and heteroglossia, an epic story has a sense of universalising dignity, which young people may want to borrow to crown their own experience, expressed indirectly through the story. That is, a story’s status can flicker. Confident that it belongs to no-one in particular, young people may be able to work very subtly with this malleability. Two 16-year-old long-term residents at Maple House, Allie and Jemima, looked delighted when I suggested telling them a version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen; they both loved the story, and Allie had seen a film of it many times. She offered to tell this version, and her telling gathered a decent-sized group of inpatients to listen. I contributed the Andersen ‘original’, and a third girl, Ina, told the recent Disney version, Frozen. Much discussion ensued as to the gender politics of the various versions told. All but Allie and Jemima then drifted off and we three decided to make a lifesize collage of the main character Gerda using lifestyle magazines. Elements of all three versions found their way into this, along with new ideas. Allie was very struck by the serendipity of a picture of three roses I had stuck near Gerda’s heart, as the film version, unbeknownst to me, had hinged on a brooch of uncannily similar design. We added words to particular images that struck us in the collage and, over the coming weeks, turned these into a song (Jemima being a guitar player) which we performed for other young people and staff. It was drifting and reverent, following Gerda’s quest downriver, looking for Kai in the face of cold and hostility:

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[…] Only the river that’s travelled far / can reveal the answers to heal the scar / It’s been through lands that you have never seen / Trust that it will show the way / To help you find your love astray / So throw your shoes far out into the stream. / Meanwhile in her land of snow / She’s kissed him now, he’ll never know / What he’s lost, what he has left behind, / She’s kissed him once, she’s kissed him twice / He will forget his previous life / A never-ending puzzle of the mind.

I had worked with these girls many times and they knew the ‘rules’; they felt free to play knowingly in No-Man’s-Land, infusing their own perspectives into the story without fearing that their words would be analysed. They were instinctively dialogic storytellers, untroubled by genre boundaries. They took the story carefully apart, put their own hard-won knowledge inside it, then just as carefully re-crafted it into a whole folktale again. The collaboration may or may not have been therapeutic but, more importantly, it was a creation that gave dignity to things dear to their hearts—an act of ‘reverent irreverence’. To have the option to topple the story or raise it onto a pedestal, young people need to be given the epic with some magic in the first place. We can’t give them a parody, but something of value and wisdom, a map of a territory not yet explored. The story can then crown their experience, in part because of its pared-down, timeless vocabulary; in translation to ‘wood and stone’, there can be common ground between the longsuffering endurance and instinct of Gerda, and the anorexic’s or self-harmer’ own journey towards self-perfection or recovery, without any insistence that this is the case. At a stage of life when they are ‘fashioning their own identities’ (Hatton 2003: 149), young people’s crossing of epic distance may be followed by a conscious return. They may be aware that the epic distance is breakable, but feel inclined to restore its intactness for their own purposes. Bakhtin may not have foreseen a generation that would reappropriate the gravitas of epic to dignify their own experience—to give it what Milan Kundera (1999) calls the ‘es muss sein’,2 the sense of rightness and importance, of living.

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Conclusion: Completing the Triangle This chapter has focused on spatial metaphors of story as a walk, as a theatre of actions, or as a No-Man’s-Land, and in particular on how epic stories may create these kinds of territories for dialogue with and between young people. It has focused particularly on the huge spur to shared creativity that can be provided by the gaps in a story. Ultimately, however, no story of any kind has agency of its own, and a metaphor only exists if the parties to it recognise its existence and usefulness. The incidents I have called on as examples therefore show us the practice, often the conscious and knowing practice, of young people using the resource of the stories provided. Within a single session on a single story, story may define the territory in all these ways at different times. The storyteller’s role in perceiving these subtle shifts calls on the skills and sensitivities discussed in the previous chapter, of empathic dialogue, and guiding while in dialogue. Taken together, Chapter 7 and this chapter have examined closely the nature of the space between storyteller, listener and story, and the dialogues and creative processes which can occur within it. To understand what is generated by such creative collaborations requires us to take a step back, to look at the storytelling encounter with adolescents in its institutional and societal context. This is the task of our final chapter.

Notes 1. Here I use the term ‘epic’ to apply equally to mythic and folktale material. In fact Bakhtin, whose views are discussed in depth in this chapter, reserves the term ‘epic’ for myth, classifying folktale as one of the antecedents of the novel, but I feel his arguments as to the ‘distant’, other-worldly nature of these stories and the characters’ lack of interiority apply equally to folktale. It is also my experience that adolescents often group both genres as a single category. 2. “It must be”.

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Boal, A. (1995). The rainbow of desire: The Boal method of theatre and therapy (A. Jackson, Trans.). London: Routledge. Boal, A. (2000). Theatre of the oppressed (2nd ed.). London: Pluto Press. Boost Rom, R. (1998). Safe spaces: Reflections on an educational metaphor. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 30(4), 397–408. Boyd, D. (2014). It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Calvino, I. (1956). Italian folktales. London: Penguin Classics. Carter, A. (1991). The virago book of fairy tales. London: Virago Press. Carter, A. (1993). The second virago book of fairy tales. London: Virago Press. Chambers, E., Hoskins, M. L., & Pence, A. (1999). Hansel and Gretel at the millennium: Shifting multiple identities in youth’s search of self. Child & Youth Care Forum, 28(6), 393–410. Chatwin, B. (1987). The songlines. Franklin, NC: Franklin Library, Franklin Center. Coleman, J., & Hendry, L. (1990). The Nature of Adolescence. London: Routledge. Crawford, R., Brown, B., & Crawford, P. (2004). Storytelling in therapy. Cheltenham: Nelson Thomas. De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press. Dickinson, E. (1998). Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. In R. W. Franklin (Ed.), The poems of Emily Dickinson (Reading ed.). Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Dickson, M. (Ed.). (1995). Art with people. Sunderland: AN Publications. Eco, U. (2006). Politics of the open work. In C. Bishop (Ed.), Participation (pp. 20–40). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Emunah, R. (1994). Acting for real: Drama therapy process, technique and performance. New York: Brunner/Mazel Inc. Fox, J., & Dauber, H. (1999). Gathering voices: Essays on playback theatre. New Paltz, NY: Tusitala Publishing. Gersie, A. (1997). Reflections on therapeutic storymaking: The use of stories in groups. London and Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Hatton, C. (2003). Backyards and borderlands: Some reflections on researching the travels of adolescent girls doing drama. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 8(2), 139–156. Heinemeyer, C. (2014, March 11). A meta-narrative of a storytelling workshop with adolescent young people. At Narrative and Adolescence. York Theatre Royal.

208  C. HEINEMEYER Heinemeyer, C. (2015a). The eloquence of non-engagement. http://storytellingwithadolescents.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-eloquence-of-non-engagement. html. Accessed March 2020. Heinemeyer, C. (2015b). Who owns the story? http://storytellingwithadolescents. blogspot.com/2015/11/whose-story-is-it.html. Accessed March 2020. Heinemeyer, C. (2015c). Epic distance and the rupture in experience: Bakhtin, Benjamin and me! http://storytellingwithadolescents.blogspot.com/2015/ 09/epic-distance-and-rupture-in-experience.html. Accessed March 2020. Heywood, S. (2018). Another story for another time: The many-strandedness of a Jewish woman’s storytelling tradition. Storytelling, Self, Society, 14(1), 9–31. Hunter, M.-A. (2008). Cultivating the art of safe space. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 13(1), 5–21. Kelly, O. (1984). Community, art and the state: Storming the citadels. London: Comedia. Kinder, M. (1991). Playing with power in movies, television and video games. Oxford: University of California Press. Kundera, M. (1999). The unbearable lightness of being (M. H. Heim, Trans.). New York: Perennial Classics. Kuppers, P. (2007). Community arts practices: Improvising being-together. In P. Kuppers & G. Robinson (Eds.), The community performance reader (pp. 34–47). Abingdon: Routledge. Machado, A. (1912). Campos de Castilla. Madrid: Editorial Renacimiento. Mead, G. (2011). Coming home to story: Storytelling beyond happily ever after. Bristol: Vala Publishing. Meretoja, H. (2014). The narrative turn in fiction and theory: The crisis and return of storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Morris, P. (Ed.). (1994). The Bakhtin reader: Selected writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. London: Arnold. Nicholson, H. (2005). Applied drama: The gift of theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nicolson, A. (2014). The mighty dead: Why Homer matters. London: William Collins. Parfitt, E. (2014). Storytelling as a trigger for sharing conversations. Exchanges: The Warwick Research Journal, 1(2), 206–219. Parfitt, E. (2019). Young people, learning and storytelling. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Plante, L. (2010). Bleeding to ease the pain: Cutting, self-injury and the adolescent search for self (2nd ed.). Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. Popen, S. (2006). Aesthetic spaces/imaginative geographies. In Jab Cohen-Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), A Boal companion: Dialogues on theatre and cultural politics (pp. 125–132). London: Routledge.

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Porter Abbott, H. (2008). The Cambridge introduction to narrative (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pratchett, T. (2002). The science of discworld II: The globe. New York: Random House. Press Association. (2015, August 24). Teenage girls’ mental health overlooked by parents, survey finds. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/24/teenage-girls-mental-health-overlooked-parents-survey. Accessed March 2020. Press Association. (2016, January 7). Online pressures creating “nation of deeply unhappy children”, says charity. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian. com/society/2016/jan/07/online-pressures-unhappy-children-cyberbullying?CMP=share_btn_link. Accessed March 2020. Reason, M., & Heinemeyer, C. (2016). Storytelling, story-retelling, storyknowing: Towards a participatory practice of storytelling. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 21(4), 558–573. Rosen, B. (1988). And none of it was nonsense: The power of storytelling in school. London: Mary Glasgow Publications. Rosen, B. (1993). Shapers and polishers: Teachers as storytellers. London: Harper Collins. Rowe, N. (2007). Playing the other: Dramatizing personal narratives in playback theatre. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Ryan, P. (2008, May 29). Narrative learning/Learning narratives: Storytelling, experiential learning and education. At George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling, Cardiff. Sawyer, R. (1962). The way of the storyteller (2nd ed.). New York: Penguin Books. Smucker, B. (1977). Underground to Canada. London: Puffin. Stern, J. (2015). Children’s voice or children’s voices? How educational research can be at the heart of schooling. FORUM, 57(1), 75–90. Sunderland, M. (2000). Using story telling as a therapeutic tool with children. Milton Keynes: Speechmark Publishing. Tolkien, John R. R. (1966). On fairy stories. In The Tolkien reader. New York: Ballantine Books. Vice, S. (1997). Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vygotsky L. S. (1967). Imagination and creativity in childhood. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42(1): 7–97. Vygotsky, L. S. (1990). Imagination and creativity in childhood. Soviet Psychology, 28(1), 84–96. Willis, P. with Jones, S., Canaan, J., & Hurd, G. (1990). Common culture: Symbolic work at play in the everyday cultures of the young. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

210  C. HEINEMEYER Wilson, M. (1997). Performance and practice: Oral narrative traditions among teenagers in Britain and Ireland. Aldershot: Ashgate. Wilson, M. (2004). Storytelling with older children: A reflection on practice. Teaching and Learning, 2(1), 20–21. Winnicott, Donald W. (1971). Playing and reality. London: Tavistock Publications. Winston, J. (2004). Drama and English at the heart of the curriculum: Primary and middle years. Abingdon: David Fulton Publishers. Zipes, J. (1994). The trials and tribulations of little red riding hood: Versions of the tale in sociocultural context. London: Taylor & Francis. Zipes, J. (1995). Creative storytelling: Building community, changing lives. London: Routledge. Zipes, J. (2012). Fairy tales and the art of subversion (3rd ed.). London: Routledge Classics.

CHAPTER 9

Spaces for Storytelling

Image 9.1  Spaces for storytelling

There is only so far one can go by examining what happens within the triangular storytelling exchange itself. The question ‘So what?’ becomes unavoidable. Having accepted that we cannot truly know the impact of our work on any individual, we might nonetheless look to what it does to the setting where it takes place. This chapter takes a sociological view of the potential of storytelling in relation to key questions: after © The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6_9

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the storyteller has gone home or the young people have dispersed, what traces does this creative dialogue leave on their lives in the school or youth club or other institution—let alone on wider society? How, and where, should we seek to establish storytelling practices which can leave such traces? And what does this say about the role of the sailor-storyteller in a setting (after all, most storytellers, whether one-off or long-term visitors, are a little bit sailor)? Why are we needed, and more to the point, what gives us the right to seek to have any impact on the life of an institution at all? In proposing answers to these questions, it offers a theoretical analysis of a complex landscape which may be intuitively familiar to those working with young people in the arts and education (Image 9.1).

The Need for Dialogic Fora We are becoming accustomed to the idea that our society is experiencing a tide of interlocking crises, from political polarisation to climate change to epidemics of mental ill health among the young. Gry Worre Hallberg (2018) suggests that we are in fact hearing the tearing sounds of what she calls ‘The Crack’ in political and economic systems which are no longer suited to the challenges we face as a culture and a species. Yet aspects of this are nothing new. Both individual people, human institutions, and culture as a whole, experience blockages, crises and conflicts, and stand in need of regeneration and renewal. According to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, human subjectivity is not primarily produced through autonomous decision-making by individuals, any more than social change is produced through rational processes of organisations. Rather, both are the product of interactions between individuals and the complex of social and economic forces surrounding them (Lorraine 2011). Consequently, Guattari argues that current global, social and psychological challenges are interdependent, and none can be solved unless we ‘enlarge the definition of subjectivity beyond the classical opposition between individual subject and society’ (1995: 1), allowing each to renew each other symbiotically. Everyday communication alone seems inadequate to this task. The ‘regenerative needs’ of a culture—bridging divides, achieving consensus, reinvigorating social bonds and enabling transformations in response to changing circumstances—exceed what can be achieved within the bounds of conventional social interchange, where individuals’ roles are often quite narrowly defined. Only circumscribed possibilities for

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discovery and mutual enlightenment exist within the everyday exchanges which take place, say, between one group of people classed as ‘teaching assistants’, another classed as ‘school governors’ and another classed as ‘pupils’. Regenerative needs of an institution or culture call for a different quality and level of communication. Also concerned with this idea of multiple interrelated levels of communication is the political and social theory of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas argues that social groups possess a ‘lifeworld’, a ‘cultural tradition which they use and at the same time renew’ (1987: 208), which comprises and generates their shared background knowledge, worldviews, social practices and personal identities. In addition, Habermas points out that societies institutionalise spaces for more attentive and deliberative public discourse—neighbourhood forums, school councils— points ‘removed from, but always presupposed in, everyday life’ (Delanty 2007: 29), within which the hierarchies and roles dividing individuals are, to a limited extent, temporarily ‘bracketed’ and a diversity of views can come into dialogue (White 1995: 160). These fora for deliberative communication exist in a complex relationship to the lifeworld, regenerating its justice and health. The rapidly changing youth experience, and adult difficulties in empathising with it, underline the need for unusually attentive dialogue between young people and adults in this moment in history. It seems clear that the burden of crises affecting many cultures at present is disproportionately affecting the young. The rate of change is such that many adults struggle to understand the difficulties of young people in their care. In the UK, recent surveys into young people’s mental ­ well-being by Girlguiding UK (Press Association 2015), the UK Government (Green 2015), and Childline (Press Association 2016), as well as indicating rising levels of distress, show a worrying disparity between adults’ perceptions of the issues facing young people, and young people’s own main worries. For example, the Girlguiding study found that parents are most concerned about drugs and alcohol abuse, while young people are overwhelmingly more affected by mental ill health, self-harm, sexual harassment and cyber-bullying. Nonetheless, there is growing adult anxiety over young people’s well-being, and a solidifying sense that interlocking pressures are impacting them in insidious ways. According to the charity Young Minds (2015, 2016), there was a doubling in hospitalisations of young people due to eating disorders during 2012–2015, a 68% increase in hospitalisation due to

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self-harming between 2001 and 2011, and a doubling in the number of 15–16 year olds with depression between the 1980s and 2000s. The causes of this phenomenon are of course disputed. Former UK Children’s Mental Health Champion, Natasha Devon, cites the key factors as poverty, academic pressure, lack of family time, cuts to CAMHS budgets and social media (Aitkenhead 2016). While Devon, like researcher into youth participation in online publics Danah Boyd (2014), emphasises that social media should not be treated as a bogey in itself, the phenomena by which social media transmit and heighten mental pressures on adolescents (as sketched out by young blogger Imogen Godwin [2015a]) can scarcely be understood by adults whose relationships in youth were largely conducted face-to-face. Meanwhile, a growing body of thought drawing on critical psychology and youth studies links the rise in mental distress to neoliberalism itself, particularly the impact of austerity, precarious employment, competitive education systems, and the individualisation of responsibility for survival and success (Harper and Speed 2012; Bessant et al 2017; Cain 2018). Brad Evans and Julian Reid (2014) and David Chandler (2014) chart the rise of ‘resilience thinking’, and the efforts of authorities to encourage populations to develop a ‘resilience subjectivity’ which looks to the self rather than the state for aid in times of difficulty. It is now in the interests of neoliberal governance, they argue, that all citizens accept insecurity as an inescapable fact of life, and remain braced to cope with the economic and ecological shocks and crises that will continue to characterise twenty-first-century life. For Bessant et al. (2017), young people, whose whole lives have been lived in this ideological environment, are ‘the precarious generation’. In such arguments, we can hear echoes of the ‘Crack’ identified by Hallberg (2018) as ramifying out across our culture, catching everything from individuals to ecosystems in its wake. Yet for others, the apparent rise in youth mental distress owes to o ­ ver-diagnosis, or moral panic. Simple, single answers are not forthcoming. Thus it seems that dialogue is urgently needed, for a start, to help adults understand the complex pressures operating on young people— not simply so as to help build young people’s resilience to them, but so as to transform the culture which generates them. Such dialogue is needed at every level, from the youth group or classroom to national and international policymaking. The young performance company, Company Three, gives its mission as simply, ‘Creating a space where young people can talk to adults’ (2020).

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However, the dialogic fora envisaged by Habermas are very difficult to create. Kester (2004) critiques both Habermas’ belief that differences of power and role can be bracketed, and his overemphasis on rational argumentation. Imagine for example a school council, even one which devotes an unusual amount of time and effort to bringing pupils, staff and governors together to discuss challenges facing the school. It is easy to envisage which kinds of pupil perspectives would, and which would not, be likely to find expression and be heeded in such a forum. Indeed, Jean Rudduck and Michael Fielding’s empirical research (2006) draws attention to three factors which often limit the democratic involvement of young people in such school councils to a tokenistic level: power relations between teachers and students, a lack of commitment to authenticity, and insufficient efforts to include less confident or articulate students in decision-making. It is Kester’s realistic understanding of such limitations which leads him to draws on feminist perspectives which can enrich Habermas’ model of communicative community with an increased emphasis on empathetic identification. Thus, as a starting point, we might seek ways of enabling an unusual level of I/Thou or face-to-face communication between young people and adults in our dialogic fora. For Kester, it is often artistic practices, with their facility to suspend normal rules, unite a disparate group around an intense experience, and bring individuals’ and groups’ perceptions to the attention of a culture, which succeed in generating moments of creative confluence between different perspectives. Indeed, in recent decades much socially engaged art practice has reconfigured itself around this challenge, in what has been called the ‘social turn’ or the ‘relational turn’. The possibility I wish to hold out in this chapter is that a participatory practice of storytelling with young people can become rooted in a setting and play this deliberative, bracketing role. It can develop its own ‘vernacular’, an alternative, situated language and established practices for free-ranging, creative, narrative dialogue. I will draw on Guattari’s thinking and examples from my own practice with young people to argue that, where storytelling practice can generate such a storytelling vernacular, it can intervene subtly in the social practices of a setting, creating ‘new modalities of subjectivity’ (Guattari 1995: 7) within it. However, I will have cause to specify the difficulties of creating deliberative fora within the institutions which dominate the twenty-first-century youth experience, and to argue that a storyteller’s primary affinity ought to be with what crosses institutional boundaries. I will also highlight the

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difference between the ideal of a dialogic forum available to all, and the protected fora available only to defined subgroups of young people. In conclusion, I will suggest that the need for a consciously dialogic practice of storytelling has arisen precisely because the intergenerational empathy gap has widened. I will ask where, in this case, storytellers’ priorities should lie: How, and where, should we seek to build a storytelling practice with adolescents so as best to ford this rift? As a starting point for approaching the question of how a ­storytelling practice might bring about change, we will examine how this challenge has been viewed within community arts practice and ‘relational art’ (Bourriaud 1998), before introducing the overlapping but distinct possibility of developing a vernacular.

The ‘Project’, the ‘Moment’ or the Vernacular Participatory artmaking within the early years of the community arts movement was often directed towards long-term cultural or political capacity-building, or even transformation, within a geographical area. This became difficult to sustain in the face of the fragmentation and atomisation of communities in advanced capitalist society (particularly working-class communities where key industries were in decline), and increasing transience in local populations. Moreover, as both Claire Bishop (2012) and Grant Kester (2004) document, community arts became increasingly institutionalised as an instrument of the welfare state, losing much of its political autonomy and becoming structured as ‘projects’ with short-term goals instead of long-term horizons. Kester laments the shift from socially committed practice situated in particular communities to ‘applied arts’ projects that define their collaborators serially, as socially isolated or disaffected individuals whose collective identification is provided by an ameliorative aesthetic experience administered by the artist. (2004: 150)

A different response to the same cultural shift can be seen in the sphere of gallery-based participatory art. Nicolas Bourriaud argued in 1998 that participatory art could no longer gesture towards a better future based on political ‘grand narratives’ such as socialism, and that an emerging ‘relational aesthetic’ was replacing it, concerned with human encounter in the present, artistic moment. Bourriaud assembles a body

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of artists who consider intersubjectivity, conviviality and interaction not as by-products of their art, but as ‘a point of departure and as an outcome, in brief, as the main informers of their activity’ (1998: 44). Works such as Rirkrit Tiravanika’s pad thai (1990), in which gallery-goers could cook for each other and eat together, constitute ‘microtopias’, tiny fleeting utopias in which participants repair the social bond between them, by learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution. Otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real. (Bourriaud 1998: 13)

These are perhaps grand claims to make for the relatively banal acts of communal cooking and eating. Yet Matthew Reason proposes that art offers us access to what we might term non-conceptual forms of knowing that go beyond those of the everyday precisely because they are framed, shaped and propelled by an aesthetic quality, which we might describe as a particular way of looking, hearing, feeling or knowing. (2016: 7)

It is the very ‘artness’ of an artistic experience, says Reason, which heightens its affective impact, enabling what John Dewey described as ‘active and alert commerce with the world’ (1934: 19). Storytelling is— or can be—just such an artistic experience, often one woven into the fabric of everyday life. Thus the invitation to a face-to-face encounter made by relational artworks, and the regenerative potential Bourriaud claims for them, is a possible way of understanding how the storytelling exchange might leave traces on the lives of participants, in the form of new relationships, realisations and ways of interacting. He seems to be describing, indeed, how art can establish moments of dialogue in fluid contemporary society. The Limits of the Project and the Relational Moment Yet both the community arts ‘project’, and Bourriaud’s celebration of the fleeting ‘moment’, could be understood as forms of capitulation to what seems inevitable: the perceived impracticability of artistic models based on durability and social embeddedness. A one-off artistic

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experience can constitute a ‘relational moment’, but as a form of community with no strings attached, it correspondingly promises to leave little behind it but a memory. This does not seem to be good enough, if we are committed to the idea that interchange within participatory artmaking can influence or regenerate society in any meaningful way. It is helpful to consider this in the light of De Certeau’s (1984) visualisation of our lives as constrained within a ‘grid of discipline’, relieved by the existence of resistant ‘local authorities’ within the cracks in the system (1984: 105–106), where communities can carve out their own meanings and ways of doing things. A relational moment or a successful project might flare up and warm people for a while, but can surely never become a local authority. Although phrased in utopian terms, relational art arguably represents a renunciation of ambition to leave lasting traces on people and places, just as the community arts movement abdicated much of its power when it embraced the ‘project’. For these reasons, Kester and Bishop both rail, in different and opposing ways, against the evanescence of much participatory art (whether defined as community arts or professional artmaking). Each suggests mechanisms by which it can still make a significant, enduring mark on public consciousness in the real world. For Bishop (2012), participatory artmakers should create work that is provocative enough to be unforgettable, and lasting enough to reach a significant secondary audience of non-participants. For Kester, art should itself create situations in which divergent groups (ideally ‘politically coherent communities’) can build mutual understanding and negotiate rational solutions to their conflicts. There is a commonality between these dialogic artworks and the aforementioned ‘relational’ works cited by Bourriaud, but the emphasis in dialogic artmaking is on literal discussion of particular issues for the betterment of the future, rather than simply on embodied togetherness in the moment. Dialogic works such as Suzanne Lucy’s Oakland Projects (1991–2001), a series of workshops, debates and media interventions involving urban youth (see Lacy 2010), or Kate Collins’ encounters between teenagers and students Don’t Talk With Strangers (2015) (see Collins 2015), seek to leave lasting traces on people’s lives. If storytelling practice is to escape the serial, ameliorative mode described by Kester, it surely needs to aspire to longevity and autonomy in some form. Both Bishop’s and Kester’s proposals have attractions, but their focus on the overt statement and the orchestrated, unusual event may seem ill-suited to the practice of storytellers. Our terrain consists

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of the everyday: the allusions, insights, analogies and realisations arising from young people’s normal lives. I suggest that a better model for longevity in storytelling is provided by ‘vernacular’ practices associated with traditional storytelling spaces and practices. The Vernacular Alternative The word ‘vernacular’ is principally defined by the OED as ‘a local language of speech’, but is often extended to architecture and other ­locality-specific accretions of artistic practices. A vernacular, then, is an established set of practices that belongs to a community—the way they always do a certain thing, as distinct from how other communities do that thing. In relation to storytelling, I use it to define a procedure whereby the usual rules of everyday communication are altered or suspended to create a shared storytelling space, and the path to this other space is tacitly understood by those present. An archetypal example is the ‘ladder to the moon’ described by Ben Haggarty (2014), a w ­ ell-trodden path from anecdote to epic; a more everyday one is the habit that developed between some young people and myself at Maple House, of transitioning between the setting’s morning meeting and the subsequent storytelling session with the telling of corny jokes. Whatever its specific local form, such a vernacular is a potentially durable resource which a community can draw upon to help meet its ‘regenerative needs’. Vernacular storytelling practices, imaginatively located within more stable communities of the past and in some present-day non-Western cultures, have more often been romanticised than described in detail. Some notably informative exceptions in anthropological and folklore literature (such as Bauman 1986; Millman 1977; Van Deusen 2001) build up a picture of vernacular storytelling spaces as multi-layered institutions with complex relationships to the societies in which they were embedded. These accounts describe stories re-crafted to emphasise certain points over others, or to rise to different occasions; different ways of grabbing an audience’s attention and keeping it depending on the type of gathering or time of year, the audience’s level of background knowledge or comfort with each other. Thus such storytelling institutions did not only entertain and transmit knowledge, but met a society’s regenerative needs, providing subtle vehicles for expression of views, experimentation with social roles, and negotiation of interpersonal conflicts, which could not be safely or amply accomplished in everyday communication.

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Most storytellers, myself included, operate within the same constraints of short-term project funding and transient communities as the artists celebrated by Bourriaud and bemoaned by Kester and Bishop. This in turn conditions the kind of practice to which we gravitate; we are, by and large, pragmatists who seek to do what is achievable within a given context. For example, even in circumstances where PhD funding freed me from the need to find funding for my work, the rapid turnover and changing moods of patients at Maple House often left me with little other option than to harness the transient relational moment, as I reflected: Every week I spend an hour with a group of young people in a mental health unit. Here I am Benjamin’s ‘sailor’ type of storyteller, not the ‘farmer’ type – my itinerant status is of positive value, as I bring from outside the institution stories and ways of being, but do not have more than the absolute minimum insider knowledge of their patient status. Thus we can ‘meet in a different room’ – a provisional space of provisional meanings and limited mutual knowledge, in which identities can be experimentally rewritten on a regular basis. My own ‘power’ is also dampened by my lack of foreknowledge or control of who will be there this week, and what mood they will be in, and what they will want to do – equalising us further. Like a sailor visiting a port, I walk into the saloon looking for old friends or new acquaintances, and see what’s up. Like the children climbing the Faraway Tree, I do not know what land I will be entering when I clamber up the ladder each week, or how welcome I will be. (Heinemeyer 2015)

Yet even at this extreme of transience, I would argue that there is an impulse almost coded into the art form of storytelling to strive towards the creation of a vernacular; a sense that we should leave behind not only stories, but the ability to keep telling stories and evolving storytelling practices. Reason and I draw on Zipes (1995) and Wilson (2006) to argue that ‘storytelling presents the possibility of the audience becoming the artist, with the listener becoming the teller’ (Reason and Heinemeyer 2016: 562) and that this invitation may be ‘more immediate and more structurally central to the form’ (562) than it is in other art forms. It is probably for this reason that long-term partnerships, such as those advocated by Jack Zipes between storytellers and schools, remain the preferred model of practice for many professional storytellers: they enable the development of enduring local habits of storytelling. Zipes’ conception of the ‘genuine storyteller’ (2004) is an honest, critical, committed visitor; an artist at the service of a community, cutting byways past the

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highroads of corrupt commercial media, and helping young people to find, inform and hone their voices. It is important to acknowledge that these high aspirations were realistic for Zipes, a white male university professor, because he managed to secure impressive levels of funding and institutional buy-in for his ‘Neighbourhood Bridges’ storytelling project for many years; the majority of arts practitioners exist within a precarious and marginal sphere of the economy, and lack the social status and connections to attain the luxury of long-term partnerships. In either case, however, precisely in this partnership or visiting role lies the paradox. ‘Vernacular’, even when stripped of its nostalgic baggage, suggests something belonging to a more or less defined community. Yet a storyteller or other arts practitioner working with young people is often a guest in an institution. Regardless of how many sessions I have led in a school, mental health unit or other setting, as long as I am not a member of staff with a known set of responsibilities, I do not have any explicit entitlement to influence these settings. Rather, I remain a partially understood figure from outside, an itinerant ‘sailor’ rather than settled ‘farmer’ type of storyteller (Benjamin 1973)—and this is probably the most common configuration of relationships between storytellers and institutions. Aspects of this situation also apply to storytellers who are employed or ‘resident’ within a setting—teachers or youth workers, for example—to the extent that they are trying to create new configurations or influence practices beyond their own work area or department. It becomes important to consider how such an outsider figure can hope to intervene, to nurture dialogic fora, or vernaculars of storytelling within them. Equally salient is the question of what gives them the right to try, and what is it about the institutions that shape adolescent life that calls for the intervention of storytellers.

The Technical, the Interpersonal, and Vernaculars of Storytelling Many teenagers spend significant proportions of their time within relatively rigid institutional structures, where interpersonal relationships with adults are governed, to some extent, by frameworks of policies, incentives, sanctions and technically structured curricula—what Martin (1958) characterises as ‘I-It’ as opposed to ‘I-Thou’ interactions

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(see Chapter 7). At its most extreme, the dominance of It can create institutions like the children’s care homes documented by Claire McNeill (in O’Connor and Anderson 2015), where young people’s development was monitored and policed through bureaucratic systems, rather than fostered through love or, indeed, care or homeliness. Yet even in more benevolently and thoughtfully designed systems for managing young people, frameworks of extrinsic motivations are constructed to persuade young people to achieve the institution’s aims. Even where these are positively structured as rewards, they can take precedence over the autonomous development of young people’s relationships, interests and intrinsic sense of purpose and self-worth (Patrick 2019). Of course, in most young people’s experience of education, mental health and other systems, technical and authoritarian imperatives are counterbalanced by caring relationships with teachers, professionals and other adults—and indeed, Buber grants that both sides of the coin are essential: ‘Without It man cannot live’ (in Stern 2013: 48). ‘Golem Schools’ and Protected Settings Discussing the above balance between It and Thou, Stern (2013) highlights the consequences of trends within education policy towards greater compliance and control: that where schools overemphasise the technical and knowledge transfer dimensions of learning, they may squeeze out the possibility of dialogic, surprising knowledge creation in the space between teachers and pupils. For Gert Biesta, such developments reflect political pressures to deny the inherently risky and unpredictable nature of education: ‘The desire to make education strong, secure, predictable, and risk-free is in a sense an attempt to wish this reality away’ (2013: 2). While such ‘risk-free’ systems can, Biesta argues, be made to ‘work’, it is at the heavy price of reducing the complexity and openness of learning, and ultimately of creating oppressive systems. This can arguably be observed in aspects of in the UK government’s academisation programme. As of 2018, the National Audit Office reported that 72% of UK secondary schools had converted to academies financially and educationally independent of local authority control, governed by a national assessment regime which emphasises measurable pupil progress. This reflects the broader global educational picture sketched by Fazal Rizvi and Bob Lingard, whereby increasing corporatisation and privatisation are accompanied by accountability structures

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monitoring ‘a narrower set of concerns about human capital development’ (2010: 3). Although academies vary widely in their pedagogical models, it is not uncommon for multi-academy trusts such as the Michaela Community Schools (Gibbons and Lough 2020) or Oakwood Grange Academy Trust (2018) to impose centrally designed ‘tight and deep’ models of behaviour management and curriculum delivery on schools’ own slowly evolved practices and cultures. Stern applies Buber’s spectre of ‘golem institutions’ (‘golem’ is translated as ‘clods without soul’) to schools which go too far in this direction: […] golem-schools lack real dialogue and are inhuman: “he who lives with It alone is not a man” (Buber 1958: 52). A school that is personal and therefore dialogic does not ‘add’ the personal to a technical search for truth. The truth, and even more the capitalized Truth, is itself discovered through personal relations. (2013: 48)

It is beyond the scope of this book to draw general conclusions as to the changing balance between the interpersonal and the technical in secondary schools; however my experience in City School may be illustrative. Schools like City School, in hard-pressed working-class areas, perhaps feel the sharpest edge of pressures to sideline the interpersonal and dialogic nature of learning, as it is not possible for them to achieve stringent and ever-moving academic targets without devoting the vast majority of their energies to them. City School is neither in a pocket of privilege, where significant time can be spared for nurturing relationships and developing interests, nor is it a protected setting for those who have proven themselves unable to progress in mainstream settings (such as Pupil Referral Units), and who therefore gain some exemptions from the expectations of the school inspectorate OFSTED. Thus, during a single day of English lessons I observed at City School in January 2015, pupils of all academic levels were repeatedly reminded of their individual target grades, and specific strategies to achieve them in assessments. The necessity to do this was a frequent subject of despair in the staffroom, with the threat of forced academisation adding to the perceived urgency of prioritising performance over emergence. There appears to be a dramatic contrast between the closely regulated use of time at City School, and Betty Rosen’s (1988, 1993) freedom, as an English teacher in an inner-city comprehensive in the

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1970s and 1980s, to set aside the whole of every Friday afternoon for storytelling sessions. Noting this contrast is not to argue that City School does not recognise and seek to meet individual pupils’ needs, nor to draw any conclusions as to the net effect of changes in the English education system for relatively disadvantaged pupils. It is, however, to identify a shrinking of the scope for I/Thou, unpredictable, interpersonal interaction within many schools, and to suggest that this may have consequences for their ability to regenerate a healthy social body. The same trends, as argued in Chapter 2, have diminished the role of narrative knowledge and storytelling in mainstream secondary education, as too indirect, capricious and unpredictable a route to demonstrable mastery of the curriculum. Pupils’ access to rich experiences of narrative language are likely to be exacerbated by the general, ongoing decline of uptake of arts subjects, which is more marked in state schools than in private schools (Bacc for the Future 2019), and affect some demographics more than others. A striking statistic is that in 2019, following a decade of decline and a 3.7% fall during 2018–2019 alone, only 574 boys took GCSE Drama in the UK (Arts Professional 2020). In contrast, in protected educational settings for young people acknowledged to be vulnerable, storytelling and narrative approaches are often readily embraced. Such protected settings are increasing in number and significance as a growing minority of young people fail to thrive in mainstream education. Pupil referral units (PRUs) were first introduced in 1994 as an alternative provision for children excluded from school, or otherwise unable to cope in school (Sheehy 2015). By 2015, 20,000 children and young people in the UK were educated within these units, or in schools for children with social, emotional and behavioural needs (SEBD schools), and many units have recently seen increases in demand (Quine 2015). In protected provision, the interdependence of individual young people’s learning, development and well-being with the quality of relationships within the setting is not in question (Quine 2015). A stark illustration of this came for me at the moment when the ‘intervention classes’ in which I worked at City School were absorbed into larger mainstream classes, losing their semi-protected status: it was at this point that the school, despite acknowledging the value of storytelling-based lessons for the young people concerned, no longer felt it could make time for them.

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‘It’ and ‘Thou’ Beyond Schooling Similar tensions exist to some extent within the child and adolescent mental health system (CAMHS) between, on the one hand, protocols and assessment regimes and, on the other, young people’s own individual and mutualistic routes to recovery. This was evident in the everyday life of Maple House, where weight thresholds dictated whether young people with eating disorders could become involved in even sedentary workshops, and rigid medication schedules were allowed to disrupt young people’s creative activity in mid-flow. The fact that important exceptions were made reflects the setting’s protected status and the relative freedom this allowed staff to respond holistically to young people’s needs. Yet more broadly, it seems likely that the transfer of CAMHS funding from community-level support to acute medicalised services, as a consequence of budgetary austerity (Wright 2015), is decreasing the opportunities for a much wider range of young people to access responsive, person-centred support. Beyond either the education or mental health systems, we might point to the decline of universal youth clubs (UNISON 2014) in favour of targeted ‘interventions’ for specific groups (young people in care, young parents, young travellers) as suggesting an overbalancing in favour of ‘It’. Erin Walcon cites a wealth of evidence for a similar trend in participatory arts practice, which she finds increasingly to be ‘grounded in problematic deficit models which define young people by their degree of “risk” or within particular categories of exclusion, deprivation or need’ (2012: 59). For example, while North Yorkshire County Council no longer directly employs youth workers, its former youth team have formed a social enterprise which funds issue-based projects for vulnerable groups such as the 1Community Arts Project (North Yorkshire County Council 2018) through specific charitable grants and commercial activity. Protected provision targeted at certain groups, whether in education, youth work or mental health care, may be internally rich in dialogue; indeed it often is. It also alleviates the distress of those worst affected by the complex of pressures discussed above. Yet to the extent that it is sealed off from mainstream education and the wider world, such dialogue cannot contribute to the regeneration and renewal of young people’s lifeworld as a whole. Tendencies to place unnecessarily rigid boundaries around the roles of ‘pupil’, ‘patient’ or ‘at-risk young person’

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may limit the extent to which adolescents can influence or reshape their institutions, or the broader society beyond. This may also hinder the formation of more fluid coalitions of young people and adults, which might shape more responsive forms of learning, well-being and sociality, such as those I have on occasion glimpsed through my practice and that of others. As Buber suggests, Real education is made possible – but is it also established? – by the realization that youthful spontaneity must not be suppressed but must be allowed to give what it can. (in Stern 2013: 53)

In sum, I wish to suggest that at least for some young people, there is a lack of fora in their schools and lives within which they can meet with adults, and with each other, in open-ended dialogue.

The Intervening Storyteller The institutional landscape I have, necessarily briefly, sketched out here is the water in which most storytellers must swim. It is a habitat characterised by overstretched teachers and youth workers, and very limited funding or time for activity not deemed essential. Whether as an insider or outsider (or something in-between) in an institution such as a school, I must situate my storytelling practice within a conflicted field of institutional goals, defined roles, personal desires and interpersonal relationships. There are choices to make. Where do I align myself, and what do I seek to cut across? Where within an institution can a storytelling practice engender a unique and situated vernacular, a local language for bracketed conversations? There are two theoretical constructs which suggest a home for such a vernacular within an institution: Habermas’ discussion of the lifeworld (1984, 1987), and Bourriaud’s use of Karl Marx’s conception of the interstice, a gap within a system which ‘suggests other trading possibilities than those in effect within this system’ (1998: 44). Habermas argues that the impulse of authorities is to take over people’s spaces, time and thinking with an ‘instrumental rationality’, in the name of governance or market forces. This externally imposed rationalisation of the lifeworld has consequences including ‘loss of meaning, […] alienation, psychopathologies, breakdowns in tradition, withdrawal of motivation’ (McCarthy 1984: xxvii), and the undermining of fora for

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deliberative dialogue. Bourriaud too is concerned by the colonisation of social interaction by capitalist and consumerist ideologies and meanings. For both authors, people can resist such a takeover, but the two have divergent ways of conceptualising the locus of this resistance. For Habermas (1987), the underlying landscape of the ‘recalcitrant lifeworld’ cuts its own grooves which are not easily ironed out by authority—the sense that ‘no matter what you tell us to do, this is the way we do things round here’—for example, vernaculars of storytelling to which the community can recourse. For Bourriaud, resistant action occurs through the creation of (artistic) microtopias in the small interstices permitted or overlooked by the system, whose significance may grow and radiate outwards. We might picture these as spaces within which a vernacular might be consciously nurtured. I would like to draw on two stories of practice to exemplify these alternative ways of envisaging the locus of a storytelling vernacular, and the role of a visiting storyteller, in adolescent settings. Interestingly, it has been the ‘failures’ of my practice which have been most revealing of the value of a storytelling vernacular, and the constraints on establishing one.

A Tale of Two Failures In the first of these settings, a youth club, the word ‘failure’ is perhaps a misnomer; rather there was an accurate perception by all concerned that I was not needed, because the club was already rich in open-ended, I/ Thou communication; the lifeworld was strong. Whereas in the second, a story already told in Chapter 6, my failure to establish a storytelling club within an interstice at City School occurred despite a hunger on all sides—young people, teachers, myself—for such a dialogic forum. The lifeworld was suppressed, and even those interstices which opened up within the ‘grid of discipline’ (De Certeau 1984) were squeezed. Global Youth Club The youth workers at Global Youth Club made a two-edged invitation to me and a theatre practitioner with whom I was collaborating: they wished to offer the club members opportunities to become involved in storytelling and drama, but past experience had taught them that the young people tended to become ‘bored’ or resistant when structured

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activities monopolised the club nights too often. We had a strong sense that control of the space and time available was shared between the youth workers and the young people, and that our acceptance would depend on the latter’s ongoing interest. These two resources—space and time—remained subjects of negotiation throughout this short and ultimately abortive collaboration. The ‘hum’ of activity and chat within the youth centre made clear how much the young people valued the traditional youth club activities of playing pool, football or cards, chatting, making jewellery, and hanging out with staff. However, the young people did not reject what we had to offer; they were intrigued. They asked me to tell scary stories and sometimes listened with fascination, participated in ‘story dice’ games in corners, joined in some of our games with hilarity, and swapped stories of family life in snack breaks. Such creativity and enthusiasm filled us with confidence in the potential of this project, and the young people showed cautious interest when my colleague proposed that they might wish to devise a piece of theatre based on their and our stories. It was once we had begun to conceive of this work as a ‘project’ that we encountered the rub. Our efforts to mark out a certain area within the centre, a certain time within the session, or a certain subgroup of keen young people, had only fleeting success. Each was an attempt to mark out a domain within which we could develop a sense of commitment to the artistic work we were proposing—and therefore an attempt to colonise their fluid social space, however benignly, by introducing internal barriers, rules and goals. Club members expressed their individual identities, interests and relationships, and their shared culture, by charting and improvising their own routes through club nights; the role of ‘workshop participant’, however carefully negotiated with them, was incompatible with this vital freedom. Their lifeworld proved indeed to be ‘recalcitrant’: during our fourth and fifth sessions, the majority of the young people resisted our agenda through chaotic behaviour or refusal to participate, and so we agreed with them and the youth workers to bring the project to a close. This project underlined, for me, that storytelling can operate at any position along Wilson’s (1997) spectrum from informal conversation to staged performance (Table 7.1). Adults were already helpfully available when required at Global Youth Club, as listeners, sounding boards, and purveyors of understated wisdom. The setting clearly possessed, if not a vernacular of storytelling per se, established communicative practices

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which did a similar job. Had I been content to be absorbed into the shifting hum of young people’s own informal narrative practices, as a ‘storyteller in the corner’, I think they would have welcomed my stories, ideas and listening presence in the long term, just as they valued their youth workers. By making my stories a hook to lure them into structured drama workshops, requiring young people to commit to the whole experience, my colleague and I were not strengthening but threatening their lifeworld, and the lifeworld kicked back. Liars’ Lunch In contrast, as discussed in Chapter 6, the origin of the Liars’ Lunch club at City School was a shared perception by teachers, pupils and myself that there was an identifiable gap in school life which a storytelling club could fill. We had identified a possible interstice within the school. It was my hope that within this niche, I could work with young people and supporting teachers to co-develop, consciously and responsively, a vernacular of storytelling. Yet there was a divergence between the teachers’ vision of the limits on this interstice, and my own, which can be illuminated by Owen Kelly’s distinction between two ‘self-directed and internally controlled activities of living communities […]: the protective and the expansive’ (1984: 51). Conscious of the deep social divides within the school, the teachers envisaged the club as providing a creative lunchtime alternative for the pupils they considered ‘vulnerable’, and perhaps enabling them to bond with a small number of other storytelling enthusiasts. Indeed, they made some efforts to restrict attendance to these groups alone. Establishing the club was, for them, a protective act of community—in Kelly’s words, their concern was to protect, nourish and maintain those minimum social meanings and resources without which community would be impossible […] (e.g.) the establishment and maintenance of basic communal facilities. (51)

When, however, a more diverse range of young people began to attend, we made steps towards eroding the lines between different ‘tribes’ through our own shared vernacular, built around the gothic and the surreal, practices of interrupting, and versions of games we evolved collectively. I felt that the improving relationships and creative ideas the club

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members were generating among themselves might even set off small ripples through the social life of the school. In this optimism I echoed Kelly’s second category of acts of community: Expensive acts, on the other hand, will aim to encourage and expand social meanings wherever they are strong. They will move beyond the determinist fallacy of seeing people solely as the products of a given, and pre-existing, culture, and take into account their role as co-authors of that culture. (51)

Kelly’s distinction hints at the productive relationship between the small events that can occur within social interstices, and the regeneration of a wider system. He envisages a conscious and sustained effort by a group, facilitated at least initially by an artist, to nurture a nucleus of autonomous shared practices, meanings and resources, which can then circulate and compete with the meanings imposed by authority or the market. It is this expansive role which I believe Liars’ Lunch, had it thrived, could have fulfilled in a small way within City School, by creating a vernacular that had not existed before, an alternative channel for communication which might have softened the lines between pupils and staff, ‘vulnerable’ and ‘naughty’ young people, the curriculum and the social life of the school. As Chapter 6 concludes, however, this glimpse of potentiality proved brief, as the club’s efforts to create a vibrant, bullying-free forum fell foul of the very measures the school had imposed to limit bullying: a very short lunchbreak, further shortened by frequent on-the-spot detentions. The interstice was simply too small to protect, let alone expand from. The ‘Need’ for a Storyteller? The contrast between these two ‘failures’ gives a new cast to the question of how storytellers should conceive of their role in adolescent settings. As Wilson (1997, 2004) and Shuman (1986) point out, many teenagers have their own established repertoire and modes of telling stories, and this oral heritage is a critical part of the texture of their lifeworld. Wilson makes a strong case that storytellers should not, ­missionary-like, try to impose their practice on young people who are ‘active, and indeed proficient, storytellers in their own right’ (2004: 20); who have, that is, their own vernacular. While my failure at Global Youth

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Club corroborates this view, my failure at City School perhaps exemplifies the dialogue-impoverished conditions where there is a ‘need’ for a storyteller. The youth club, a protected setting, was rich in dialogic opportunities. It was precisely City School, which did not have the luxury of allowing a vernacular of storytelling to develop and flourish, and much less of allowing the pupils to reshape school life, which would have benefited from the regenerative leaven of a storytelling club or similar forum. In these circumstances, it may be more helpful to envisage the storyteller’s role as ‘seeding’ storytelling practices within an interstice in the regime. An aesthetic or practice arising solely from the lifeworld of a group of young people is not inherently more valuable than one developed with the input or facilitation of caring adults. Both are endangered in some settings; both are valuable, and each may nourish the other. It could be legitimately argued, however, that there are many artistic and other practices which could have created the dialogic forum that seemed necessary at City School, as demonstrated by the fact that ‘everyday’ youth work practice appeared to supplant it at Global Youth Club. Is it possible to be more specific about what established storytelling practices contribute to a setting and the young people within it? This question is illuminated by Guattari’s examination of the interlinkages between the individual’s psyche and creativity, and the health of the social body of which they are a part.

Storytelling and Resingularisation of Institutions: Causing the Walls to Flicker? In Guattari’s clinic at La Borde, he was less interested in healing patients’ symptoms than in exposing them to new activities, relationships and possibilities. Like Buber, he found self-renewal to originate in the space ‘between’ people (or between people and environments). He aimed for his patients’ ‘resingularization’, a word which like most of Guattari’s terminology resists straightforward definition, but which refers to an escape from subjectivities imposed by capitalist economic and social relations, or colonised by instrumental objectives. The patient role can be understood as just such a constrained subjectivity. He wished his patients, like artists (and often through the arts), to generate for themselves other roles and ways of interacting with others, which were healthily and creatively their own:

232  C. HEINEMEYER The important thing here is not only the confrontation with a new material of expression, but the constitution of complexes of subjectivation: multiple exchanges between individual-group-machine. These complexes actually offer people diverse possibilities for recomposing their essential corporeality, to get out of their repetitive impasses and, in a certain way, to resingularize themselves […] One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette. (1995: 7)

Stories, with both their otherworldly and their highly personal facets, and with their tendency to initiate unusual conversations (Parfitt 2014), may be naturally suited to facilitate ‘complexes of subjectivation’. My notes during the devising process of Wormwood in the Garden (see Chapter 5) circle around the sense of multiple possibilities in the territory created by our exploration of the storyworld: There is a network of relationships between the two young people, me, the story, the garden, the puppets and props, Imogen’s poetry, the city, Maple House, the mental health system in general. (1 June 2015)

In The Three Ecologies (2000), Guattari lays out the interdependencies between the ecologies of the natural environment, the social body and the individual psyche. His ‘ecosophical’ philosophy contends that, if we are to reverse social divisions, inequality and ecological destruction, we need to find ways of resingularising both individual and collective subjectivities at every level. Thus, for example, the social role and curriculum of the pupils in City School’s intervention classes somewhat constrains their subjectivity to that of low achievers in an economically struggling corner of an unequal society. Although in theory these young people may achieve anything, in practice their education tends to encourage them to be compliant and grasp the ‘basics’, so as to find a place in that society, and to discourage them from critiquing its injustices or helping to renew it. Yet, as discussed in Chapter 2, through engaging with the complexities of concrete political and social situations (such as rainforest destruction) through storyknowing, they sometimes reached a level of critical, intellectual and emotional engagement which was so far in excess of what the curriculum expected of them, that it felt virtually transgressive. Any cognitive dissonance this may have created felt like a price worth paying for the sense of a unique exchange among skilled and curious storytellers with a stake in the wider world. The history of community and participatory

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arts is strewn with such islands of excess; indeed providing an escape route from constrained subjectivities is a key mode of (or precondition for) achieving ongoing social change. I would argue that the concrete, graspable specifics of a story—the multiple points of access it provides— are an invaluable element to such a complex of subjectivation. Such incidents in City School were many, but they usually remained sealed within the walls of one classroom. Guattari, however, wishes the aesthetic process of resingularisation to influence institutions at every level, abolishing the rigidity of their roles and structures, and making each one and each relationship within it a unique and singular thing: Something is detached and starts to work for itself, just as it can work for you if you can ‘agglomerate’ yourself to such a process. Such requestioning concerns every institutional domain, for example, the school. How do you make a class operate like a work of art? What are the possible paths to its singularization, the source of a “purchase on existence” for the children who compose it? (1995: 132–133)

Artistic approaches which tangibly grapple with the scale of Guattari’s challenge are few. One of the most notable is Sisters Academy, a performance collective whose ‘manifestations’ involve the complete takeover of a mainstream secondary school for a fortnight through immersive performance strategies, to allow the ‘inner inherent poetic potential’ of each teacher and pupil to unfold (Hallberg 2018). While every lesson continues to be taught, the other-worldly atmosphere draws the whole school community into a new paradigm of teaching and learning to help build a just, emotionally connected and ecologically sound society. Other unusual and ambitious approaches to resingularising whole schools and their surrounding communities, if only momentarily, include those of Hidden Giants (Gorman 2019), Glass Performance (2019) and Border Crossings (2018). The same impetus for whole school renewal arguably drives programmes such as the Arts Council of Wales’s Lead Creative Schools scheme (Arts Council of Wales 2019) and Creative Partnerships (Creativity Culture and Education 2019), which place artists as creative agents in schools for extended periods, although in practice competing drivers to raise educational attainment within existing frameworks can often take precedence over transformative ambitions. As Nick Nuttgens, former director of Creative Partnerships Sheffield, explains, ‘In my experience there was always a tension between our desire to do something

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that really provoked fresh thinking or new experience and being “useful”’ (Nuttgens, pers. comm., 2018). Yet all of these practices envisage leaving, at the least, a long-term trace after the artist has gone, in the form of new means of expression and communication which have been experimented with in enough depth to start to gain their own life and momentum—in Guattari’s words, ‘something is detached’. On an even larger scale, Nick Rowe (2015) evidences the beneficial impact on a university (York St John University) and its students of hosting ‘Converge’, a range of arts and other learning programmes for users of the mental health system. Rather than adopting a therapeutic model of practice with ‘service users’ and ‘professionals’, the Converge programme defines learning as a multi-directional process; the university’s student volunteers often find themselves in an apprentice role to more experienced Converge students. At organisational level, the presence of Converge also suggests an alternative identity for the university, that of the ‘healing campus’. From a Guattarian perspective, this alternative identity might be said to renew and resingularise the university, by providing an alternative driver to market-­ imposed logics of competition, and blurring the boundaries between the roles of community member, staff and student. As these practices suggest, there are various artistic means other than storytelling of ‘detaching something’, and on occasion they can operate radically and transformatively. I remain interested, however, in how resingularisation can happen on an everyday basis in institutions, even without cost or structural reform. To me, the semi-autonomous life of a story, or an emergent storytelling vernacular, within a group, is a strong candidate to function as this ‘something’, which Guattari refers to elsewhere as a ‘mutant nucleus of subjectivation’ (1995: 131). Stories told, retold and mutated become unique possessions of individuals and groups, nuclei, reference points for realisations made or moments when relationships collectively shifted. For one intervention class, their collaborative composition of the hero’s journey tale, Mr Imagination, became totemic of their identity as a group of storytellers, such that a year later, they retold the story in detail to other pupils, using it as a shorthand for what storytelling had come to mean to them. This process can be speeded by the ‘everyday’ nature of storytelling, and its ability to move between multiple levels of formality and gravitas. It can be both subversive and under the radar, not needing to announce itself under the banner of a radical arts project. Many groups of young people rapidly grasp the marginal, fluid, potentially influential role of storyteller, needing only a small amount of facilitation, modelling and

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transparency on the part of a visiting or resident storyteller before they can develop their own vernacular versions of it. For these reasons, one role of storyteller may be rapidly to catalyse this process of resingularisation such that the metaphorical ‘walls’ of the institution—its stated purpose and roles—are felt to ‘flicker’ for a moment, or perhaps even to be regularly called into question. In particular, dialogic storytelling fora may allow for usual roles to be transcended, assumptions to be challenged, or new and unexpected shared meanings to be coined. To see how this can happen, turn back for a moment, if you will, to the story which begins this book—John’s Legend of Swimming. Rather than reinforcing the regulations which confined young people to the setting and kept their case histories confidential, the staff at Maple House endorsed John’s leadership, as well as what D. Stephenson-Bond (1993) would call his ‘personal myth’. His escape, and the meaning he had made from it, had insights to offer to the other young people, the setting, and potentially also to local people (via the radio station). John’s legend suggests how understanding storytelling as playing a resingularising role helps to escape the binary between a ‘therapeutic’ and an ‘artistic’ storytelling practice. Neither I nor, I think, John perceived his telling of his strange experience to be cathartic or necessary for him personally. Rather, he and his story brought other young people back into an optimistic and voluntary engagement with what the setting had to offer—something which both the staff’s therapeutic goal of increasing participation in groups, and my initial challenge to ‘explore the theme of flooding’, had failed to achieve. Roles had been subtly reversed, rules suspended, and as a result, something—a unique communal legend— had indeed detached itself and started to work for us all over the coming weeks. John’s story suggests how a dialogic mode of storytelling, open to surprise and leadership by young people, entails an open-mindedness as to what the exchange is ‘for’ and who might bring what to it, and a secret hope that it might cause the walls of the institution to flicker.

Dialogic Storytelling: The Everyday Chronotope Reinvented? Experiences such as John’s illustrate that some young people do have access to spaces and fora where attentive listening can occur across generations, and where their understandings can help to shape and renew the institution around them. This brings us back to the existence

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already posited of a bifurcation of the systems supporting and educating young people. While the scope of mainstream institutions like secondary schools to provide the dialogic fora envisaged by Habermas has arguably decreased, protected settings for young people identified as vulnerable or mentally unwell abound in opportunities for dialogue. Indeed, access to such settings risks becoming another unequally distributed resource, which the least articulate young people, or those with the least confident parents, are less likely to obtain. I have documented (in Heinemeyer 2018) conversations I have observed between young people, struggling in mainstream school, sharing tips on how to get referred to a pupil referral unit—because ‘they treat you like a human being there’. The processes determining which young people are referred to caring environments such as Maple House and which are sent to schools’ ‘isolation’ rooms for bad behaviour are highly imperfect. Moreover, the nuanced dialogues occurring within protected settings are often more or less sealed off from influencing mainstream provision. Ultimately, all young people are potentially vulnerable, all are potentially significant contributors to society, and all need and deserve responsiveness, flexibility and dialogue. The intergenerational empathy gap I have evidenced calls on us to make special efforts to hear and understand what young people are saying. Storytelling is a vessel designed for this purpose. Within my own practice, the stories young people created often threw up recurring motifs (alongside much exuberant and utopian creativity). Without psychoanalysing these, I learnt to harken to them and follow the themes they generated. For example, I frequently encountered the figure of a young and wounded hero or anti-hero in retreat to a wild and lonely place, on the run from technology and unsympathetic eyes. A related common theme was that of dystopias, societal and ecological breakdowns. The moral reversals at the end of stories sometimes seemed like straws, not happy endings but snatched refuges of calm, happiness, trust and control, of fragile bonds being formed between individuals across complex and cold environments. Undoubtedly these motifs will partially reflect themes of film or young adult fiction, as well as concerns young people may perceive in my consciousness through my tellings—storytelling can never be a wholly unbiased research method. Nonetheless, they provide starting points for discussion and creative exploration, and insights into how the personal, the cultural and the global interact in young people’s lives.

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Talking of story in this way, however, indicates a particularly contemporary, conscious receptiveness to the listener which may seem more complex than the traditional conception of storytelling. To understand why this is, we need to return to our discussion of chronotopes. Storytelling has undoubtedly always provided a vehicle for unusually attentive, I/ Thou dialogue, through the narrative channel of storyknowing, within young people’s everyday lives. I have suggested (in Chapter 2) that the everyday chronotope rests primarily on the mechanism of counsel, and the related metaphor of the story as a walk across unknown territory—on the common-sense idea that telling any story or sharing any experience is likely to provide something of use, and build up shared understanding by eliciting answering stories exploring similar territory. The value of counsel will never go away, but the more the pace of social change accelerates, the thornier it becomes. To counsel other people, one must inhabit the same social sphere as them, at least to the degree that one’s own understandings gained from experience might foreshadow their future experiences and needs. For example, the success of Pat Ryan’s (2008) Kick into Reading project lay in bringing experienced football coaches to tell stories to young footballers. Bruner draws on Jean-Paul Sartre’s observations to explain this point: life stories must mesh, so to speak, within a community of life stories; tellers and listeners much share some “deep structure” about the nature of a “life”, for if the rules of life-telling are altogether arbitrary, tellers and listeners will surely be alienated by a failure to grasp what the other is saying or what he thinks the other is hearing. Indeed, such alienation does happen cross-generationally, often with baleful effects. (2006: 138)

Thus it was in the 1930s, in the aftermath of rapid industrialisation and the dramatic social ruptures of the First World War, that Benjamin contended that ‘“having counsel” is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring’ (1973: 86). In the same way, the idea of adult storytellers providing counsel to young people through stories today is challenged by the empathy gap, in that adults may consider their own life experience to be of only limited relevance to adolescents growing up in highly mediatised, highly uncertain, politically and ecologically unstable times. Moreover, the everyday chronotope was based on a confidence in the multifaceted value of narrative knowledge and a readiness to make time for the storytelling exchange, which have prevailed during certain

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periods in education and the welfare state in the UK, although never unchallenged, and which have been in retreat since the early 1990s (see Chapter 2 and Heinemeyer and Durham 2017). My observation from working in a variety of settings catering to adolescents is that only in protected settings do adults and young people frequently share experiences and stories. Thus neither the spaces and time, nor the shared frame of reference, essential to the everyday chronotope can be taken for granted by a twenty-first-century storyteller working with adolescents. It therefore becomes necessary to articulate a way of working which inherits its intentions and values of open-endedness and exploration, and its ease with the cross-fertilisation of imagination and critical thinking, but adapts itself to current circumstances. Neither the dynamic nor the magical chronotopes (oversimplifications though these may be) fulfil this role, both involving, to some extent, a quest for a predetermined outcome, or an overemphasis of a certain ‘moment’ within storytelling over others. The dynamic reaches too eagerly towards a propositional expression of knowledge gained through story; the magical seems to limit the potential for critical engagement with reality; both can leave storytelling too open to instrumentalisation. It is dialogic storytelling which I put forward as the answer—and this book concludes by bringing together a picture of genuinely dialogic storytelling in the twenty-first century: how should storytellers offer our stories to young people, and just as importantly, where should we do it? How Shall We Tell Stories Dialogically with Adolescents? In Chapter 8, I proposed three metaphors—the story as walk, as a theatre of actions, and as a No-Man’s-Land or Spielraum. It is the third of these that I feel is most fundamental to dialogic storytelling, having taken shape in response to the empathy gap, and the particular needs of contemporary young people. It has the potential to honour the ethic of open-ended exploration which was so key to the everyday chronotope, and put our stories at the services of young people. While our own experience might not offer counsel, stories open, distant and fantastical enough to provide a common ground for mutual exploration are particularly valuable. Their strangeness and anachronisms may provoke; their complex plots and wide landscapes may show up the boundaries of social languages and bring them into dialogue with each other. Finally,

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they can be told with great dignity. Young people may choose to satirise these epic stories, bringing them down from their pedestals, but just as often they choose to raise up their own experiences to the mythic plane, and use the cachet of storytelling to make a proud statement of their hard-won learning. The generational rupture in understanding between an adult storyteller and a group of young people no longer applies at this level of universality; these stories are vastly flexible and can dignify or ‘crown’ almost any experience. Simultaneously, however, being continually surprised by the very different resonances stories may strike for young people reiterates the guiding role explored in Chapter 7; even if we are creating something rather than discovering something already existent within a story, we cannot abdicate responsibility for bringing listeners home safely. Working without an agenda, but with an awareness of the many meanings in circulation between oneself and the listeners, bears an affinity to the everyday chronotope, with its lack of predetermined outcomes. Both chronotopes embrace listeners’ complex practice, the constantly shifting dynamics of the triangular storytelling relationship, and thus what Warren Linds calls ‘[g]roundlessness, the very condition revealed in common sense’ (2006: 116)—but the choice to work in this way is made more consciously within the dialogic chronotope. Given the increasing impermeability of mainstream secondary schools to the initiatives of artists (Ryan 2008, Walcon 2012), and the difficulty already explored of carving out spaces for a storytelling practice, on what ground can we work in this ‘groundless’ way? Where Shall We Build a Storytelling Practice with Adolescents? The preceding discussion of lifeworld and interstices suggests that we have several possibilities. We might be guided by understanding the dialogic possibilities that already exist within the formal and informal settings that are shared by young people and adults, and seek to enrich this lifeworld through storytelling activities, finding a fit between our storytelling practice and the existing practices of others. Where such possibilities seem too limited, we may need to carve out new spaces, interstices in the schedule or the building where we can establish fora for dialogue through storytelling—in libraries at lunchtimes, backstage, during form period or art club or homework club, on trips and projects, in the student well-being room, on off-curriculum days, or while people are

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arriving for sports practices. Once established and nurtured, such interstices may expand until young people create vernaculars of their own that cannot be easily suppressed: projects will be hatched, collaborations will form, the character of spaces will alter. If institutions are wise and responsive, they will encourage such expansive acts of community and allow them to help to regenerate the public sphere that young people and society so badly need. In practice, our approach will depend on the kind of setting in which we are working and the role we have within it. Storytellers working in mainstream schools may spend much of their time either grappling for a foothold, if they are outsiders, or struggling to make time for dialogue and narrative within their working practice, if they are insiders such as teachers. Their challenge is to soften the boundaries between groups, departments and categories within the school. Those working within the more hospitable, but insular, environments of protected settings such as youth clubs, pupil referral units, mental health provision or drama groups may have much less difficulty in establishing storytelling practices. Their challenge is rather to blur the boundaries of the setting itself: to provide pathways for young people’s storytelling to influence a wider audience, and ways for them to experiment with different roles inside and outside the setting. The peculiar ‘everydayness’ and unthreatening accessibility of storytelling—its ability to resist what Guattari calls the ‘bifurcation of subjectivity’ between rarefied artistic activity and mainstream culture (1995: 132)—is perhaps our greatest asset in this work. In my own practice, I have found the barely-visible boundary between storytelling and other forms of communication more usual in the school setting (lessons, drama) allowed storytelling to make its home in surprising areas of the institution, and briefly propose alternatives to some of the roles, relations and divisions that pertained there. There is another important dimension to the storyteller’s role with young people, a mentoring role which we might best think of as the ­‘storyteller-as-friend’. As long as we consider ourselves as workshop facilitators or ‘applied theatre’ practitioners working with groups of young people within organisations, there remains a kind of ‘lid’ in place restricting the aspirations young people can have for their storytelling. We need to ask ourselves what cap this model places on the role of participants; what alternative ‘higher’ roles it may prevent them from trying out. To lift the lid, it is necessary to be committed to the possibility of guiding

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interested young people to develop their engagement in storytelling in the wider world beyond institutional boundaries, roles or timescales—as performers, activists or storytellers to their own communities. This calls on us to be present to young people as storytellers and as people rather than simply as practitioners. As practitioners, we often need to err on the side of caution, celebrating all offers forthcoming in a tentative group: as Sean Cubitt said of community art, ‘we are always reluctant to tear down the fragile unity of the self that is being expressed’ (cited in Bishop 2012: 189). In contrast, in my mentoring relationships with young storytellers (such as during the process of devising Wormwood in the Garden documented in Chapter 5), the growing sense of an artistic common ground and the engagement with individual characters and abilities brought a greater robustness, artistic bravery and tolerance for dissensus. Friendship, vitally, implies the potential for long-term interaction, and thus for the detachment or development of something—a vernacular, a shared endeavour, ongoing obligations—that can endure beyond the relational moment, or the ten-week project, to support young people as they start to make their own mark on the world. This understanding of the ‘storyteller-as-friend’—a friendship which needs to retain a finely tuned awareness of professional boundaries—has an interesting echo of recent ‘ecosystemic’ thinking on child and adolescent mental health, seeking to move beyond a reliance on clinical interventions and professional roles to a nurturing of the informal support systems available to an individual young people, from the local priest to the next-door neighbour (Wright 2015). Where rigidly defined systems cannot meet a young person in dialogue—see for example Godwin’s (2015b) account of a bureaucratic and frustrating transition from children’s to adult mental health services—they will have need of responsible others who, as in Sandra Lynch’s glossing of Derrida’s view of friends, will ‘engage purposefully but without purpose and see what happens – much like the artist does in producing a work of art’ (2002: 105). A s­toryteller-as-friend might play a certain creative and responsive role within a young person’s life, helping to bridge the gap between different identities (such as patient and artist, adolescent and adult); or in a group’s life, helping to nurture their own vernacular forms of storytelling. Figure 9.1 attempts a conceptual mapping of the resingularising roles which I propose for storytellers both within and beyond institutions:

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Fig. 9.1  Resingularisation and the storyteller

In all of these conceptual spaces in which storytellers can work, we need to return to the central role of singularity and resingularisation. That is, while storytellers may be engaged to work on short-term projects motivated by institutional goals, which we may or may not recognise as worthy, we render ourselves of service to adolescents by never letting these goals overcome the pull towards singularity: the singular experience expressed in story rather the ostensibly desired ‘learning outcome’; the singular relationship of friendship rather than the binary one of facilitator and participant. Singularity may arise wherever we respect the authority of the I/Thou relation over the I/It.

Last Word My own research journey has given me glimpses of the ways in which epic stories might form part of a common language for mutual understanding, friendship, and advocacy between storytellers and adolescents. It has convinced me that storytellers emphatically do have a role to play in re-seeding story and dialogue in youth settings where these have become endangered species. As artists operating in the spaces between art and simple conversation—and between institutions—storytellers number among the few non-aligned adults who may be able to listen carefully enough to gain a nuanced understanding of the challenges facing adolescents. Such an approach seeks to honour the ‘utopian

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function’ Zipes (1995) sees for storytelling, an everyday art form now placed in knowing hands. A MANIFESTO OF DIALOGIC STORYTELLING I START FROM THE POSITION that young people benefit from genuine, ‘I/Thou’ A manifesto of dialogic storytelling. I START FROM THE POSITION that young people benefit from genuine (‘I/Thou’) dialogue with caring adults, and that society will be enriched by their perspectives, but that this is near-impossible to achieve in institutional settings. THUS different social languages are needed from those of everyday communication in institutions. The sparseness of story makes it inherently responsive to context, in that a story requires ‘rehydration’1 in each setting: a transposition to the time, place and particular context of each telling. The storyteller must, however, be sparing and leave gaps for the listeners to stitch the story to their own experience. SINCE the storyteller can only call on her own experiential vocabulary to perform this delicate task, AND the listeners can only call on theirs to fill in the gaps, AND these two processes are often simultaneous and reflexive,

What results is a dialogue ‘in another room’ between their respective knowledges.

This ‘other room’ is a bounded place in which different discourses can be accommodated and then orchestrated, by both the storyteller and other participants; thus the boundaries of worldviews and the existence of alternatives become clearer, and there can be negotiation to create new meanings and (imperfectly) shared understandings.

The storyworld is also a place where all present can operate on a higher and roughly equal plane of understanding, because of innate human tendency to think in narrative;

244  C. HEINEMEYER no-one’s knowledge is sufficient and everyone’s is necessary, thus not even the storyteller can know her way around at the outset, nor can she have preordained goals for what should happen there. no-one can be forced to enter, or to stay in once there. The ultimate dampener of the storyteller’s hubris is that she must ask the listeners for the gift of their listening.

There will be many occasions when there is no meeting of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, no real dialogue— sometimes because listeners are not disposed to listen, sometimes because the storyteller puts her blinkers on and navigates the storyworld using her own pre-planned route, or seeks to bind listeners into it against their will.

A storyteller cannot rely on the ‘magical’ connection of storytelling. Nor can she force a critical or ‘dynamic’ engagement with the ideas a story implies. It is only when she is aware of both these possibilities that a ‘dialogic’ mode of storytelling can result. The muscles being exercised are those of developing a responsible discourse of causalities, of recognising the ultimate unfathomability of the world, while assuming the role of one who can help to shape it with others.

dialogue with caring adults, and that society will be enriched by their perspectives, but that this is near-impossible to achieve in most schools and institutions. THUS different social languages are needed from those of everyday communication in institutions. The sparseness of story makes it inherently responsive to context: a story requires ‘rehydration’2 in each setting: a transposition to the time, place and particular context of each telling. The storyteller must, however, be sparing and leave gaps for the listeners to stitch the story to their own experience. SINCE the storyteller can only call on her own experiential vocabulary to perform this delicate task, AND the listeners can only call on theirs to fill in the gaps, AND these two processes are often simultaneous and reflexive,

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What results is a dialogue ‘in another room’ between their respective knowledges.

This ‘other room’ is a bounded place in which different discourses can be accommodated and then orchestrated, by both the storyteller and other participants; thus the boundaries of worldviews and the existence of alternatives become clearer, and there can be negotiation to create new meanings and (imperfectly) shared understandings.

The storyworld is also a place where all present can operate on a higher and roughly equal plane of understanding, because of innate human tendency to think in narrative; no-one’s knowledge is sufficient and everyone’s is necessary, thus not even the storyteller can know her way around at the outset, nor can she have preordained goals for what should happen there. no-one can be forced to enter, or to stay in once there. The ultimate dampener of the storyteller’s hubris is that she must ask the listeners for the gift of their listening.

There will be many occasions when there is no meeting of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, no real dialogue sometimes because listeners are not disposed to listen, sometimes because the storyteller puts her blinkers on and navigates the storyworld using her own pre-planned route, or seeks to bind listeners into it against their will.

A storyteller cannot rely on the ‘magical’ connection of storytelling. Nor can she force a critical or ‘dynamic’ engagement with the ideas a story implies. It is only when she is aware of both these possibilities that a ‘dialogic’ mode of storytelling can result. The muscles being exercised are those of developing a responsible discourse of causalities, of recognising the ultimate unfathomability of the world, while assuming the role of one who can help to shape it with others.

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Note 1. A term coined by storyteller and tradition bearer Shonaleigh Cumbers.

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248  C. HEINEMEYER Haggarty, B. (2014, July). The Ladder to the Moon: The progression of stories and narrative sequencing in performance. http://www.crickcrackclub.com/ MAIN/LADDER.PDF. Accessed March 2020. Hallberg, G. W. (2018). Sisters Academy: Radical live intervention into the educational system. In M. Reason & A. M. Lindelof (Eds.), Experiencing liveness in contemporary performance (pp. 130–136). London: Routledge. Harper, D., & Speed, E. (2012). Uncovering recovery: The resistible rise of recovery and resilience. Studies in Social Justice, 6(1), 9–25. Heinemeyer, C. (2015). Storytelling at an adolescent mental health unit. http:// storytellingwithadolescents.blogspot.com/2015/03/storytelling-at-adolescent-mental.html. Accessed March 2020. Heinemeyer, C. (2018, September 3). Mental health crisis in teens is being magnified by demise of creative subjects in school. TheConversation.com. Heinemeyer, C., & Durham, S. (2017). Is narrative an endangered species in schools? Secondary pupils’ understanding of “storyknowing”. Research in Education, 99(1), 31–55. Kelly, O. (1984). Community, art and the state: Storming the citadels. London: Comedia. Kester, G. (2004). Conversation pieces: Community and communication in modern art. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lacy, S. (2010). Leaving art: Writings on performance, politics and publics, 1974– 2007. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Linds, W. (2006). Metaxis: Dancing (in) the in-between. In J. Cohen-Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), A boal companion: Dialogues on theatre and cultural politics (pp. 114–124). London: Routledge. Lorraine, T. (2011). Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent ethics. Albany: SUNY Press. Lynch, S. (2002). Aristotle and Derrida on friendship. Contretemps, 3, 98–108. https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/phil_article/16/. Accessed March 2020. McCarthy, T. (1984). Translator’s introduction. In Theory of communicative action, Vol. 1: Reason and the rationalisation of society (pp. vii–xliv, J. Habermas, ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Millman, L. (1977). Our like will not be here again: Notes from the West of Ireland. Saint Paul, MN: Ruminator Books. National Audit Office. (2018). Converting maintained schools to academies. https://www.nao.org.uk/press-release/converting-maintained-schools-toacademies/. Accessed March 2020. North Yorkshire County Council. (2018). Young people’s art challenges stigma and stereotypes. https://www.northyorks.gov.uk/news/article/young-peoples-art-challenges-stigma-and-stereotypes. Accessed March 2020. O’Connor, P., & Anderson, M. (2015). Applied theatre: Research—Radical departures. London: Bloomsbury. Outwood Grange Academies Trust. (2018). Prospectus. http://webfiles.outwood.com/OGAT+Prospectus.pdf.

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Appendix 1: Practitioner Interviews

To introduce the voices of other practitioners into a discussion of the dialogic chronotope, I include short dialogues with two other artists whose practice embodies this way of working: storyteller Jo Blake, and drama practitioner Matthew Harper-Hardcastle. Both of their practices encompass both a deep understanding of story and a critical awareness of applied theatre, and consciously facilitate a dialogue between reality and myth, storyteller and listener. Jo Blake is a performer, performance-maker and teacher across the disciplines of storytelling, theatre and dance. She has a PhD in Storytelling from the University of Chichester, an MA with Distinction in Dance Theatre from Trinity Laban and a First Class BA (Hons) in Performing Arts from the University of Winchester. She teaches an annual course in embodied storytelling practices in Northamptonshire and continues to perform, teach and collaborate with prominent national and international companies and institutions, including the National Theatre and British Council, as well as emerging artists and local communities. She is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Northampton. CH: You have worked as a storyteller now for 18 years, your entire adult life. How did you, as a young person just out of school, learn your craft? Who taught you, what did they teach you, and how?

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6

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JB: My early days of getting into storytelling were influenced by two things. Firstly, in 2001, aged 19, I went to the School of Storytelling at Emerson College. I loved it there—it was very structured, there was a wonderful progression to what they taught. I also loved being around people of such different ages—I was the youngest person and the oldest person on the course was 62. At that point, I had no desire to go to university. I wasn’t really into mainstream culture, I didn’t feel part of it. So I felt very much at home in that environment, studying storytelling with people of all different ages and from different countries. Secondly, it wasn’t long after leaving Emerson that I entered the Young Storyteller of the Year competition, and that connected me more to the public storytelling scene, the likes of Ben Haggarty, David Ambrose and other known names on the storytelling scene. And also, the year that I entered, there was Rachel Rose Reid and Tim Ralphs— that’s where we met each other. Rachel won the competition; Tim and I were highly commended runners-up. Then after that it was this very peculiar process—I did some training with Ben Haggarty, and one-week storytelling retreats with Hugh Lupton and Eric Maddern—so I did all that training and was doing a lot of work going into schools and putting on events locally. I also went to university during that time as well, and studied Performing Arts. Some of the training, particularly the physical training, that we did at Emerson, was of interest to me as a performance discipline. I was always asking myself: How do they do that, what are they doing with their voice, their bodies? I had that interest in the mechanisms right from the very early days, which felt, in a way, contrary to what a lot of the storytelling culture seemed to be about. That culture really seemed to emphasise the story, that the story is the main thing, and that’s the thing that most storytellers live for and are drawn to. Although the stories were very familiar to me, that landscape of fairy tale of myth felt very familiar and ordinary to me, it was more the mechanisms of performance that I became interested in. That’s what led me then to study Performance at university—even though I was studying very contemporary performance forms, there was always this link to storytelling. I was studying contemporary companies and solo artists, and seeing them playing with the same ideas as I was interested in with storytelling—going into non-performance venues, having a very fluid relationship with the audience, recognising the very ritual nature of performance.

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CH: You have written about the need to ‘disenchant’ storytelling training—can you explain what you mean by that? JB: I am referring back to my own experiences. My experience with storytelling culture when I came into it was that there was, and still is I think, a real mythos around storytelling. There is a sense of certain narratives around contemporary storytelling: who a storyteller is, the model of work you do—for instance, storytellers work in schools, with traditional narrative, that that can come from anywhere in the world, that we don’t use scripts but oral composition. There were all these things that seemed like given, yet at the same time I’d meet storytellers all the time who would tell you that they write their stories, or had the urge to create their own stories, but felt inhibited from doing so. I saw people not quite fitting into the model, and felt that I myself didn’t always want to fit into that model. So yes—so when I talk about enchantment I almost feel like storytellers are enchanted by their own myth, this mythical idea of what a storyteller is, and that storytellers themselves become quite enchanted by that idea, and I guess what I’m interested in, and what I’m trying to do constantly with my own work, is to explore what a storyteller can be right now. I am interested and inspired by what a storyteller used to be. But the times we are living in now are different from any other time. What do these myths have to say right now? And that’s partly about the content of the myth—the fact that every myth we meet has been on a journey through the pen of probably white, middle-class, educated men, through the filter of our quite patriarchal European society, so that needs to be questioned. Then just as importantly, to me, the form of storytelling also needs to be questioned— where are we receiving these notions from about what storytelling is? That’s what I mean by disenchanting storytelling: checking our own sense of whether we’re enchanted by the mythos of the storyteller. My main desire as a storyteller is to be of service to contemporary audiences, and people and communities, and I feel like more than ever, my job as an artist is to help wake people up. That is the opposite of putting people to sleep, which is often what storytellers are seen as aiming for! CH: You have taught the art of storytelling to many young undergraduate performers and are currently running your own training programme for those interested in developing an artistic storytelling practice. What does it take for a person—perhaps particularly a young person—to become a storyteller? How can we nurture this process?

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JB: I think it’s really difficult to step into the role of a storyteller at a young age. I see it as being a long transformation. This is not to say that young people can’t be storytellers; you start the process when you’re young, but I think that it’s a long journey towards that place where you really feel that you can inhabit that role fully. I say that because there is, to me, some kind of inherent link between the storyteller and wisdom. When I think about the storyteller, what makes the storyteller different from the dancer or the actor, I associate the storyteller with wisdom, which is a depth of knowing which only comes through experience— through knocks and difficulties and stuff that life throws at you. I do believe the skills of storytelling can definitely be developed from when you’re younger. Those skills which I would cultivate in the students I worked with are things like presence—being present to the moment, being present to the images in your mind—and trying to shorten the gap between what you see in your head, what your body is doing and what your words are saying. It’s about trying to cultivate this state of presence where the imagination, the body and the words are very organically connected, so you’re able to follow the impulses. That state of presence can be cultivated from any age, and actually children have it quite naturally, though it’s undisciplined. So we have to refine that really tight organic connection. But in terms of the telling of fairy tales and myth, for me those stories really come alive when you get a sense that the storyteller has somehow lived them in some way. So when people ask me, ‘How do you find stories, where do you get stories from?’, I really believe that you have some stories that are really personal to your life experience, that really ring true or resonate for you. When you’re sharing those stories, you’re sharing a deep understanding of them, so it’s a rich experience. That, for me, is what really marks storytelling out from an actor in a written play. It’s a story that you’ve lived with. So when I work with young people I encourage them to be listeners, to go and hear storytellers and fill their minds with stories, and pay very close attention to when they’re caught by an image in a story. It might be that there’s a moment in a particular story that just fascinates you, that makes you cry, that you can’t get rid of, or that pops into your mind when you have an argument with somebody. And then whenever opportunities arise in their friendship groups or communities to stand up and share a story, to take that opportunity—if you have a story that resonates in a particular gap—stand up and tell it.

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So it’s somehow connected to who you are on a very fundamental level. There are techniques, but there’s also much more than techniques. CH: How do you see storytellers responding to the circumstances of young people’s lives today? And to flip that question around, how do you see young people contributing to, or reshaping, the art of storytelling? JB: I don’t see many young people coming through the storytelling scene. Just to be clear, storytelling is way broader than ‘the storytelling scene’, but that scene itself isn’t that different from how it was when I entered it twenty years ago, which in this day and age seems pretty mad. There’s a question there about why, and I have thoughts on that, but it’s hard to say exactly what is going on. All I know is that whenever I introduce storytelling to young people, the reaction is always the same, which is a deep interest and a very positive experience. Certainly, when I worked with young actors on the Acting degree at Northampton University, learning storytelling was, for some of them, a very profound experience. They realised that they were connected to this long tradition that stretched back thousands of years. We’d trace it right back to that theatre in Greece when Thespis created a play in which there was a dialogue, and the actor turned their attention to another person on the stage instead of the audience. Before that moment there was only storytelling. Recognising that lineage is a major experience for young people. I think at the moment we need lots and lots of trickster storytellers, and I think it all needs to be exploded. Honour tradition, but be ready to turn it all on its head. A bit of irreverence is really needed in our age—not flippant irreverence, but reverent irreverence. Because that’s when the rebirth comes. We need a bit of rebirth in storytelling, I feel. Matt Harper-Hardcastle is a theatre maker, with his practice firmly rooted within community engagement. Based in Yorkshire, Matt has worked extensively across many youth theatres, including York Theatre Royal, Upstage Centre Youth Theatre and Connecting Youth Culture. He was the long-standing artistic director for Once Seen Theatre, a company made of actors with learning disabilities and was the theatre tutor for Converge, an education programme for adults with mental health problems. Matt also runs his own company, Next Door But One, delivering performance with and for community groups. CH: As a youth theatre practitioner and director of youth and community theatre, what is your relationship to story? When you’re starting an R&D or devising process, what role does story have in that from the outset?

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MHH: It’s the most important thing—that those involved understand it or are given enough space, time and agency to explore it. It is the washing line for all ideas, or which all conversations or all moments of creative expression hang off—without the washing line you just have a pile of stuff on the floor. With young people, their imagination can be so vast that you can end up exploring an unmanageably large territory. Bringing story into it gives them permission to self-edit, but also to edit within the group and bring people back from tangents they have been following. It gives them a rationale for their decisions, so they take more ownership of the devising process. And this is the case regardless of people’s learning needs. With Once Seen Theatre, a company I direct for adults with learning disabilities, they say that they can now tell stories, in a way they couldn’t before. People had treated them as if they needed a diluted version, but now we spend time working on the story in-depth. It gives them a grasp on the whole process and the reasons for making the choices we make. CH: When you were devising a play, The Holding Place, in response to the refugee crisis with your 14-16-year-old youth theatre group Project J, you invited me to come and observe the process. You also invited me to tell the group a story—the section of Virgil’s Aeneid dealing with Aeneas’ search for a new homeland after the battle of Troy—to see if that would add anything to the devising journey. What do you feel this brought to the process? MHH: It brought a territory that the young people could not only access, but felt confident critiquing and voicing opinions in. Speaking of real people in real, troubling situations was a daunting prospect for most of the young people—they were scared to cause offence or say the wrong thing. But once in the world of fiction, agency was given to say ‘that person should not act in that way’ or that ‘this person deserves this’. Eventually, after finding the grounding and vocabulary within a fictitious world, the conversations began to merge into those that discussed parallel real-life scenarios. The end performance then became one that the company felt empowered to tell, rather than the very timid, somewhat superficial exploration that might have occurred without the initial, mythical story. CH: A piece you wrote and directed which made a big impression on me was Where I’m Stood in 2015, which was informed by numerous interviews with local young people about their lives and the challenges they faced. You wrote in the programme notes that many of your interviewees seemed to feel

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‘divorced from their peers and the world around them’. Do you think this is an age-old part of being young, or is it something that’s particular to these times in some respect? MHH: I think there is, to some extent, an age-old problem in which teenagers are almost expected by themselves, their peers and adults to almost skip over being a teenager—with the majority of interaction or interventions focused on growing up or preparing to be an adult, rather than just asking, who are you and where are you now. This ‘in betweeny’ stage of adolescence is often dealt with as if it were just a long transition, when in fact it should be relished. That’s what we found from Where I’m Stood—teenagers had some of the most interesting experiences and stories that could articulate their generation and their place in the world, but there wasn’t really a gap or a platform where they could express those without a prior agenda. However, a particular theme for those young people we were working with (even though it seems to be the current scapegoat) was social media and the culture which surrounds it. There is an expectation now to be more connected, more public, more sharing and consume more of the news, information and happenings. Whether it is just the vastness of this or the constant reachability that becomes overwhelming, young people actually have the opposite response and become more detached. CH: Can you say something about the difference between working with the stories of young people’s true personal experiences as in Where I’m Stood, versus working with fictional or mythical material? If you were making a sequel to Where I’m Stood, what approach would you take? What would make you choose to use autobiographical material rather than a mythic or fictional story as a ‘washing line’? MHH: I think both approaches were acknowledgements of the teenagers who were part of it. Where I’m Stood was a way to get their stories out to a wider audience, so that people could see how things really are for them. All of the young people we interviewed for it were already very articulate about their own narrative. So—importantly—their stories were not raw, unprocessed personal information, they were curated and fully formed. There was a sense of ‘this is what I’m ready to say to the world’. We didn’t go in with a set of themes in the research phase—the brief we sent out to all the groups was: we want to know what it’s like to be your age, in this city, now. Tell us a story that tells us something about that. We were given some quite gruelling stories, such as of the care system, but maybe because of the care system they were quite used to telling

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that. But then there were other stories which were just hilarious anecdotes of things—stories that just gave the essence of what it’s like to be them, who they were in their social group. For example, we heard from young people about a place in York called Sex Hill—they all knew it, and everything happens at Sex Hill, not just teenage sex. So we decided to feature in the play the party in the park where everything happens. I think it felt ethically OK because we knew we were gathering stories from one group of young people, to be performed by another group. So we weren’t going to be exposing people’s experiences directly. And in fact, there was an audience member in her 60s who recognised the issues from her own adolescence; she said they were ‘just packaged differently’. Whereas with the story of Dido and Aeneas, I was worried—because it’s huge. Was it going to throw them, overshadow their own stories? But in fact, they needed it—I think they felt the right to play with it. They were quite conscious of the switch between storyworlds, the gradual moving away. CH: Do you think theatre-makers’ approach to fictional and fantastical stories is changing in any way? What are the emerging ways that people are working with young people? MHH: Among my networks, I have noticed a move towards a more self-contextualising, self-referencing, postmodern approach almost. When I was in youth theatre, the predominant experience was of ‘acting up’—a play mainly written for adults, performed by a cast pretending to be much older than they were. But recently, and as I currently work with Project J on their telling of Romeo and Juliet, the emphasis has changed. Many theatre makers are considering: How can this story be told in the voices of the young people? How can we fully acknowledge and harness the fact that this piece of theatre is being created and performed by young people, and how can it say something because of that fact? We’re using Brechtian techniques so there’s a teenage commentary on the whole scenario, so that they’re self-referencing who they are, as well as playing the parts. Therefore, the theme of adults not listening to young people comes to the fore—what if all the adults in the play had actually listened to Romeo and Juliet and helped them to achieve what they wanted to achieve, rather than saying, no, you can’t do that. They don’t want to make it into an issue play, but they’re really up for all the potential things it could be—what if it was an LGBT relationship? What if it was a play showing really strong women? It’s all the things they’re currently seeing

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in their world—they’re really aware of it in their lives—it gives them a completely fictitious world to apply these themes to and ask, what happens if that’s in there? I also think, aesthetically, it’s really boring to see a teenager dressed up as a 45 year old. Young people can get to the crux, or the heart of a character, and play that rather than the superficial or demographic characteristics. So, in The Holding Place, the character of Faisal was a ­middle-aged man, but he was also a wonderful storyteller—the 16-yearold girl playing him didn’t need to play him as an older man. CH: That sounds like there is something more complex going on there too—as if you are allowing young performers to ‘ghost’ the characters they are portraying. MHH: I think that since such a lot of teenagers now are politically and socially engaged, they can’t shelve their emerging beliefs for the sake of performance—so embracing ethnic or social differences has become, in some sense, enough of a challenge. I’m not saying that teenagers can only play teenagers or people who think like they do, but that there needs to be some recognition of their perspectives. It’s not simple to ask them to play Lady Capulet, trying to make her daughter get married, when they are staunchly opposed to that. Their own views about the justice of that situation need to find some expression in the performance as a whole. In addition, more scripts are becoming available for younger people. I can’t remember playing a teenager when I was a teenager. Now plays like Brainstorm by Company Three are more like frameworks for individual casts to use and shape to their own concerns. They are explicitly about devising, and making it your own—co-writing with young people. That’s why The Holding Place worked so well. Throughout the devising term, we transcribed all our ideas onto a 10-metre long roll of paper, unrolling it a little further each week. CH: I remember the last session of the devising term. Sitting around the fully unrolled paper at the end of the process, we could trace linkages between ideas, themes, moments in the fictional and the true stories, and all the young people’s intentions for the play came together. MHH: It was such an incredible moment—to go from week 1 where the group was so hesitant to even express an opinion, to that final week, all stood looking at this colourful and diverse exploration in pictures, poetry, statements, questions and squiggly lines. And just to return to your first question, I think this is the other gift of story; it is moveable.

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Once you are inside of it, you can shift things around, rearrange sections, redefine the boundaries and exit the story with a new one altogether. In the case of youth theatre and many other similar practices, it is a story that becomes richer because it has traces of all the different tellers left within it.

Story

Appendix 2: Games and Structures for Dialogue

Every storyteller, arts practitioner, teacher or youth worker will have their own ways of working with story, derived from their own practice. Often the best storytelling practice is just about sharing stories informally, with no particular plan or aim in mind. However, sometimes there is freedom in structure, particularly in educational or youth theatre settings. I have found the following games and activities particularly helpful in dialogic practice with young people, because they generate a spirit of shared exploration and make tangible the connection between participants. They are loosely grouped into three types: those for starting off a conversation, those for facilitating dialogue within the landscape of a story, and those which build towards a synthesis or collaborative retelling.

Starting the Conversation Chain Story—and Variations There are almost limitless forms of the ‘chain story’ game. One Word Round The Circle: Sitting in a circle, each person adds one word to the story. ‘Yesterday’—‘I’—‘went’—‘under’—‘ground’— ‘where’—‘I’…. You may want to play freely for a while, then gradually introduce some rules, for example, ‘no killing off other people’s © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6

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characters’, ‘say the most obvious/first word that comes into your head’. As people enter into this in a focused manner, a ‘hive mind’ will emerge and you may be able to set harder challenges, e.g. ‘By the time we get back to Samirah something dramatic must have happened’, or ‘The story should reach a satisfying conclusion within the next two rounds’. Three Words/One Sentence: As confidence builds in a ‘One Word’ game, you can extend people’s allocation to a larger number of words. Give/Take: Rather than progressing in order around the circle, give a stone to the person whose turn it is to add a sentence. Explain, ‘Once you have added your sentence, look around the circle to see who is the right person to take the story further, and pass the stone to them’. Eye contact increases and a sense of shared responsibility for curating the story builds. Once that is established, change the rule from ‘give’ to ‘take’: the person with the stone keeps talking until someone else feels they are the right person to continue the story. They cross the circle and take the stone from the speaker, and continue until someone else takes it from them. You may reach a point where both ‘give’ and ‘take’ rules are in operation and there is a gradual flow between group members. Exaggeration: This is a ‘silly’ game which nonetheless builds listening, confidence and dramatic range. Ask one group member for a true fact from their recent experience, e.g. ‘Yesterday my brother ate the chocolate I’d been saving for dessert’. The next person in the circle must exaggerate this statement, but only slightly—‘Yesterday Zara’s brother stole the chocolate she’d been saving for dessert and shoved it in his mouth in front of her’. The third person repeats the story with the dramatic ‘volume’ turned up one notch further… continue until the story has been inflated to what the group feels to be bursting point. ‘Yesterday before dawn, Zara’s brother lowered himself into the kitchen on a bungee cord suspended from the Eiffel Tower, cut a hole in her bedroom window, plundered her bedroom for every edible substance, taped her mouth and danced on her desk while stuffing all the food into his mouth…..’ Story Letters: Shyer groups may prefer to create chain stories in writing. The simplest version is ‘Consequences’, where the facilitator calls out the story elements which each person should write down—‘Main character’s name’, ‘where they went’, ‘whom they met there’, etc—and papers are folded and passed round the circle after each element. The

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results are frequently hilarious (and/or bawdy). However, a more lyrical variant, particularly for groups with a level of trust between members, and serious topics in mind, is ‘Story Letters’. Each person writes the beginning of a story on a page, stopping at a ‘crisis point’ or climax, and then chooses someone to swap with. The recipients write the second instalment of the story, bringing it to a conclusion (or you could have more ‘chapters’ and more swaps). Stories are then returned, as a kind of gift, to their originators who can read them silently or out loud. It’s important to debrief: ‘How did you feel about the ending your partner created? Were you surprised by it?’ Freeze-Hold-Change This is essentially a physicalised form of chain story. Form partners (or threes). Person A adopts a pose. Person B looks carefully at A’s freeze, then puts herself into a pose in relation to A’s. After holding for a moment, A relaxes and examines B’s pose, then adopts a different pose in relation to B’s. If in threes, A and B hold their pose and C adds herself into the scene, then A comes out, and so on. Every so often, draw the whole group’s attention to a particular pair’s freeze. Ask: ‘What do we imagine is going on here?’ It is impossible to avoid making up stories— take lots of suggestions. Alternatively, play this game in a circle. Person A takes a pose in the centre, then add person B, then A comes out and C enters, then B comes out and D enters, so the whole group can watch the gradually shifting narrative. Then keep building the frozen image without removing anyone, so that soon the whole group is in the image. Ask for interpretations, reasons for decisions made—does the group have any shared idea of what their scene shows, or are different understandings in play? Story Dice These special dice sets (containing nine dice) can be bought online, with each side showing a different object, character or location. By casting them one at a time, or a few at a time, group members can create a story that builds in elements on the dice as well as their own ideas. I have worked with groups that could play this game for hours.

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Word Litter As an alternative ‘randomising machine’, give out lots of tiny slips of paper. Ask young people to write on some of them a place, on some an object, on some a character, then ‘litter’ these over the floor or table. There are lots of ways to work with these: • You could place them face down and ask each pair of young people to choose three slips at random to create a story around (taking more slips whenever they need further inspiration). • You could distribute the litter over a large area, and send one volunteer walking among the slips, face up. Ask him to pick up two or three that attract his interest. He starts to tell the beginning of the story, walking around to find further elements as he goes. When he reaches another group member, he can pass the pile of slips he has gathered to her, and she continues the walk and the story. • You could order the slips into zones—locations, objects, characters—and use a ‘hero’s journey’ type structure to guide storymaking in pairs. Ask pairs to first choose a setting, then a main character, then an object which will give a clue to the character’s problem, then a character or object that will act as a helper, one that will be a hindrance….and so on to complete their story. • You could do the above as a whole group, as a chain story. The simple satisfaction of this game is that group members see others working in surprising ways with objects or ideas they have contributed. Yet it can lead to quite complex and highly worked narratives.

Activities for Dialogue Within a Story In My Head Just after you have (or a group member has) finished telling a story, zoom in on a particular moment, image or character in it and ask one listener, ‘What does the room/queen/forest/factory/house look like in your head?’ Then ask another listener (or several): ‘And what does it look like in your head?’ You might wish to ask them to write these down and then share them, so their answers don’t influence each other. The discrepancies will often be striking and detailed—‘She has long red hair and clenches her teeth a bit when she talks’. ‘No, she has dark hair, in a

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pixie cut, and she is very fragile-looking’. This exercise draws attention to the vital creative work of the listener and will open up discussions of the associations a story set off for each person in the room, as well as their judgements on characters and situations. Letters in a Landscape This is a good activity for exploring multiple perspectives and issues arising within a complex story, such as a myth, and starting to ‘novelise’ or interpret it. It takes at least 45 minutes. You may want to preface it by asking groups to make freeze-frames of 3-5 key moments within the story, to help them assimilate the whole story and identify the things that interest them most about it. First, ask each listener to choose the character that intrigues them most, or that they feel closest to. Ask them to home in, further, on a single moment when ‘their’ character is looking at another particular character. It might be the moment when a boy first meets his birth mother, or a woman decides to leave her husband, or even an imagined moment that never happened in the told story because the two characters never got to meet. Ask each person to write a letter from ‘their’ character to this other character in that moment. They must write the sender’s and addressee’s name at the top of the letter (‘From Grendel’s mother to Beowulf’). Encourage them to write the letter in free verse if they feel able, and perhaps to include questions in it. Now explain that the room you are in will represent the landscape of the story. Map this out verbally as a group: ‘That corner is the house she was born in’, ‘This is the sea’, etc. Ask each person to leave their letter in the place its intended recipient is most likely to find it. Gather the group back together and tell them they are no longer ‘their’ character. Now ask the group to move around the room, reading the letters until they find one they feel called to answer, as the intended recipient. They write a reply on the reverse of the page, then leave it in the place they found it. It is vital that every person present writes a reply, or else someone will be left with an unanswered letter. Everyone now returns to their original letter and reads the reply that has been left for them. Gather in a circle to read some of these out and discuss responses, feelings and issues raised. There will often be a sense of a storyworld which has become thickened and transformed by the opinions and experiences of the whole group.

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Wheel of Correspondence It is of course possible to play the above game without the ‘landscape’ element—simply imaginatively adopting the perspectives of different characters. This is particularly useful for opening up discussion of a character who is a mysterious ‘closed book’, who seems stereotypical/ archetypal (e.g. a passive heroine or a villain) or whose motivations are difficult for the group to understand—as is often the case in myth and folktales. In that case, identify all the characters in the story who have an interaction with this ‘Character A’. Ask young people to choose one of these characters and write a letter from their perspective to Character A. They then swap letters and write a response from Character A. Reading out the body of correspondence that results will give an abundance of clues or ideas about what makes Character A tick, and starting points for further creative work. Word Clouds Ask the group to choose a small number of characters in a story whom they find intriguing, then write each of these names in big letters on separate pages. Place these names far apart from each other around the room. Give out lots of tiny slips of paper and ask each person to write on each an adjective/phrase describing one of these characters. Keep going until everyone has written some slips about each character, and ask them to place their slips in a ‘cloud’ around the character’s name. Now ask everyone to stand near the single character they find most interesting of all—so that groups form which ‘own’ each character. Ask them to work as a group to create a poem, using the cloud of words and phrases around their character, as well as any other words or phrases they want to add. They don’t need to repeat words that come up often— though they might want to use them as refrains. Then ask them to devise a group performance of their poem, sharing out words and phrases, and choreographing it if they are game for this. The Museum of the Story This is a well-known devising strategy in drama education, which I have adapted to allow multiple low-pressure opportunities for individuals to tell a story. Bring in a box or suitcase containing an array of objects, which

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need not (in fact, should not) have any obvious link with the story you are working with. Rather they should be very diverse objects that could resonate with lots of times and places—from clocks, to shoes, to cloths, to bowls, to old books, to ornaments, to dolls, to stones. Place the young people in the role of ‘experts’ on the time and place in which the story is set. Ask each person to choose an object whose role in the story they ‘know’. Give an example—‘This test-tube, as you will all be aware, contained drops of essence of a flower which was poison to people of magical origins like Blodeuedd, although to ordinary humans it was a tonic. She was given this by a scientist – they called them philosophers in that time – who took pity on her and wanted to give her a way out of her sufferings….’ The group then work in pairs to develop their stories of their objects through mutual questioning—‘Where did it come from?’ ‘What did she do for the scientist that made him want to help her?’ Then set up a ‘museum’. Half the group (one from each pair) are curators, and set themselves and their objects up in their chosen corners of the room—perhaps arranging them on a stand, with a display cloth. When they are ready, declare the museum open. The other half of the group enters as museum visitors, and visit, in turn, the various curators to hear their stories. This gives each curator-storyteller the opportunity to tell and refine their stories multiple times, building confidence. Then swap curator/visitor roles. You may wish to follow up by asking people to retell stories they have just heard that particularly struck them—another opportunity for young people to hear their own ideas told back, interpreted and appreciated. Story Gifts Create a set of slips of paper, each bearing the name of a ‘gift’, ranging from the lyrical and fantastical to the mundane: ‘a flute that can play any tune’, ‘a mirror that shows inside people’s souls’, ‘walkie talkies’, ‘x-ray specs’, ‘a river running through your garden’, ‘a cherry tree’, ‘superhuman strength’, ‘wings’, ‘the ability to bear pain’, ‘loads of money’…. These can be used in association with many of other activities. For example, if young people have generated or developed characters within a shared storyworld, ask them to introduce these characters to the rest of the group, then leave sketches of them in a chosen place around the room. Other young people then circulate, reading about each character and leaving gifts beside its sketch which might be useful to that

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character. Young people can then use these gifts to develop their character’s story and perspective. It is a good idea to include blank slips for young people to write down their own ideas for gifts.

Synthesis, Exchange and Retelling Storyhacking and Tale Exchange ‘Storyhacking’ covers a multitude of approaches, some of which I discuss in Heinemeyer (2018). The image of ‘hacking’ refers obviously to the ‘hacker’ and ‘maker’ movements, but for me it also conjures the image of a large animal hunted by a resourceful group of people. Each individual or family will carve out different bits of the animal to transform into something else entirely, perhaps to share with the whole community. We can do the same with the body of a monumental story—whether we do it reverentially, humorously, subversively or otherwise. In so doing we can harness the special affordances of different art forms—the different kinds of interpretive acts that are encouraged by creative writing as opposed to visual art, for example. The Tale Exchange is an approach which colleagues and I have developed which enables large groups to engage in a productive, creative process together, resulting in multiple artistic outputs which are shared. First, tell the story to everyone. Make sure it is a meaty one with lots of interesting characters, and different ways to interpret their actions—a myth, saga or historical legend will be better than a simple fairytale. Set up the room with different ‘stations’, according to your resources and the interests of your group, for example: a visual art station with paper, pastels, crayons, pencils and other resources; a collage station with newspapers, magazines, brochures, paper and glue; a creative writing station with plenty of pen and paper, and small bits of paper for creating a word bank; a drama station with a facilitator; a songwriting station with instruments; a crafting station with craft resources…. This kind of storyhacking will work best if you have a well-briefed volunteer or facilitator supporting each ‘station’, to lead participants through the task. Two or three stations would be plenty in most groups! Ask the group to divide themselves according to their preferred means of expression, so that a subgroup forms around each station. Start by using drama games like freeze framing, or simple retelling of the story round the circle, to help groups home in on the moments and characters

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they are interested in. Then ask each individual (or pairs/small groups if you/they prefer) to make something in their chosen art form based on one of these moments or characters. Keep the tasks manageable and somewhat structured. A creative writing task might be to write an acrostic poem about a particular character, using their name as the stem, or to write a manifesto or defence for a misunderstood character. A collage task might be to create a powerful message in words and images to a group of characters. A songwriting task might be to tell (i.e. invent) the backstory of one character, or their dreams for the future. You could then, if time allows, swap work between groups. Pair the groups and ask each group to send an ambassador to give and explain their work to their paired group. Each group then makes something else, in ‘their’ art form, in response to what the other group has just entrusted to them. In that way, there will be an empathetic two-stage dialogue between groups, and the storyworld will amplify further and further out from the original starting story. Come back together and share all the work created and reflect on the process together. Document it if necessary (e.g. film drama work), and consider creating a shared archive such as a blog. It may be good to conclude with a single, shared creative task. I have also invited a performance poet to witness an entire storyhacking event and write a poem to reflect the whole process and outcomes, to share as a final, satisfying acknowledgement of the creative layers that have been added to the original story. Teachers or arts practitioners might wish to use this process to open up conversation on a controversial or difficult issue, by choosing a stimulus story which touches on the theme in question. Working through narrative and art in this way would sensitise the group to the complexities and human realities of the issue, preparing the groundwork for more propositional or direct debate around it. This is also a good way of working with several small groups who do not know each other or who are shy of each other—each works on the same story, but through a different art form. Then all the groups come together to share what they have found in the story, and perhaps to make something new all together. When they meet for the first time, they will already be collaborators, with a shared ownership of the same story. Mapping This is another well-known strategy in theatre devising. After telling a story, create a very simple outline map of the landscape in which it

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takes place, on a piece of flip-chart paper. Invite young people to add features to the map, naming these features as they go. Depending on their age and willingness to be playful, you could facilitate this ‘in role’, with you as convenor of a research event to find out more about this particular place and time, and the young people as invited experts. Ask questions: ‘How did the Molten River get its name?’; ‘The story is very vague about Belye’s journey to Kotura, can anyone mark it out in more detail?’; ‘Was that crack in the ground always there or did it appear in living memory?’; ‘Do any photographs or records survive of the kind of festivals that were held on the southern slope?’ There are unlimited ways to work with such a map, once a group is invested in it (even if only whimsically or subversively invested). You could develop the characters and stories of these places through other approaches such as the ‘museum’ (above), ‘story gifts’, or invite young people to draw or paint images of the ‘real’ places represented on the map. You could create a book of folklore belonging to the people of the area, or map how it has changed in the present day. Lining Paper If you are working with a group of young people over a number of sessions and integrating ideas from several stories, improvisation or exploration activities, factual or other sources—for example, during a theatre devising process—a graphic and low-tech way of building a practice of dialogue and making shared exploration tangible is to use a long roll of white lining wallpaper. At the end of each session, set aside ten minutes for the group to record key phrases, ideas and sketches on the paper, unrolling a little more paper each week. At the end of the process, when it is time for synthesis of ideas (e.g. plotting and scripting a play, creating a presentation) unroll the entire paper and sit around it. While discussing the themes that have been explored, draw linkages between recurring ideas from different sessions, circle key motifs or issues, add on new thoughts and ideas. ‘Returning’ Stories The idea of ‘returning’ a story to a group of young people has been alluded to in several of the aforementioned activities. Participatory arts workshops often generate large amounts of quite improvisatory or

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‘unfinished’ materials—drafts of poems, collectively invented stories that don’t get written down properly. Time runs out and everyone goes home. Even if it is the process rather than the product that you feel to be important, this process should include the opportunity for critical assessment, and the sense of having contributed to the human canon of stories. Try writing up a ‘clean copy’ of the story (or new version of a story) that has been created, to the best of your memory, and bringing it back to the next session. Read or tell it fluently and with dignity, then invite the young people’s feedback, corrections, reflections and ideas for further development. There may then be a further iteration where group members undertake to further elaborate or build on the discussion. Developing this approach can lead to higher-level collaborations with or between groups of young people: digital storytelling, fi ­ lm-making, shadow puppetry, performances.

Reference Heinemeyer, C. (2018). Adventures in Storyhacking: Facilitating Indirect InterCommunity Dialogue Through Storytelling. Teaching Artist Journal, 16, 3–4.

Appendix 3: Recommended Further Reading

Those wishing to develop their skills, confidence and repertoire as storytellers with young people may wish to read the following very valuable resources. Betty Rosen’s wise and practical books build on her own extensive experience and are excellent guides for teachers or youth workers wanting to build storytelling into their everyday practice: • Rosen, B. (1988). And None of It Was Nonsense: The Power of Storytelling in School. London: Mary Glasgow Publications. • Rosen, B. (1993). Shapers and Polishers: Teachers as Storytellers (2nd ed.) London: Harper Collins. Jack Zipes is possibly the most prolific and truth-telling of writers on storytelling with young people. Many of his books are an inspiring blend of critical thinking, strategies for teaching storytelling and useful repertoire. Other works, notably his collection of versions of the Red Riding Hood tale from different eras and cultures, provide abundant c­ross-cultural grist to the critical storyteller’s mill. • Zipes, J. (1994). The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context. London: Taylor & Francis. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6

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• Zipes, J. (1995). Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives. London: Routledge. • Zipes, J. (2004). Speaking Out: Storytelling and Creative Drama for Children. New York and London: Routledge. Jenny Moon has compiled a very useful free online resource of guidance for teachers and students, storytelling repertoire and links to further repertoire and guidance. • Moon, J. (2010). Students Building Storytelling Skills. HEA Education Subject Centre. http://escalate.ac.uk/7121. The Traditional Arts Team’s fantastic booklet of storytelling games and activities for teenagers and adults is available free to youth, education and library organisations via the website http://www.tradartsteam.co.uk/ Pass-It-On.html: • Langley, G., & Douglas, A. (2013). Pass It On: A Resource for Teaching Storytelling with young People. Traditional Arts Team. Mike Wilson’s analyses of the informal world of teenage storytelling (1997) and the landscape of performance storytelling today, including participatory practice with young people (2006), give a very rich overview of the ways storytelling is employed in contemporary UK and Irish culture. • Wilson, M. (1997). Performance and Practice: Oral Narrative Traditions Among Teenagers in Britain and Ireland. Aldershot: Ashgate. • Wilson, M. (2006). Storytelling and Theatre: Contemporary Storytellers and Their Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tom Maguire provides a theatrical language for understanding the performance skills of storytelling, particularly of interest to actors or drama practitioners wishing to develop as storytellers. • Maguire, T. (2015). Storytelling on the Contemporary Stage. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Index

A Acting Up, 22 Acts of community expansive, 229 protective, 229 Adolescence, 5, 73 mental health, 171 need for connectedness, 145 personal fable, 145 personal myth, 145 resistance to ‘magical’ storytelling, 73, 110 ‘Affect’, 15, 89 Applied storytelling, 81 Applied theatre, 10, 13, 89 Archetypes, 72 Ascesis, 80, 177 Autobiographical storytelling as dominant discursive system, 80, 121 association with young people, 79 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 16, 59, 77, 86, 119, 181, 192, 200, 202, 204

Benjamin, Walter, 7, 33, 35, 140, 142, 160, 162, 204, 237 ‘Between’, 138–140, 144 coercion, 152 gift-giving, 152 guiding while in dialogue, 160, 164 purposelessness, 156, 241 Biesta, Gert, 222 Bishop, Claire, 16, 81, 119, 216 Blake, Jo, 18, 34, 77, 160, 162, 203, 251 Boal, Augusto, 76, 177 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 125, 226 Braden, Sue, 20 Brecht, Bertolt, 77, 142 Bruner, Jerome S., 8, 21, 29, 35, 37, 39, 44, 166, 175, 237 Buber, Martin, 13, 138, 165, 221 C Calvino, Italo, 115, 194 CAMHS system, 225 Campaign for Cultural Democracy, 79, 193

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 C. Heinemeyer, Storytelling in Participatory Arts with Young People, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40581-6

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276  Index Campbell, Joseph, 72 Carter, Angela, 111 Chronotopes, 59, 92, 151, 174, 237 dialogic, 84, 235, 243 dynamic, 14, 19, 76, 193 everyday, 61, 235 magical, 14, 18, 66, 182, 193 City School, 21, 30, 36, 37, 42, 51, 125, 151, 157, 178, 197, 223, 229, 231, 232 Community arts, 216 Complexes of subjectivation, 232 Conquergood, Dwight, 15, 159 Contracting with listeners, 148 Converge, 234 Counsel, 24, 34, 160, 164, 175, 237 Craft, Anna, 49 Creative Partnerships scheme, 233 Creativity, 49 Cultural democracy, 20 Cultural Learning Alliance, 40 D De Certeau, Michel, 36, 38, 173, 175, 189, 227 Decline in arts subjects, 40, 224 Deleuze, Gilles, 189, 212 Derrida, Jacques, 156 Devon, Natasha, 146, 214 Dewey, John, 63 Dialogical performance, 87, 88 Dialogic artmaking, 218 Dialogic storytelling games and activities, 261 Dialogue, 15, 138, 139, 143 Bakhtinian understanding, 86 dialogical aesthetics, 15 dialogical nature of language, 16 dialogical performance, 87 dialogic artmaking, 87

dialogic fora, 215 Digital storytelling, 196 Director of Converge, 82 Dramatherapy, 182 E Educational ideologies, 43 compliance, 49 creativity, 49 National Curriculum, 47 new sociology of education, 46 performativity, 50 pre-progressive era, 44 progressive or child-centred tradition, 45 Education policy academisation, 222 England and Wales, 31 global, 30, 222 ‘Effect’, 15, 89 Empathetic dialogue, 155, 157 ‘Enstasy’, 66 Epic, 192 appropriation by young people, 200, 202, 205 as ‘finished thing’, 192 as grounded aesthetic, 198 as invitation, 194 as narrative resource, 90, 195 as provocation, 197 as Spielraum or play space, 121 dramatic plot-led nature, 180 focus on young people, 179 novelisation, 201, 202 provoking, 119 ‘recrowning’, 203 subversion, 128 ‘uncrowning’, 201 Epic stories subversion, 77

Index

F Fairytales, 122, 162, 202 ‘Farmer storyteller’, 7, 221 Focus of folktale, 180 Focus of myth, 180 Folktale, 115, 127, 162, 175, 190, 193 Forum theatre, 79, 182 Frank, Arthur W., 7, 33, 161 G ‘Gaps’ in a story, 13 Gersie, Alida, 106, 181 Global Youth Club, 153 Golem-schools, 223 Guattari, Felix, 126, 189, 212, 215, 231

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International Centre for Arts and Narrative, 32, 70, 90, 183 Interstice, 125, 129, 239 Intersubjective space, 21 Intersubjectivity, 141, 143 Intertextuality, 78, 202 ‘I/Thou’, 138, 221 J Jeffers, Alison, 81 K Kearney, Richard, 34, 90 Kester, Grant, 15, 16, 81, 87, 215, 216

H Habermas, Jürgen, 131, 213, 226 Haraway, Donna, 38 Harper-Hardcastle, Matt, 43, 84, 85, 195, 251, 255 Heathcote, Dorothy, 164 Hero’s journey, 106 Heteroglossia, 201, 202 History education, 45–47

L Lead Creative Schools scheme, 233 Levinas, Emmanuel, 138, 162, 165 Librarians, 61, 181 Lifeworld, 131, 213, 226, 239 rationalisation, 226 recalcitrant, 227, 228 Liminal or ‘hypnagogic’ state, 66, 70 Logico-scientific knowledge, 29 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 35, 42

I Impact, 212 Impossible, 143, 156 Instrumentalisation, 42 Instrumentalisation of storytelling, 81 Instrumentalisation of the arts, 64, 157, 216 Instrumental value of storytelling, 13, 17 Intergenerational empathy gap, 213, 236

M Magical chronotope, 17 Maguire, Thomas, 11 Maguire, Tom, 90, 141–143 Maple House, 3, 18, 21, 105, 115, 152, 154, 158, 160, 185, 196, 204 Mental health, 181, 204, 205, 212, 214 ecosystemic model, 241 impact of neoliberalism, 214

278  Index Metaxis, 90 Multi-modal enquiry, 21 Myth, 185, 190, 193 Mythological cycles, 179 N Narrative characterisation, 117, 119 crisis, 90 hermeneutics, 90, 203 Narrative knowledge, 23, 29, 174 anatomy, 33 cleverer within the story, 43 creation of shared meanings, 36, 37 cultural and class dimensions, 42 cumulative nature, 38, 62, 175 epistemology, 36 indeterminacy, 49 intentionality, causality, ­responsibility, 180, 181 memorability, 36 mistrust/denigration in schools, 39, 42, 48, 51 purpose, 33 route versus map, 38, 175 situated knowledges, 38 ‘stitching knowledge to experience’, 179 sparseness, 35, 62, 115, 191 spiral curriculum, 53 technique, 35 Narrative learning, 32 emotional literacy, 40 expression of life experiences, 32 language skills, 32 model of learning, 37 spiral curriculum, 39 ‘Narrative turn’, 203 National Curriculum, 48 National Oracy Project (NOP), 47, 48 Neoliberal education systems, 9, 31 New modalities of subjectivity, 215

Nicholson, Helen, 15, 165, 195 No-Man’s-Land, 238 Novelisation, 119 O Obliquity, 182 Obliquity and indeterminacy, 183 OFSTED, 50 Open-ended practice, 7 Oracy, 49 P Paradigmatic knowledge, 29 Parfitt, Emma, 38, 52, 68, 69, 78, 178 Participation, 16 eloquence of non-participation, 110, 160 role of dissensus, 119 Participatory art, 16, 87, 218, 225 Participatory arts work, 9 Participatory storytelling, 10 Performance spectrum, 19 Performance storytelling, 68 Personal digital storytelling, 79 Playback theatre, 79, 182 Post-dramatic theatre, 143 Practical thinking exercises, 114, 122, 131 Practice research, 9, 20 arts ethnography, 21 ethical dimensions, 23, 87 performance research, 21 role of blogging, 22 role of theory, 20 self as research instrument, 22 settings, 21 Propositional knowledge, 23, 29, 38, 81 Protected educational settings, 216, 222, 224, 236, 240

Index

Psychological or behavioural outcomes, 64 Pupil referral units (PRUs), 224 R Ranciere, Jacques, 16, 89, 190 Reader response theory, 89 Reason, Matthew, 11, 16, 89, 90, 139, 194, 217 Regenerative needs of a culture, 212, 219 Relational aesthetics, 216 microtopias, 227 Resilience thinking, 40, 41, 214 Resingularisation, 126, 231, 242 Rosen, Betty, 46, 63, 181 S Safe space, 182, 185 critiques, 185 ‘Sailor storytellers’, 7, 156, 221 Sawyer, Ruth, 62, 140, 154, 181 Shedlock, Marie, 62 Social media, 145, 214 Solitude, 53 Spielraum, 189, 202, 238 Stern, Julian, 67, 139, 160, 223 Story as territory, 171 as founder of a theatre of actions, 182 as No-Man’s-Land, 189, 192 as walk, 175, 177 ‘staying within the story’, 183 Storyknowing, 29, 32, 139, 172, 174, 232 ambiguity, 120 collaborative sense-making, 54 imagination, 53 memorability, 53

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pupils’ observations, 51 sensory richness, 53 transposition, 90 ‘Storyteller-as-friend’, 240 Storyteller’s role, 55 authenticity, 150, 152 compositional processes, 151 identity, 150 Storytelling activities for connection, 146 Storytelling and theatre, 142 Storytelling initiatives in schools, 30 Storytelling movement, 10, 12, 66, 68, 141 exclusion of young people, 71 role of tradition, 151 unwritten rules, 71 Subjectivity, 212 Surprise, 21, 139, 157 T Tam Linn, 127 Teachers as storytellers, 45, 61, 181 Tenets of storytelling, 11, 14 improvisation, 141 mutuality, 144 opposition to facts or lessons, 140 Territory of story, 171 Therapeutic storytelling, 72 Thompson, James, 14, 15, 80, 121 Three Ecologies, 232 Transmedia storytelling, 78 Triangular relationship, 11, 12, 172, 184, 211 U UK educational context, 9 Understanding of obliquity, 73

280  Index V Verbatim theatre, 79 Vernacular, 129, 215, 219, 229 Vernacular codes, 149 Vygotsky, L.S., 53, 176 W Wilson, Mike, 5, 78, 142, 177, 193 Winston, Joe, 32, 39, 40, 190 Wisdom of archetypes, 193 Wounded storytellers, 161 ‘Writerly’ texts, 190

Y Young Minds, 213 Young people’s oral cultures, 43 Young Storyteller of the Year (YSOY) competition, 69, 71 Youth work, 225 Z Zipes, Jack, 18, 45, 76, 79, 88, 201, 220