Indy Theatre Habit

Last Saturday evening I went to the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center to hear the five featured tellers in the Printing Partners Hoosier Storytelling Festival share stories on the stage of the Basile Theater.  This final portion of the Festival was called “The Story Cabaret.”  It was presented by Fred and Midge Munds.

One of the tellers was Charlotte Blake Alston.  I had heard and loved her beautifully musical storytelling before at a Storytelling Arts of Indiana event in a previous year.  Her voice is gorgeous and heart-filling.

She often incorporates call-and-response elements to her telling.  “Listen first, and then sing it back to me,” she’ll say. 

We sing, “Yangata chay na…yangata chay na…yangata chay na…yangata chay na…”  Then, when the audience is confidently singing our part, Alston weaves another layer of a capella singing in and around ours.   After two or three lines, she joins us in our part again, strengthening us so that she can go back to singing her more intricate part again.

It is a magical experience.

At the Story Cabaret this year Alston began by saying that sometimes with all of the political talk it is easy to forget that we are not each other’s enemy.  It is important to try to speak the language of peace. 

All of her stories that night shared the theme of the power of one individual to make a difference.  She urged us all to “choose to make a difference for good where you are.”

One story was a South African tale about a group of children who saved their dying chief when no one else was brave enough to do what needed to be done.  A huge python had told the chief that if he ever needed help, he could call on him.   Years later, the chief did need the python’s healing, but whenever any of the villagers approached the huge snake’s cave with the required calabash of water, they chickened out when the snake began crawling up and down over their heads as they stood in a line in front of his home.

Finally, a group of children went to call the snake, and managed to hold still as he crawled over their heads and shoulders and leaned down to drink the water that the last child had brought.  The snake slithered on down the hill after that and healed their chief.

The way Alston told it, I could feel the weight of the snake as it slid down over my head, too.  It made me shudder!

Another story is one that is told often.  In fact, Alston said she had thought she would never add it to her own repertory because “everyone tells it.”  But then she was talking to her optometrist who said something like “what difference does it make what one person does?”

“Can you imagine?” Alston said.  “An optometrist that could be that blind?”  She decided that she would learn this story after all.

It is the story of the little girl who is out on the beach one morning after a storm, picking up stranded starfish and throwing them back into the ocean.

A man walks by, sees her doing this, and says, “Why are you wasting your time?  There are thousands of starfish stranded on this beach.  What you’re doing can’t possibly matter.”

The little girl picks up another starfish, looks at it, and then looks at the man.  “It matters to this one,” she says, and throws that starfish back into the sea.

I have loved that little story for a long time.  It is “power story” for me as I work with teens at my day job and sometimes feel overwhelmed by how much they need.

However, Alston’s telling of this story made me love and appreciate it as if I were hearing it for the first time. 

For one thing, she accompanies herself on a kora as she speaks.  A kora is a large, stringed instrument that is played by storytellers in many African countries.  It has 21 strings, but you only get to use your 1^st fingers and thumbs to play the strings because the rest of your hands and fingers have to hold on to the two handles.   Alston is playing a kora in the photo above.  The sound is simultaneously delicate, rich, and lovely.

Also, Alston makes the story about the girl’s relationship with her grandmother, too, and about the universality of life and death.  The grandmother dies in the story “because it was her time.  Everything has a time.”  And the next morning, the little girl is back on the beach, alone now, but still rescuing starfish. 

The man wanders by and says, “It won’t matter, you know, what you’re doing.” 

“To this one,” the girl says, feeling to see if the starfish in her hands is juicy and alive, “it will matter.”

Oh, it was just a perfect example of how a well-known story that “everyone tells” can become fresh and newly satisfying in the hands of a skilled storyteller.  You don’t mind hearing it again and again and again.  In fact, you look forward to it.

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The Hoosier Storytelling Festival is over for another year, but there are more storytelling events on the way from Storytelling Arts of Indiana. 

For example, on Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 7:00 there will be a free storytelling event at the Arthur M. Glick Jewish Community Center (6701 Hoover Road, Indianapolis.)  The event is called “More Alike Than Not: Stories from Three Americans - Jewish, Catholic, and Muslim.” 

It is presented by the Congregation Beth-El Zedeck, the Jewish Community Center, the Muslim Reentry Network of Indiana, the Pacer Foundation, St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, Storytelling Arts of Indiana, and the YMCA of Greater Indianapolis.  It is supported by the Performing Arts Fund, a program of Arts Midwest funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art, with additional contributions from the Indiana Arts Commission, General Mills Foundation, and Land O’Lakes Foundation. 

I am not going to take time to add links to all of those organizations, but I appreciate their generosity!  I have heard two of the three featured tellers before: Gerald Fierst and Susan O’Halloran are both professional storytellers who are based in New York and Illinois, respectively.  They will be joined by Arif Choudhury.  ‘Sounds like it will be an entertaining and thought-provoking evening!

Hope Baugh - www.IndyTheatreHabit.com