Check out what Jeff Gere says at 21:00" He recounts in this interview what he said in answer to a high school student who asked, petulantly "Why are you telling us all this old stuff?" Jeff's answer? Is mine too, I say these ancient stories are blue prints for possble actions. Jeff Gere goes one further and says his story is a "life jacket" you do not need it now but when you do it will be there because this story has been around longer than all of us put together.
by Jeff Gere 8/08 Appears in ‘Storytelling Duets’ Book, due in January 2010 By Jonah & Harold Wright
My name is Jeff Gere. I’m a storyteller in Hawaii who runs it’s biggest storytelling festival (Talk Story Festival) each fall. As Oahu’s Drama Specialist in the Parks Department, I talk to humans of every age and income all year long, usually alone. I look upon these as ‘warm ups’ for the REAL storytelling event: tandem telling with musicians. I've done LOTS of these in lots of configurations for lots of years. My master’s degree is in ‘Inter-Relating the Arts’, an inter-disciplinary performance and discussion curriculum exploring the languages and idioms of the various arts. HearSayThe Two Sisters (Wind ‘n Rain) (shadow puppets, music and telling.) I toured one summer with a symphonic quintet. I told Arabian Night tales for 18 months of Saturdays to sold-out shows in a swank Chinatown bar with a belly dancer and two musicians- THAT was fun! was a story/band trio, which morphed into a duet which built an evening show around the ballad, OK, but let’s talk about WHY I love telling with tunes.
As a painting student at the University of California, Davis, I painted all night until, nodding into sleep, I’d suddenly jerk awake with a command ringing in my ear: ‘paint that out’. I’d rise, paint, sit and nod; Jerk and paint again. The mornings revealed paintings I had not intended to paint! Painting was my initial method of having a dialogue with the subconscious. In my storytelling, I seek this same authentic dialogue and resonance. Music can trigger that. OK, so that’s the WHY, but HOW do you do that?
Let’s face it: It’s easy to recite your precious clever story patter while a musician plunks along behind. I’ve done it- nothing sensational emerges. Creative musicians get frustrated and quit. Little is risked, little gained. That’s no 'event', that’s not what grips me. Remember, I want the subconscious dialogue, want a revelation. What GRIPS, THRILLS, and MOTIVATES me in recording and performing with improvising musicians, my MAIN EVENT, is this: If I can split myself open, keeping one ear on the music while speaking, taking audio directions while leading, I myself get lead. Music helps me to let go, to step over the cliff, to dare to walk onto the water, to dwell in the creative moment of NOW. I stop knowing what will happen next. Huh? Say what?
If talented, attentive, inventive, bold musician(s) are really INVITED to PARTICIPATE with me in the tell, I start to get distracted by the rhythm, the percussion, and the cadence of notes. Yes, I get deliciously confused within the story I know well, and it becomes new again, fresh as the first time I spoke it. Whole new things come up! The STORY begins speaking ME! REALLY! Speaking while listening to playing to your speaking... it is all happening so fast that I’m tellin’ by instinct! Spiritual (in essence), collaborative (surprising), fun (PLENTY!), infectious. You can FEEL the LIFE of such a tell with your EARS! You can hear it in the recordings, the audience can feel it in the room. The stories come ALIVE!
What's your PROCESS in this equation? I tell by watching the story unfold in my mind. There’s no script, there’s just the movie in my mind’s eye. When one tells in this way, and we drop in the musical score, I can only talk it out as it unfolds. However, I’ve seen this ‘tune-telling’ work well with ‘reciters’ too, especially when the teller's cadence leaves spaces between sentence clusters (thoughts) for the musician to respond. I remind myself to use this technique because my tendency is to plunge forward and talk right on top of the music, in overlays, which is exciting but not always appropriate. It also means the musicians have to be more aggressive with me. Diversity and variety enrich artistic creations.
A coincidental meeting at a Somerville performance in May, my monkey curiosity and a desire to see some of the kids I had been teaching and had to leave so precipitously drew me to do a free gig for my old school yesterday. Yep, I am that sentimental and I love storytelling that much. Yesterday I was the guest speaker/teacher at a Theater and Literacy Class for middle school kids. The students had been writing memoirs all summer so we worked on telling personal stories. The kids who remembered me gave me a big shout out and then all did a great job of mining their experience for details and finding words that made the moments of their experience come alive for the listeners. Very fun to work with them and great to catch up a bit with Branigan and meet her co-teacher, Laura. We had just over an hour and in that short time, at the end of the workshop, 4 kids took the mic and told 1- 2 minute stories filled with detail. Wished I could have stayed to hear them all and do so more coaching. The students were really good about giving each other specific positive comments and listening to each other. My visit had a wistful feel, I am sure only for me, and I kept thinking of the last line in one of our family's fave read aloud books Noisy Nora. "But I am back again said Nora, with a monumental crash!"
The legend of the King of Denmark and the Yellow Star has long been a favorite of mine. And I was delighted to find an authentic, but soon to be legendary example of that kind of creative response to bullying in Boys Wear Pink written about here at Parent Dish by Peter Sinasohn: Students wear pink to fight bullies:
Seniors David Shepherd and Travis Price decided it had to stop. Using the internet, they encouraged fellow students to wear pink the next day and even bought 75 pink tank tops for boys to wear. They also brought a pink basketball and pink material to make headbands and arm bands. They estimate that half of the school's 830 students wore pink.
It seemed to get the message across. "The bullies got angry," said Travis. "One guy was throwing chairs (in the cafeteria). We're glad we got the response we wanted." The bullies, he says, "keep giving us dirty looks, but we know we have the support of the whole student body. Kids don't need this in their lives, worrying about what to wear to school. That should be the last thing on their minds."
David explained their motivation: "Our intention was to stand up for this kid so he doesn't get picked on." When one of the bullies asked him if he knew that wearing pink indicated homosexuality, he told him that he didn't care and that neither should anyone else. "Something like the colour of your shirt or pants, that's ridiculous," he said.
When the student that had been bullied put on one of the pink shirts and saw all the other pink, "he was all smiles," David said. "It was like a big weight had been lifted off his shoulders."
After hearing the tragic stories coming from Western Mass about students being bullied to death, I wanted to do something - but what? It is not enough but "something" clicked when I heard storyteller Tony Toledo and Sharon Kennedy tell the story of Tipingee and her friends - a story from Haiti. So this summer I have been combining the story of Tipingee with the real life story of Travis and David from Nova Scotia and it has been wonderful to see the wheels turning in the heads of 5,6,7, 8, 9 and 10 year olds and their young adult counselors.
A typical response from an 8 year old boy in a camp for kids with "issues" He said, in answer to my question "What did you notice about the two stories?" "Well that just shows that violence doesn't work." Another girl said, "They used their brains to help their friends." Have to love the power of story to get a point across and even teach some strategy too.
Here is Diane Wolkstein's version from youtube
followed by my interpretation a clip from a digital story video
This is your brain on storytelling - from Roger Dooley (no relation)
We storytellers often describe a successful performance by saying that our audience was "entranced" by our story. After a storytelling performance in a school, I sometimes have the opportunity to break it down for students. Explaining what just occurred, I might say, "I used words to transmit the images in my mind and you received my words and turned them into images, feelings and experience in your minds." I tell students this is the magic of language and story. "Our heads are connected - like wifi ! Only without the computers, iPhones, modems and DSL." It seems that brain imaging shows my wifi metaphor to be less metaphoric and more a scientific description of the actual process, than I knew.
"You may be talking and I may be listening, but our brains look strikingly similar.
That’s the conclusion of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. After conducting brain scans of a woman telling a story off the cuff and then of 11 people listening to a recording of her, researchers Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson say they found that the same parts of the brains showed activation at the same time, suggesting a deep connection between talker and listener."
Storyteller and college professor of folk lore Lee-Ellen Marvin said:
Fascinating news! Those of us who tell stories professionally have sensed a deep connection with our listeners that seems mysterious. Some professional storytellers have observed that their audiences breathe together during intense stories, but this goes quite a bit further. The study might also explain the light trance state that listeners seem to fall into during storytelling events. It certainly fits with my favorite definition of storytelling as the communication of experience. If only there was a way to measure the brain activities of a storyteller and listeners in a live, face-to-face storytelling event!
A wordle created from the words of the manifesto by wordle.net -
thanks to Joanne Piazzi of LANES
A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as a creed. Manifestos may also be life stance -related. Manifesto is derived from the Italian word manifesto, itself derived from the Latin manifestum, meaning clear or conspicuous. Its first recorded use in English is from 1620.
Storytelling
is a human birthright and as natural as breathing. When practiced as an art, storytelling is deeper than philosophy and more fun than the movies. Story is an amazing educational activity because it works on so many levels. It is meta-cognition or the natural format of human thought. Because it engages physically, emotionally and intellectually, storytelling is deeply satisfying entertainment. Since the listeners work with the performer and have a shared, active experience, storytelling is also a social tool that can help build healthy community. As a performance art, storytelling is spoken word at its most accessible. As a timeless and essentially human art, storytelling delights, engages and inspires students of all ages and abilities.
“Language is a human instinct, but written language is not…Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on. This basic fact about human nature should be the starting point for any discussion about how to teach our children to read and write.” – Steven Pinker, neurologist and research scientist
A wordle created from the words of the manifesto by wordle.net - thanks to Joanne Piazzi of LANES
I apologize for my tone.
I have not been myself.
The climate control
Is cold and penetrates.
My smile feels stiff
as if it had been pinned on
and God knows
I
didn’t pin this smile on
Do you see any fingers on these stumps?
No.
I do not bleed
On their shiny floor.
I can hear the night watchman’s heart beat
And the sad thoughts of the woman
who sings in Spanish when she washes and waxes
the floors.
I do not bleed on them.
I am
still
a
Bodhisattva,
after all.
But
What I want to tell you is–
I’ve been stuck on this pedestal
With
a rod up my ass
for 100s of years.
I will never get down.
And they took my hands.
What more do you need to know?
Can’t you see it?
Must I say it ?
If I spoke
my polychromed lips would break and
the Guardian on the next pedestal would wake from his wooden sleep.
Believe me
he is best left alone
and slumbering.
You see it in his eyes, don’t you?
I can no more save you from his madness
than save myself from
this pedestal.
His rage would
thunder, breaking the silence in an
explosion of fury
where dust motes now
plop
one
after
another on waxed floors.
Look at his fists, at his biceps!
Don’t get him started.
The Persian minatures would shake in their cases
and those Grecian kraters, ringed with hard ons following
hard ons would
crash
sending shards and
frozen smiles into a
future of puzzles
that are as simple as this one.
What more do you need to know?
Now can you see it?
Or must I
a Bodhisattva
say it?
Help yourself.
The Bodhisattva without hands that inspired me lives at the Sackler Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge MA. The one pictured above is from the Met in NYC
Advanced Entrepreneurship: Teaming Up for Success The post above is the third in a series on Advanced Entrepreneurship and what distinguishes a great entrepreneur from a good one, by by Stever Robbins. Would any one have pegged this writer [ Norah] big mouthed, left wing, radical butt pain as a reader of the Harvard Business School review? Not bloody likely. But here I am posting a link [above] to a blog from the "B" school about team building and entrepreneurship ( is this even a word?) How mighty are the fallen? Fear not, comrades! I only study the Man's tools to work smart and bring down the Man. Anyway, I like the "socialist" leanings of the Get-It-Done-Guy and see valuable insights in what he has to say about teams and start ups:
A major part of a CEO's job is building and keeping the team together. Mastering this skill is especially important for CEOs of start-ups. When resources are scarce, you need to make sure everyone's working together, to avoid wasted effort or scattered focus. For example, several college friends founded a tech start-up their senior year, but they paid no attention to learning to work as a team. As a result, the marketing VP simply did what she thought made sense. Too bad it didn't correspond to what the product developer was creating. As team members executed independently what they considered best, they began to butt heads. Ultimately, while they fought and squandered the company's resources, their competitor came out with a strongly marketed, tightly developed product — one that put them in the market-leading position previously held by the start-up. Good entrepreneurs focus first on building a strong executive team. This process begins with hiring. CEOs of start-ups must find the right people with the right skills and get them excited enough to sign on, despite not being able to offer them much money and the uncertainty of success. Recruiting under these circumstances has the happy side effect of building a team that's emotionally committed to the job.
Of course, emotional commitment brings with it strong opinions, and sometimes these opinions clash. As team leader, the CEO is charged with ensuring that personalities among the senior team members mesh and is responsible for mediating any conflicts that arise.
It also falls on the CEO to keep the senior team motivated. Team members were hired for their intrinsic motivation, so this largely means pointing them in the right direction (or letting them help set that direction) and getting out of their way.
massmouth.com is a kind of "start up" and we are building a good team to really get moving on some exciting projects. So I am studying up on all kinds of models to help us make headway in the big wide world. In the world of storytelling, we have many models that show us to how to do things in a small, careful and unobtrusive way. At massmouth.com, we are working on how to take risks, be noticed if not loud and work effectively. We are planning to raise the role of storytelling back into the larger world of culture and art. And oh yeah, by doing so, we hope to make our livings doing this important and creative work.
IRL: In Real Life. It's used as shorthand all over the Internet, to distinguish what happens online from what happens offline. And it's a lie. If we still refer to the offline world as "real life," it's only a sign of deep denial — or unwarranted shame — about what reality looks like in the 21st century. The Internet's impact on our daily lives, experiences and relationships is real. Our world is deeply affected by networks. From the moment you wake up to news that was gathered online to the minute you fall asleep listening to a podcast, the Internet shapes how you experience the world around you. From the lunch date you make with your BFF ("r u free 4 lunch 2day?") to the colleagues your company recruited online, the Internet shapes who you interact with. And from the boss who fills you in on a Twitter rumor to the kid who fills you in on her Facebook activities, the Internet shapes how you interact with them.
All the above verbiage was good, and helpful but this article was even better:
Susan Harrison, my mother in law, died several months ago after a long and courageous battle with cancer. Like most of us, she was not famous. If you didn't know her you probably didn't know of her. She lived in the relatively small community of Savannah, Georgia.
Yet she did some amazing things there — she was the first ordained woman Deacon in Georgia, she founded a soup kitchen, and she helped create the Savannah Homeless Authority. In addition to raising three children and, some would say, a husband.
One of the problems we faced after her death was finding a church big enough to hold the people who wanted to attend her funeral. We picked the largest one we could find, with seating for 600, and still many had to stand in the back and along the aisles.
Susan had a particular quality that drew people in. It wasn't her accomplishments. It wasn't money. She had no access to famous or important people. She couldn't hire you; she wasn't a stepping stone.
Susan was, quite simply, a really good friend.
Which is an art. To be a good friend, you have to give of yourself, but not so much that you lose yourself. You need to know what you want and pursue it, while helping others achieve what they want. You need to have personality while making room for, and supporting, other people's personalities. You need to care about, and even love, people you might disagree with (I'm pretty sure she didn't vote for the same candidates as her husband). You need to be willing to give at least as much, if not more, than you take.
This is a pretty predictable recipe for happiness. Giving to others — a reliable way of fostering friendships — makes us happier than taking things for ourselves. According to research led by Dr. Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia, money can buy happiness . . . as long as you spend it on other people.
Researchers conducted three studies. First, they surveyed more than 600 Americans and found that spending money on gifts and charities led to greater happiness than spending money on oneself.
Then they looked at workers who had just received bonuses and found that their happiness was not based on the size of their bonus but on the decision they made about what to do with whatever amount of money they received. Those who spent more of their bonus on others were happier than those who spent the money on themselves.
Finally, the researchers simply gave money to a number of people, instructing some to spend the money on themselves and others to spend the money on others. At the end of the day, the ones who spent money on others were happier.
So having friends and treating them generously is clearly a winning strategy in life. But what about business?
If you watch even a single episode of any reality TV show based on a competition — The Apprentice, Survivor, Top Chef, America's Next Top Model, The Bachelor, The Amazing Race; it doesn't matter which — you'll hear a single phrase come up more often than any other:
"I'm not here to make friends!"
If you want to see what I mean — and just for the fun of it — watch this short YouTube video compilation. Apparently many of the contestants believe that in order to win you can't be worried about how you affect others. As one contestant on The Apprentice so eloquently said, "We're not here to make friends. It's nothing personal. This is f**king business." Is that true? Are we better off being cutthroat than collaborative?
Well, let's look at the data. If you're looking for a job you'd better have friends. The number-one way people find new jobs is referrals by friends.
Once you're on the job, having a best friend at work is a strong predictor of success. People might define "best" loosely (think of this as kindergarten where you can have more than one "best" friend), but according to a Gallup Organization study of more than 5 million workers over 35, 56% of the people who say they have a best friend at work are engaged, productive, and successful while only 8% of the ones who don't are.
And another remarkable study, spanning decades, revealed that friendships in high school were a strong predictor of increased wages in adulthood — to the tune of 2% per person who considered you a close friend. In other words, if in high school three people listed you as one of their closest same-sex friends, your earnings in adulthood would be 6% higher.
Want to stay in that job you have? Then you'd better have friends. As a friend of mine who runs sales for a successful technology company told me recently, "People try hard not to fire their friends. It's the difference between 'he's a good guy' and 'I don't know about that guy."
The happy truth is that the people who say they're not here to make friends don't win. That's true for reality TV. It's true for business. And it's true for life.
During Susan's last few days she was surrounded at all hours by her family and friends. During those moments she managed to get some advice out. Among her parting words? "Surround yourself with a loving community."
In other words, it's a pretty good bet that we really are here to make friends
'Nuff said, friendship trumps competition -- the Harvard Business School sez so. Avanti Populo!
