Most of the Bible in 90 minutes - Dennis Dewey

Last night we had the privilege to see and hear Dennis Dewey perform an array of Bible stories beginning, of course at 'The beginning... , going on to 'The Fall', 'Abraham, Sarah and their guests','The Exodus', 'The Daughters of Zelophehad', 'Jonah' (we all liked the fish - and the song of lament), 'Jesus' Birth', 'Jesus, the boy in the temple', 'Jesus Calms the Storm', 'Jairus' daughter', 'The parables of the persistent widow' and 'The two praying', 'Jesus death and resurrection', and a bit of 'John's revelation'.

Wow! It was a great performance! Dennis brought out the voices of the characters in the stories and let the emotion of the story speak. And we felt like we were part of the story. I couldn't imagine listening to a sermon (although I've endured my share of long sermons) for 90 minutes and wanting more. 90 minutes represents a lot of material, both for the storyteller and the audience, and yet we discussed different scenes on the way home and this morning as well. We're still talking over the stories with our colleagues and they are as vivid in our minds now as they were last night.

As a storyteller, it's great to be in the audience and see tellers like Dennis perform. It gives me more ideas of how I'll tell one of those stories in the future, not that I'll attempt to do as Dennis did, but his voice and performance gives me more to think about and to explore.

It was a great experience. Wish you could have been there.

Storyweaving and feedback from the 'other' story

Recently, we presented to our colleagues, our newly undertaken work with oral approaches to translation and language development. To give our colleagues a taste of what we have in mind, I wove a personal story with an old and very well-known story. The latter story was what I had hoped was in focus. Instead, much to my surprise, I received very positive feedback in connection with my personal story. Briefly, the personal story centered around my first experience of the feeling that life is meaningless, when my sister died in an auto accident. I was 12 at the time. In telling my story, I wanted to connect with the motif of 'meaninglessness / vanity / futility' found in the well-known story of the book, Ecclesiastes (chapters 1,2 and 12), which I'm viewing as a personal journey of the Teacher, aka Qoheleth, in his search for meaning. I did get positive feedback on the telling of Ecclesiastes too, but it was the personal story of my sister's death that people responded to first.

This experience taught me that the audience connects with stories, especially stories woven together, at various points. Most likely, where the audience connects depends on their interpretive frames and experiences or personal stories. Perhaps I could have woven the stories together in a different fashion if I wanted a different response. I'm satisfied with the response and feedback from the audience, but I can't get passed how surprised I was at how strongly people connected with my personal story. I told an earlier version of this storyweaving to a another audience and received a different response. I know that I told my personal story better the second time. We'll see what happens next time.

Connecting with the audience through storytelling

Last July, my wife and I attended the National Storyteller Conference in downtown Pittsburgh overlooking Fort Pitt and Heinz field. Other than being so close to where our favorite team, the Steelers plays football, we had a great time meeting storytellers from around the country and hearing not only their stories but what helps to make their stories so interesting to listen to, or what makes them good storytellers. It was the first time for us to attend a National Storytelling Network (NSN) Conference. After attending several of the workshops, we came away convinced that telling stories is an engaging and memorable form of communication. We decided to tell stories rather than presenting our work and vision through a progression of points. The first thing we did when we arrived home was to redo our 'presentation' by selecting stories that would communicate the same ideas. Having practiced weaving stories together at the conference, we wove together stories, some of which were ancient, some current and some from Vanuatu. The audience we spoke to knew us, but after this talk they commented that they had a much better idea of what our work is all about and what we hoped to do in the future. It was an 'aha' experience for me, as well as being somewhat humbling, in the sense that I thought we had communicated those same ideas several times previously. The experience was also somewhat exciting in that we received unsolicited and positive feedback and had a taste of connecting with our audience through storytelling.