Satirical Tales for the Making!

Imagine a concise and pithy story that sheds light on the repeatable and fairly predictable failings of humankind. If you then imagine that, so that no one can possibly take offence, those tales have animals or inanimate objects as the main characters, you have imagined FABLES! Whether they are traditional fables passed on in the oral tradition or literary fables written by a single author, they share a common ability to serve the needs of their current masters: those who would adapt them to suit the times we live in.

My first adaptation of a fable was Aesop’s: “The Tortoise and the Hare.” I had been searching for a family story that would encourage slow readers to believe that they were as important as those who sped through books. I found the framework for my story in that classic tale. My version had the rabbit literally tripping over the tortoise in the road, berating it for being a Rock. And, because I have a deep aversion to our consumer driven society that keeps us rushing from store to store, from sale to sale, my rabbit trips because he is so focused on the next SALE, he doesn’t even see what is in front of him! The tortoise was just there, in the road, pulled into his shell and happily reading. But reading what? Letters, of course!! The rabbit is disdainful of this, showing off how he reads and speeding through the words, sentences and paragraphs in the same book, but the rabbit reads so fast that, much to the children’s delight, he misses the part about the ice cream! When the race between the two does begin, it is a race to the library- whomever wins gets a library card from the librarian! Though the tortoise wins (the rabbit was too busy signing autographs) we do find out that at the library, everybody is a winner- librarians give library cards to us all. The characters were a delight to improvise with and embody. Clearly drawn and with a situation that has captured the imagination for so many years I had the best Material to work with, for aren’t these time-honored satirical tales from another century material to stitch and re-stitch?

At the Sharing the Fire storytelling conference this March, I’ll be taking those in my workshop on a wild and wooly exploration of the riches fables can yield. We’ll improvise with these “fabulous” characters and situations shining the light of satirical fun on the world we live in. We’ll even experiment with devices like rhyme to see how limiting ourselves to a “form” can yield surprising results. Aesop used his own stories to educate his audiences about the foibles and politics of his time. With all to comment on these days, I can’t wait to see what we come up with at my  “Fun with Aesop’s Fables” workshop at the Northeast Storytelling Conference: Sharing The Fire this year!

A Meditation on Nature Myths

Here is a blog that I wrote for the League for the Advancement of New England Storytelling. It centers on Nature Myths, the topic for my workshop at their annual storytelling conference: Sharing the Fire. 

Boston's Arnold Arboretum at Summer Twilight

A  MEDITATION ON NATURE MYTHS

You don’t often hear, ‘Wow, I heard a really cool nature myth today!’
You probably won’t hear, ‘Did I tell you the one about how the Evergreens came to be?’ at the neighborhood bar. They may not be the most popular narratives these days but I say that Nature Myths* are the most sorely missed. So much missed that we have forgotten what they once taught us to know.

One thing they taught us is that we belong to the land, as much if not more than it belongs to us. One of the reasons we have lost that sense is that, over the years, the old stories that rooted our imaginations in the landscape have been shredded by assimilation and modernization. We have continued to travel further and further from that Eden, from the feeling that we are in a unified place. We are faced more and more with things we do not know how to process, in terms that are alien to our soul. Mythology, revisited and reinvigorated, can still be a deeply orienting narrative. Myths speak in the archetypal language of dreams and meaning, encouraging us to suspend disbelief and to wonder as a child does at the marvel that is our world.

I've worked with nature mythology for all of my life as a storyteller, plumbing its depths for Seasonal Celebrations, Stories in the Landscape, explorations of specific natural elements like trees and flowers and more. What I find is that these old stories always challenge me to think more deeply about a creature or plant or celestial body. When I am outdoors, those tales accompany me – encouraging meditative thoughts on the natural world and revealing each plant or insect in a new way. Sometimes I feel as though surrounding a natural element with a myth is like gifting it with a new perfume!

For me now, these old stories clothe the world, drawing my imagination closely to it. Truth be known, that is why I began the search. Feeling alienated from the natural world when I grew up and stopped building forts and running through the pastureland and became a responsible adult, I wanted more than ever to find a way and a reason to have nature still be my constant companion. Exploring nature myths has been a ‘way’ for me and my wish is to bring my discoveries to others.

Whenever someone says to me after hearing a myth on roses, “I will never see a rose in the same way again.” I know the right chord has sounded. What they mean when they say ‘see’ is ‘experience.’
The Australian Aborigines call the time of myth the Dreamtime. One of their tribes has a beautiful saying: “It’s true that we need the earth, but that is not the whole story. The earth needs us. It needs to hear the laughter of our children. It needs to hear the pounding of feet to the rhythm of the dance and it needs to hear the old stories told in a sacred manner.”

Does the earth need to hear the ancient stories? I say YES, it needs to hear them and so do we need to be tied back to them as we were “in the beginning time.”

We are such an important element of nature. Better weavers than the spiders. Our myths were designed to weave our intangible imagination into the fabric in such a way that we ourselves could be caught in delight, suspended in wonder and meaning.
Can you imagine that?

* By Nature Myths I am referring to ancient stories of origin that tell how elements in nature came to be, including Nature Mythologies where natural forces are personified.

Read the other LANES blogs on a variety of storytelling topics!

Happy Valentine's Day!

We are at single digit weather here in Boston and Jack Frost put the frosting on our icy Valentine's cake by creating dancing, starry patterns that glitter in the sun. He disguised his signature as a Cupid's arrow sweeping through the fun from upper right to down left! Thanks Jack! I am totally star-struck by you!!

Jack Frost's signature

You have to look hard to see it and in truth he does not Always sign his work. But lately I have discovered the telltale marks. A dashing line at the bottom of some of his finest etchings. It is not a scribble such as doctors are said to make when they hastily scrawl their names. No! It is a DASH - a long one----- as in Dashing! I think Jack is pleased that I found it.

Winter Meditation 2016 "In Search of Jack Frost"

Jack Frost- Second Installment! I am still in search of him, who he is and where is he from.... He is the most eloquent of artists with crystal tipped brush and the swiftest most delicate strokes. His laughter crackles as though the thinnest layer of ice is breaking. For aeons he studied the world of nature. Tracing every shape in silver and in the process opening our eyes to every natural SHAPE. But I believe that his greatest joy came when we created windows. For at that moment we gave him his canvases - a place to create his original work.



This morning he did a quick sketch of himself on my dining room window, well at least a sketch of his clothing and his long and winding hat! You can see the hat twining up the left middle of the window. Curiously he left his face blank. Does that mean that he is invisible? Or is it that he prefers to remain anonymous? Ah, Jack, the search continues...

In Search of Jack Frost

Jack Frost Design 1_8_2016

Who is Jack Frost?? I've been wondering for some time. A few days ago Jack's first winter paintings appeared on our windows and I marveled at this dexterous and obviously brilliant A.D.D. artist. I began writing about him, imagining his crackly laugh that sounds like the rapid shattering of the delicate ice on deeper pools. I wondered where he lived, what he looked like.

This morning I was rewarded! If I believed in magic, I might say Jack knew I was writing about him!  My car was frost-designed with an intricate flowery pattern while all the other cars were a simple sheet of grey! Ah, Jack! It is going to an enjoyable hunt trying to pin you down!!

In Search of Jack Frost

a golden thread....

My Golden Thread workshops will be drawing on what I have learned in over thirty years of experience working with traditional stories, bringing them to life for a variety of audiences. In the course of this work I've studied a variety of writers and thinkers. Historians of religion, anthropologists, Jungian scholars and whenever possible listening to the voices of the indigenous- those who grew up in the old ways.

By now my approach to traditional tales is deeply intuitive. When I enter a sacred area, like that of myth, I truly feel I am entering a very particular world with certain rules and possibilities of expression. The same is true with fairy tales, animal fables and legends each have their own rules and their secrets are best unlocked by following a certain path.  Their classifications are important only so much as they are sign posts pointing the way to the proper approach. When you revive a fairy tale you do not treat it in the same way as a myth. You would not approach a queen in the same way as a shepherdess!

Now I want to help others discover the unbelievable depth that can be found in these old tales- thus this series of workshops called The Golden Thread: Finding Meaning in Traditional Tales. Each workshop series focuses on a different kind of traditional tale. The first journeys have been into the landscape of fairy tales. To deepen the work with fairy tales I have taken cues from dream analysis, amplification of symbols, Michael Chekov's gestural work and cultural explorations. The tellings that have resulted from the classes so far has been extraordinary.
The newest version of the workshop will begin this October 7th, 2015 on Wednesday evenings. The Golden Thread: Finding Meaning in Traditional Tales: Fairy tales

Flowers and Presence

While working on my newest performance: The Language of Flowers* I spent hours pouring over volumes of myths and folktales about flowers that tell of their origins and their meaning. The work sensitized me to the unique qualities of each flowering plant. Because they were created to reflect the true essence of each plant, myths of origin in particular opened up the doors of perception. Now when I see these flowers, the stories surround them like an ethereal fragrance helping me to go deeper into the experience of each plant.

I've begun my own new custom of greeting the day by looking closely at flowers and honoring their delicate presence. Bringing them in the house to be with me when I work allows me to let them companion me through the day- a lovely contemplation. Today the delicate white spray of the cilantro and yesterday spicy, sweet geranium blossoms.

* The performance title refers to the Victorian custom of endowing every flower with a specific meaning. Daisies-innocence, Red Rose- passionate love etc.., Deciphering a bouquet using one of the many "Language of Flowers" booklets in circulation revealed the hidden messages.

Invisible Worlds

I think often of an encounter I had several years ago in Poland. I was sitting at a well-worn kitchen table with an anthropologist whose work was in the field with different African tribes. When he heard I was a storyteller he lit up. "It's good that you still exist!" he said. "You bring us to the invisible worlds."

'WORLDS,' he said. Not just ONE invisible world. It did me good to hear this because when working with different types of stories I have seen that they have different qualities, rules and access points. FAIRYTALES- share their boundary with DREAMS, the landscape of our nights. Both of them utilize archetypal symbols, bizarre juxtapositions with a logic all their own and -held on high- the banner of the life and death struggle of the soul to be born.  MYTHS- remain rooted in the cultures that created them. They receive their stamp of authenticity from those people and are tethered to the "in the beginning time" of the world, with its bold characters that leave an imprint on all that we see. When we tell a PERSONAL STORY, we bring on our breath an invisible world peopled by the ghosts of our MEMORIES. And for a completely ORIGINAL TALE storytellers must build their own invisible habitation from whatever bits and scraps they can find until it is TRUE and the story feels JUST RIGHT.

INVISIBLE WORLDS.... Yes it is a storyteller's work to source them and we are in competition with a lot of modern day imposters. Video games have taken these potent archaic symbols and harnessed them to a Sisyphean narrative of endlessly repeating encounters with no real transformation possible. Disney cannot put us in touch with the invisible worlds. Everything it presents is completely visualized and encoded in two dimensional film, forever colorized and controlled.

Fortunately, storytellers do not have the same aim as the entertainment world. For us it is not even a matter of trying to make the unseen SEEN, it is about making it PRESENT and palpable in the space. We bring the old stories not to forget ourselves or to make our audience forget where they are, but to remember there are other worlds beyond.

Recording "In the Groves"

Just spent two days in the recording studio putting our tree myths and songs on vinyl or the digital equivalent. IN THE GROVES our next CD is finally on its way! We had our 'one and only' all time - cannot record without - engineer Huck Bennert and our favorite studio Wellspring Sound in Acton. Tom came in at the end to bring a haunting accordion background to the Russian birch song. Eight hour and nine hour days with not even a half hour lunch break and no complaints. You can tell we all have backgrounds as free lance artists. We would starve to death if we worked union hours... Hey wait a minute, Maybe those are union hours!!

There will be an incredible amount of beautiful ethnic music on the CD thanks to the wonderful material Margot has brought in to complement the stories. Margot and I sing in Japanese, Welsh, Russian, Czech and ... OK English!!

There is an ongoing very beautiful story about the Russian Birch Song we are recording for the CD.

Several years ago a wonderful, elderly Russian woman came to our In the Grove performance (tree myths and music along the paths of the Arnold Arboretum- Boston's tree sanctuary (more on the performance) We end the performance at sunset among birches while telling the Czech story of the Dancing Spirit of the Birch Grove. The whole experience brought her back to her childhood days - there is a great love of the birch in Russian culture. She took off her shoes and walked barefoot among the trees remembering her childhood and singing a song. Her daughter was with her and later sent us a copy of that same song. We decided to bring it to life for this recording. The day we went in to record, her daughter sent me an email - the first she had sent in years! 'What a coincidence!' I wrote to her. 'We are heading in to record your mother's song today.'
Talk about synchronicity - another incredible coincidence occurred. Our recording studio adjoins another and, in a break from working on the Birch Song, two musicians from the other recording studio met us in the hallway. "You are singing in Russian!" they exclaimed. "How do you know?" they were asked. "We are Russian!!" they said and they began singing that same beautiful song. Makes me feel our CD is on the right track!

Margot and I wore our Angel socks for luck. Huck was barefoot all the time but had a cool Thai dragon tattoo around his ankle. We Prevailed!!