What is Firebrand - An Oral Storytelling Workshop ?

This workshop might be the beginning of an apprenticeship in oral storytelling for you. You will have the opportunity to hear old stories and to practice telling them. You may come with a story you are already learning, or receive a story on the day. You will have an opportunity to witness the art of oral storytelling and begin to practice. Aside from the actual telling of a story, there is all the background relational work that goes into telling a story. If you know a story well, you can tell it with or without details, with just the bones or in full detail - much as you might introduce a friend to another friend: given the time and setting you might tell a story about them or add a detail or describe their favourite things, and if pressed for time you will entrust one friend to the other. Such is oral storytelling if we treat the stories as living beings. In this respect we're talking about a kind of animism. Oral storytelling is a transformative art, it is inevitable that you will be changed in the process of getting to know the story just as much as you will be changed in the telling and changed again when you hear how the story is landing in the hearts of those who hear you tell it. Fidelity to the aliveness of oral storytelling is one of the features that distinguishes it from a recital of literature. To be sure, the oral tradition and literary tradition are not foes, not opposed, but they are different and they can feed each other - more on that in the workshop.

Why a Workshop on Oral Storytelling?

Over the last five months I've been gathering soul kin together to listen to old stories, folktales and myth and to remember the medicine of stories. For you who have been coming along to Remembering Story Medicine you will know that when stories are told in these old ways, in community, with ritual, there's something deeper and older that we are enjoining. As you know, the stories keep feeding us well after we first hear them, especially if we feed them in return. Stories - particularly old stories - can rescue us from stories that are two small or that don't allow us to unfurl into our full shape. Stories shape and confine character. Genre's limit what can eventuate, can mute and sometimes entirely block certain emotions and ways of being. If you're in the wrong story you will not be able to know yourself, nor will anyone else. Stories can also give us an opportunity to try on different shapes.

As it turns out, so far I (Vas) have been telling the stories for these monthly gatherings and I have been conscious of reintroducing an indigenising old, old way of telling and way of listening, and way of beginning to incarnate these stories. But I would like to be a firebrand and set you all on fire so that you too tell stories, and for you also to become a firebrands. This way of being together and listening is not new. It's an element of how we've spent time together for millenia. Stories have been with us since the earliest times, along with food, fire, song, dance and ritual. If you have a story in you, or you have a desire to work with a story, come along to this workshop.

Details

The workshop will be held at the Kangaroo Ground Centre, 25 Donaldson Road, Kangaroo Ground. We will begin at 10am and conclude at 4pm on Saturday 15 March. Please bring a journal or notepad to write on as well as any material you have that relates to a story that you would like to begin to tell. Lunch is BYO. Feel free to bring something to share. A lite morning tea will be provided. Tickets $80. There is parking at the venue. There's a cafe in Research and The Store in Kangaroo Ground if you're thinking to get a coffee before the workshop begins. There's a small fridge to store things. Feel free to come at 9am if you would like to have a cuppa and walk the grounds, meet the horses or kangaroos.

Preparation

If you are already feeding on a story I encourage you to listen and look out for the ways that the story is already moving in your life. Look for omens, signs, dreams, synchronicities - hold them lightly, with an open hand, refrain from making too much sense out of them. Such helps are like fairywrens, they will dance and play for you but they will fly away if you hold them with anything other than your eyes.