Thesis - Antithesis-Synthesis

In my recent course on Advanced Storytelling at East Tennessee State University, we discussed a variety of ways to organize story programs. One such way, is to use Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis as a schema for a storied discourse. [This dialectic is often mis-attributed to the philosopher, Hegel, and seems to trace back at least to Kant.]

One of our storytellers, who works in a corporate setting, sent me the following query:

"What appeals to me about this one is that it seems to exemplify one of the critical skills of collaboration - that of reconciling (synthesizing) two seemingly contradictory positions (thesis and antithesis, of course).

I've got a business workshop concerning Adaptive Skills coming up in a few weeks, and I've been asked to talk about "The Power of Storytelling".  I was thinking of launching into a T-A-S story as an illustration of the kind of behavior we're looking to encourage.

So – I was wondering if you can direct me to any stories (or collections!) that have this sort of organization?"

In answer to this request, I suggest that you consider any story as being maleable enough to serve a storyteller in any way he/she wishes.
To paraphrase Humpety Dumpety:
"When I tell a story it means exactly what I want it to mean, neither more nor less."

So, take a fable and turn it into an exercise for Thesis-Anthesis-Synthesis. Here is an example:

The Grasshopper and the Ants 3x

Cinderella's Coach

David has a brilliant mind and memory. His recall of people and their stories is flawless and he nails it for observation. A fantastic listener. ––– Elaine Dull Muray (Thanks Elaine!) 

Q: When is a pumpkin a coach?

A: When it carries someone to The Ball.

Where are you going? Do you want to craft your story? Improve your art? A coach can carry you closer to your destination.

When a small group of storytellers gather to work on their craft with the aid of a coach, there is no set curriculum. The combination of artists forms a unique opportunity for discovery.

Serving as a coach for fellow storytellers is an opportunity to practice listening, discernment and discovery.

When coaching, I bring the following premises concerning storytelling:

1. Storytelling is a conversational art form.

This is where we begin, in conversation. There must be a dynamic relationship between the story-teller and the story-listener. This is where we look for the involvement strategies to engage and manage a listener’s attention.

2. The art begins with listening.

It is easy to think that the role of the listener is to pay attention and the role of the teller is to receive it. But keep in mind that a currency is being exchanged. If the listener  “pays” attention, what are they paying for? Often, they are paying attention in order that attention will be paid to them: the story is for them, it concerns them, it is relevant to them. This is where we look for the teller to make choices based on an awareness of the needs of the listener.

3. The storyteller is a living body-of-text.

The "living literature" of the modern storyteller includes narrative, anecdote, poetry and song. Are you drawing fully on what you know? Understanding how your story fits in with your body-of-text strengthens your personal authenticity.

4. Storytellers must be concerned with the context of the telling.

Where are you? Why are you here? What just happened? Who are these people? What is this place? The storyteller is concerned with telling the right story at the right time for the right reason. We must learn to associate our body-of-text with our awareness of place, time, society, and circumstance.

5. All stories change value when put in relationship with other stories.

What do we discover about your story when it is shared between one story and the next? This is where we have our greatest opportunity: discoveries revealed to us in a group process. No matter how random the assortment of stories may appear, we will find lines of relationship within and among them that will reveal new considerations of the individual story and the story program.

6. To tell means to discern.

We often think that the story is the most important concern. But “story” is the object, “telling” is the action. Telling is, in part, tallying: the recounting of events. But the more important function of telling is discerning. Discernment makes the art of telling distinct from other story art forms. The storyteller practices this in choosing stories and in finding latent values in those stories to serve the present discourse.

Finally, each person in a group coaching session has something valuable to offer. Coaching is neither auditing nor judging. But there is evaluation.

Evaluation is the act of finding value. A coach listens for the particular opportunities your work presents and from that, creates a valuable experience for the entire group.

For me, coaching is a way-finding art, an improvised curriculum for getting us to The Ball.

Sweet is the Silence

I just spent a few lovely winter days with the students at Moorestown Friends School. MFS is a Quaker school and, as such, appreciates the beauty of silence. The 200+ yr old Meeting House is a deep well of silence, and according to their custom, each of my programs began with a moment of silence. The gentle strength of the silence that follows the scurrying and noise of a full room is enchanting.

http://mfs.smugmug.com/Lower-School/David-Novak-with-First-Grade/

I am reminded what Jean Louis Barrault wrote in his autobiography, Memories For Tomorrow, that "the greatest moments of drama happen in silence."

In storytelling, silence is dynamic. The creation and quality of a silence is determined by the qualities of the sounds that precede it. A large sounds yields a large silence. 

Additionally, silence finds its corollary in stillness. 

Stillness is to silence what movement is to sound. They are the dual forces that sculpt experience. A partial silence might occur if I stop talking but keep walking. Likewise a partial sound exists if I stop walking but keep talking. Mix them and match them to conjure silences. Raise the volume, increase the action, then abruptly stop sound and action. What follows? Resounding silence.

Enter the silence like diving into the depths of a clear pool.

Drift there a moment.

Feel the surrounding universe.

Sillence is where we fully enter the feelings of a moment. No matter how emotional my story may be, if I am still talking, the brain is still working. The  words are demanding thought and intellect. If I want you to feel fully a moment in my story, I must stop talking altogether.

I must stop moving as well, so that the seeing eye is not distracted.

Then we dive out of the head and into the heart.

I often judge the quality of the storytelling experience by the quality of the silences we achieve together. I listen for those moments when, out of the action, out of the words, we achieve still and silent communion.

Thank you Moorestown students for sharing that communion with me.

http://mfs.smugmug.com/Lower-School/David-Novak-with-First-Grade/

Spherical Storytelling

Imagine a sphere, a bubble. Imagine you are inside this bubble, arms and legs extended in a 4-point star. The bubble is clear and you are free moving on all axis lines: forward and back, left and right, and so on. Your turning form defines the sphere you inhabit. You can look out from your bubble in every direction.

Now imagine your bubble is in a story. Let's select a story from Western Culture that many people know: Hansel and Gretel. Imagine you are in the humble home of our main characters. You turn about in your bubble to survey the scene:

A gaunt man slumps in his seat at a rough hewn table. He  stares at his hands. His hands are hard and cracked. His palm shines with a fallen tear.

Turrn again and see a woman standing across the room, looking out a cracked window onto a frozen woodland. Her face is drawn, her eyes are fierce with fear. She thinks, as does he, "how did it come to this?"

Turn again and see a far wall. A boy lies next to his little sister on a narrow palette. Her feet are beside his head, her head at his feet. He looks at her sleeping calmly. He surveys her clear brow, long lashes, red cheeks. He is afraid. Something is wrong. Trouble is coming.

From your position in the center of the scene, you can experience the surrounding landscape of the story: the dim house, the chill wind rattling outside, the smoke-tinged air. You can look as well into the hearts and the minds of the characters; into the wide world stretching out in every direction from your pivot point; into the past events and histories of those now gathered for the scene. You are the omniscient narrator.

To tell the story from here, you must move your bubble along a line; listing details, sequencing events, and composing images. Your bubble begins moving along a story line. Story lines move across the topography of the story world, like water flowing from the mountains to the sea. But what creates that topography?

Let's sink our bubble deeper into the world of the story, to the story's core. We are not in any scene. Instead, we are beneath the scene, beneath all possible scenes. From the story's core we can look out in any direction along radial lines that will lead to the emergence of scenes and the opening of pathways. As we look out from our bubble, we see considerations of story development. What are the motive forces pushing the story to the surface? Along one line we see the complex layers of jealousy, greed, and fear urging a mother to wickedness. Along another line we see the forces of apathy and indolence reducing a father to desperation. Along another line we see naive childhood selfishness awakening to disillusionment. The story's core is the realm of emotions, intentions, issues, urgings, fears, hopes, and longings that manifest the surface details of the story. Along the line of the wicked mother, we compose a scene of entrapment and control, a weak father and helpless children. Along the line of fecklessness, we watch a man fail to stand for his family and slide into immorality. Along the line of naive thoughtlessness, we find a scene of entitled children, taking what they want, unaware of others. Each of these lines reach the surface and inform the topography across which you delineate your story. They inform the mood, the season, the color, the sensation, the depiction of character and the character of the action. 

A story is more than its text. A storyteller goes deep into the story's core, finds a line of development and from it describes the world and lines of the telling experience that yield a text, a "textile," a sinuous thread which is this particular iteration of the story.

At the core of the story world we are at the juncture of all stories. We stand where many lines converge. That deep place is, paradoxically, here and now in the moment before telling, before weaving the text. We face the place we have entered: the room, the people, the season, the  circumstance, and from them find lines-of-relationship that inform the path we will follow as we emerge into the story world and find the story line.

Like a spherical railway roundhouse, the storytelling place, the place where teller and listener meet, is at the intersection of possibilities. Look out and see who is there, what is happening, and why you are gathered, then enlarge your bubble to embrace them all and begin the journey.

Sunday in the Park (Shanghai)

A front blew through last night, heavy rain and high winds, yielding blue skies, bright sun, cool breezes, and fallen autumn leaves. Zhongshan Park in Shanghai is like any city park in Manhattan or Chicago. At the entrance, vendors spread their wares along the pavement, selling kites, whirligigs, bubble blowers and other good toys for a park outing. Within, meandering paths lead over little bridges, along greenswards, through shady groves of bamboo, oak, and even a small stand of redwoods. Park benches are scattered along circular plazas where couples practices ballroom dancing or small groups move in silent Tai Chi meditation. There is a small lake with boat rentals and a little amusement park with spinning swings and a carousel. Families are out today, loving their children (and their smart phones) and contentedly enjoying the sun and each others' company. These are middle-class, urban families, comfortably arrayed and equipped with strollers and back packs. Their children are gifted with balloons and toys, running about in windbreakers and sport shoes. This is China's baby boom. The grandparents easily remember a the great privation and distress of the Cultural Revolution, barely 40 years ago (1966-76) during which our baby boom was protesting the Vietnam War. This new urban China baby boom, like ours, emerges from hardships to bask in new material comfort. A rising middle class is enjoying luxuries unimaginable a short time ago. If patterns repeat themselves, this baby boom will soon develop the perennial distrust of the Establishment. Already the cities are up against a discovery of pollution similar to that which ignited America's environmental movements. The saturation of materialism may likewise lead to a similar questioning of values and ideology, fueled by increasing higher education and international influences. Maybe. It remains to be seen.

Today, however, I feel the warmth of the sun, the peace of the pastoral setting, the beauty of families, and the sense, however fleeting, that all is well. I am especially missing my son, Jordan, who would fit in with all the other children, and whose company would make this day complete. Monday is his 6th birthday and I cannot wait to hug him up close.

Meanwhile, I am happy to begin another week of work tomorrow, and grateful that I will be spending next Sunday at home.

Great Expectorations

I am in China for my second tour of International Schools with the new company, Pana Wakke. The director, Sonia Zivkovic, does a grand job of organizing and integrating my work with the schools and the experience is very rewarding. Because the International Schools serve a population of foreign nationals living and working in China, my tour is limited to the denser urban areas: Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Shouzou, and so on.

The world of the schools is set apart from the life of the city. By and large, the cities are sleepless and busy: pile drivers and construction cranes assault the rising sky line; dense, erratic traffic scurries in, out, and across all lanes; horns bleat, phones blare, and people shout. Yet amidst all the cacophony of the urgency in urban China, one sound grates across them all: the sound of throats clearing. It is a harsh, raspy sound followed by a brief pause and then the splat of spit upon grass, trash, or pavement. The open-air effusion of phlegm erupts suddenly from the crowd and never fails to startle and sicken me. A less loud, but equally common companion to these throaty expectorations is the hiss and spray of open-air nose blowing. Clearly this is one practice where the lines of culture are sharply drawn. I feel a drip, take a tissue, blow, and throw away the refuse. But the man across from me shows that you can skip the tissue (and save trees?) by merely clearing your nostrils onto the nearest bin, bush, or byway.

The rising pollution index in China is famous, and it may be this that engenders the people's nose and throat distress. Whatever the cause, there is something here that can neither be swallowed nor coughed up. The People, it seems, are choking. Or, perhaps, they getting ready to speak.

Magic Picture Story Boards

Over the years I have created ways for using a simple paper folding toy to explore storytelling, tallying, and storyboards. The "magic picture" toy is created by folding a square of paper in on itself to create multiple folds that can hide and reveal part or all of a square. 

As a picture toy, these are used to change a simple picture such as making a facial expression turn from a frown to a smile. For storytelling they can be used to recount a story. I use them in the classroom, to help students find their way through a story and to divide a story into richer details:

Throughout history storytellers have used pictures to illustrate their stories.

Bankelsanger literally means "bench singer." These German storytellers would use a small bench as a stage from which to direct listeners to their story boards.

Similarly the art of Kamishibai in Japan is based on telling stories to images.



The modern use of storyboards in film-making is a direct descendant of these traditions. Storyboarding was first used as a cost effective way to pre-edit animated films by Walt Disney.