Day one reflections

One thing that I noticed today is that we did physical exercises before mental ones. Pretty basic, but I think it's important. Sometimes, I think I treat it like the story comes out of my brain, and I focus on the mental aspects--the ideas, the tropes, the interpretation, the synthesis, the "shadow-work," what have you. But on a really basic level, it comes out of your body. The words are a production of your body, as are the volumes of unspoken, non-verbal communication. Getting grounded there first made a noticeable difference to me.

I also thought a bit about the "see, say, show" activity. I'm not sure how it's meant to be interpreted, but the last part of it--where we paced ourselves around the room--was very illuminating for me. It made me think about my own story pacing, how quickly I'm comfortable processing and translating images; basically, it made me consider the length of an "idea unit" (Chafe-style) when I'm storytelling. And riding the wave right at the top of that arc--the "glib" space where we were trying to get through idea units/images as fast as we could without losing coherence--felt to me like that place where you're pacing a story just right, riding the edge.

The activity at the window resonated particularly with me. I was thinking of it later in terms of something that Shonaleigh said about walking the line between the two worlds. The storyteller occupies a liminal space, between the world of the story and the listeners. As at the window, the teller translates the unseen storyworld for the listeners. However, if the teller totally disappears into the storyworld--as in the first instance, where Julie was looking out the window the entire time--then the connection isn't made with the listener. (Though of course this kind of immersion could be useful in rehearsal, as it was for Julie.) During later examples, though, it still required glances out the window every now and then, and without that, Julie wouldn't even have seemed a reliable witness; she would have been too much in our world to show us that one. For the fullest experience, we needed to experience Julie looking out the window and interacting with us; she needed to be both here and there. I think that is, metaphorically, the space we need to occupy when we're telling.