Telling stories on my own requires a lot of work. I have to find the story I like, decide for what audience it will fit, learn the text of the story and then craft it to become a telling tale. This takes time and effort. For the first time in my professional storytelling career I recently learned a story to be told in tandem (two people telling a story together, in this case my fellow storyteller, Debbie, and me). Learning this story added new challenges to the telling a story process, for now I was working with another individual.
The story that we picked was “Jack and the Pot of Brains”. We adapted this story from one by Milbre Burch called, “Morgan and the Pot o’Brains” that both of us had read and one from a tandem pair of storytellers, Joan and Mack, called, “Jack and the Poke full of Brains” that I had heard over the summer in Virginia. We decided that we would try and tell it during our performances at “Tellabration 2007” at the North Shore Public Library and the Little Portion Friary.
We re-worked the story and e-mailed it back and forth prior to practicing it together. Both she and I had performed a version of the story to audiences as a solo act, so we were familiar with the text. Debbie and I live about 25 miles from each other, so getting together frequently to practice wasn’t very viable. We met for the first time to go over the story about 2 weeks before our performance. There we read through the script a few times, divided up the parts, worked out some of the logistics and went back home to practice on our own. With script in hand we could use members of our households to read lines to us so that we could practice prior to meeting again.
We met the following Monday (our first performance was scheduled for that Friday). There we tried to practice the story with minimal use of our scripts and we digitally recorded our telling, so we could listen and practice it throughout the week at home.
That Tuesday night we tried something rather unique. Skype is an online Voice Over Internet phone system. You can call through your computer anywhere in the world. If the other person has Skype, it is free, if you call a land line from your computer it is a very minimal cost. All you need is a computer that has Skype software (a free download at Skype.com), a microphone input and speakers. I convinced Debbie to get Skype. We used it to practice our story. I initiated the Skype session and we did our story. On her end, Debbie had on a headset with a microphone attached, on my end, my computer has a built-in microphone, so I just talked to the computer. It definitely was interesting and has a lot of potential. What we couldn’t practice was the visual aspect of our telling. Skype does have video capability, but neither of us had webcams. The other difficulty was when we had to say lines together, but that didn’t happen much in how we adapted this story.
Our final practice session, prior to our performance was at Debbie’s school. I went there that Thursday and we performed our story twice in front of 2 classes, a third grade and a fourth grade. We got suggestions from both groups and were ready for our Tellabration performances.
The key to telling well in tandem is to listen to each other as you tell. Each performance we gave was better than the previous one. By the final performance on Saturday night we really knew how to play off of each other and the audience. Unfortunately the opportunity to tell this story again in the near future is limited. It was a great experience and I really like telling tandem tales as well as my own. I’ve already thought of another one that we might do next year. But we’ve got time.
Here is an excerpt of our performance on Friday: Pot of Brains
Very good.