ABSTRACT
It is perhaps not our first instinct to think of storytelling as a performance art, but rather as a literary one. In our late twentieth-century environment we are engaged in a constant drive to organise, label and compartmentalise. Even in terms of oral storytelling we can listen to the text, collect it, edit it and publish it. Until relatively recently the study of folklore has been essentially a text-based discipline, hence the numerous publications of texts, which bear little or no reference to the collector’s informants and the circumstances under which they were gathered. We can, of course, by means of the text understand the story as a piece of literature. However, over the last twenty years or so progress has been made in folkloristics towards a more performance-centred approach (see Ben-Amos and Goldstein eds., 1975, pp. 1–7), and more recently, with the renaissance of interest in storytelling and the rise of the professional storyteller, we have begun to appreciate his/her art in its performative mode. We can now go to our local arts centre or theatre and enjoy a concert from a professional storyteller, and this fits in nicely with our own understanding and expectations of what performance actually is; we purchase our ticket, sit in our seat and wait for the lights to dim and the show to begin. The event is the performance itself and the storyteller will employ all the devices and techniques any solo performer could be expected to employ. We can, therefore, easily come to an understanding that the (professional) storyteller is engaged in both a literary and a performance-based discipline.
