ABSTRACT
Storytelling theatre, originating from the work of Mike Alfreds, strips theatre of all but its essential energies, consisting simply of actors, an audience and a story to tell. Lacking costume, scenery and props, actors are called upon to create the imagined environment solely through their own physical and vocal resources. This chapter considers the educational role of such theatre, for the teacher artists who perform it and for the children who watch it, and is based upon my long experience of teaching university students from a range of international backgrounds. Beginning with a consideration of Walter Benjamin’s The Storyteller, in particular his distinction between stories as conveyors of experience rather than purveyors of information, it proceeds to describe approaches taken to the performance of three traditional tales, each of which were explored and performed in ways that offered, among other things, nuanced readings of gendered behaviours. An examination of the Italian tale ‘Dear as Salt’ concentrates on how, during the devising stage, a playful exploration of physical images was used to reveal themes hidden within the tale centred upon the simple but powerful domestic pleasures that can make life worth living. A consideration of the English fairy tale ‘The Two Sisters’ recounts how performance was used to ironize an apparently straightforward moral tale, thus exposing to critique issues of sibling rivalry, adult favouritism and feelings of exclusion in ways that a straightforward telling could never manage. The concluding section considers a performance of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ that interpreted it as a tale of greed, reflecting on how the careful deployment of the figure of the miller’s daughter within the performance space was able symbolically to mirror her moral journey from innocence to corruption.
