Roger Jenkins
storyteller
© Roger Jenkins 2011 Made With Serif WebPlus.
3) Every performance enables me to draw on what I’ve loved doing in the various phases of my life as a performer, teacher and writer: comedy improvisation with The Madhatters, mime, my large mask collection, doing commedia dell’arte with Marco Luly, devising visual theatre with the hearing-impaired in Hi! Theatre, and crafting stories and characters as a poet and playwright.
4) The stories I tell are stories that speak to me – they make me laugh or touch me in some way, so I always a strong connection in sharing them.
5) Most of the stories I tell are traditional folktales and many of them embody a wisdom that has ensured their survival through countless generations. (hence the which means wisdom)
6) People listen to stories and remember them. A P6 girl in Teck Ghee Primary told me the closing line to The One Wish when I returned a year after she’d heard it as an 11 yr old! For that reason, stories are powerful teachers, because they have a stickiness which keeps them in people’s hearts long after they first heard them.
7) Storytelling is a terrific tool in the language classroom – apart from modeling the expressive use of language, the repetition and redundancy (saying the same thing in different ways) are really helpful in developing understanding. Whether
there’s a short refrain that occurs again and again, or one that grows longer and longer as the story unfolds, it lends the story a degree of predictability that enables language learners to join in with growing confidence.
8) There are so many opportunities for participation in a storytelling event that it really becomes a sharing. It’s why I believe you need all three things – a good teller, a strong tale and a willing audience – to make a successful session.
9) This act of participation – even at its most basic level, of listening attentively and imaginatively – and the interaction between teller and audience makes oral telling so compelling for me – unlike ‘digital storytelling’ which is a video story. While digital is a useful vehicle for sharing short (3-5 minute) personal, true, contemporary stories, as a storyteller I tell stories that are fictional, metaphorical, universal, and which have fascinated audiences for many generations; and many of my stories can hold even the very young captive for 10 minutes and more!
10) When I’m in storytelling mode, I feel I’m a better person – the best that I am as a human being. It’s a wonderful feeling and I’m glad to be alive and able to share.
We sometimes forget what a powerful gift that is. I am sure that at the dawn
of civilization when hunters went out to kill a mammoth on which their clan would
have to live for the next six months, some man, not necessarily one of the shrewdest
when it came to tracking the beast or the bravest when the animal was cornered, returned
at night to sit by the campfire and relate the incidents of that day.
He told of the bird that guided his hunt;
he told of the heroic resolution of the prey, noble
and defensive with skills not encountered before;
he identified the men who led the assault and the one on whom all depended when it
seemed the mammoth would escape; and this fireside narrator lent that day a glory
that it could never otherwise have gained.”
James Michener, The World is my Home
Why did I turn my back on drama
and become a storyteller?
1) The teller looks into the eyes of the audience and makes a connection that is totally unlike theatre, where actors spend most of the time pretending the audience is not there.
2) It’s a delicate combination of improvisation and polished performance, oral dexterity and visual communication, that allows me to tailor the tale to the specific audience and the moment – both in my choice of story and the way I tell it.
Storyteller Under Sunny Skies, a clay sculpture by Rose Pecos-Sun Rhodes (Jemez Pueblo), 1993,
