Storyteller Elly Stuart writes about her experience in India.

Every Picture tells a story. Everybody is a storyteller

As a professional storyteller, most of the work I do tends to be in schools, but what I enjoy more than anything is working in a visual arts environment. When someone tells you a story, you see the images created by their words in your mind’s eye, so telling stories in a museum or gallery seems to me to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Imagine then, my delight, last year when I was approached by the British Council to run storytelling workshops in conjunction with their exhibition on illustration in children’s books Magic Pencil, in India.

My brief was to run storytelling workshops for 10-to-12 year olds which linked in with the exhibition. I was sent the Magic Pencil catalogue and took some time finding the pictures of stories I could tell to that age group – a difficult task. Many of the illustrations were from books written for much younger children. I was also aware of the danger of 'taking coals to Newcastle' as so many rich and powerful stories have come out of India. So, I decided on a traditional tale and a very contemporary story, both of which were illustrated in the catalogue.

The exhibition was being held in The Prince of Wales Museum, an imposing Raj-era building of the early 20th century crowned by a massive white Moghul-style dome and housing a superb collection of paintings and sculpture. One wing of the museum is dedicated to visiting exhibitions and was showing Magic Pencil. The children were already sitting cross-legged on the rug when I arrived so I immediately started my workshop.

Twenty five children and their teachers sat and listened quietly while I told them the story of Snow White taken from the beautiful book illustrated by Angela Barrett. The book sticks very closely to the original Grimm’s tale using descriptive and powerful modern prose interwoven with poetry. After the wonder tale I wanted to give them a very different kind of story, so I changed course completely and told My Uncle is a Hunkle says Clarice Bean from the series of contemporary books written and illustrated by Lauren Child. The children both understood and loved the story that is told in streetwise language using a fair amount of slang. Judging from their laughter, the boys in particular seemed to enjoy the characters and the accents.

My aim was to make storytelling and illustration accessible as tools for the children to use in the telling of their own stories. Dividing them into pairs, with the help of the teacher I asked each group to go and find the illustrations that related to the stories I had just told. That done, each pair of children was given a stone, and asked to retell the story of Snow White. The person holding the stone told a couple of sentences while the other listened, then the stone was given to the listener and they became the teller so that the story was handed back and forth. I have always found this exercise works well as it creates a shared telling of a story, takes the pressure off the individual and empowers the teller by allowing only the person holding the stone to speak. I walked around the gallery and listened to the different storytellers. I was amazed. Their recall was unlike anything I have come across in the UK. Although some children took a while to get going, within five minutes they were all immersed in their own shared telling of the classic tale and took a good 20 minutes to re-tell a 25-minute story using lots of detail and imaginative descriptions. Their mastery of the English language was very good – they spoke it fluently and their sentence structures and use of vocabulary was better than that of most of the children I work with in English state schools.

To complete the workshop, I then asked the same pairs to look closely at all the illustrations in the exhibition and to choose their favourite picture (only looking at the title on the label) from the exhibition and to write an imagined story around it. By this stage, all the children were very excited and the groups were all busily creating their stories. There was just time at the end to listen to three groups reading their stories out – they were wonderful. The teacher seemed really pleased telling me I had released the creativity in them and the children all thanked me individually as they left.

The next day I ran a session for teachers – I told them The Pedlar of Swaffham and a strange but true family story called The Foxes of Gormanston. This was followed by a lengthy discussion about storytelling and how it works, about how stories travel and change according to different cultures. I had assumed that storytelling would be a natural part of schooling in India, but this was certainly not the experience of these teachers, all of them women. They were very keen to know how I trained to be a storyteller and many of them took details of The School of Storytelling at Emerson College. I went through the basic crafting techniques and it became clear to me that training teachers in the craft of storytelling could be a future project. Many of those I spoke to would like to use storytelling more in the classroom but don’t have the confidence. Interestingly, storytelling is not yet seen as a way of making a living in India, although there are still some traditional storytellers in small village communities. It was fascinating to hear about how teachers are still, on the whole, respected in India, which is just as well as their average class has about 40 children!

That afternoon I ran another session for children and the next day I flew to Chennai. On Saturday and Sunday I ran storytelling workshops for children in the Lalit Academy. The dynamic of these workshops was very different as the children were not in school groups but were brought by their parents. It was also interesting to note that being that much further south, in Tamil Nadu, their English was not as fluent as the children in Mumbai. However, by the time we reached the part of the workshop where they created their own stories in groups, they were firing on all cylinders and every child wanted to tell the stories they had created. I was very pleased when I looked through the feedback sheets afterwards to read the following written by 12-year-old Sasha:

'The workshop was helpful because it made us get interested in writing. Most of us read but this workshop has taught us to write. Please conduct more workshops like this'

Elly Stuart earns her living telling stories and running workshops for adults and children. Performances take place in community centres, arts centres, schools, museums, galleries, and at special events. Elly is currently one of the Associate Artists of the Wivenhoe Engine Shed Project.