Griot,
Asik,
Zirau,
Troubadour,
Pandavani,  
Guslar,
Nogmbe,
Dalang,
Romanceros,
Storyteller.

Joke,
Riddle,
Family story,
Fable,
Legend,
Ghost story,
Wonder tale,
Romance,
Epic,
Myth.

Dinner table,
Library,
Market place,
Wedding,
Museum,
Kitchen,
Funeral,
Tent,
Concert Hall,
Temple.

The activity of storytelling is something that occurs all over the world. Sitting round a fire, relaxing on piles of cushions, picking over remnants at the dinner table, are all natural settings for storytelling. Stories are an essential part of every culture and storytellers are everywhere; parents telling bedtime stories, grandparents recounting family histories, teachers enlivening lessons, priests passing on religious mysteries, and professional tellers entertaining and transforming through words alone.

Over the last 20 years the UK, along with many other countries, has seen a resurgence of storytelling as a professional art form. Storytelling emerged as a response to the diverse ethnic background in UK schools and the need for students to hear and share their own stories and cultural traditions. Over 20 years the work of professional storytellers has evolved from performances in classrooms, to performances in theatres and on TV and radio. Storytellers' repertoires have expanded, exploring dark, complex and philosophical material for adult audiences alongside work for children. And the body of professional tellers has grown too, from about 20 to around 500.

Storytelling in the UK is taking place in diverse venues. Schools use storytellers to explore global cultures and literatures, to look at story structures and elements that make up stories, and to develop listening and speaking – getting children to become storytellers themselves. Museums such as The British Museum and The Horniman in South London use storytellers to take the viewer inside an artifact or an exhibition, to bring an object and it's culture to life, and through story to ask philosophical and social questions. Festivals like Hay on Wye Literature Festival and theatres such as The Barbican and the Southbank Centre, both in London, host regular storytelling events, giving tellers the opportunity to experiment, and to collaborate with other art forms. Audiences range across all ages. Most storytellers will target a specific audience group with a particular programme. Family audiences are popular, as stories work on many levels and live across generations. Community storytelling projects are developed for a particular group, such as a hospital, a literacy group, or a youth club. Venues also market events to encourage specific community groups to come along, groups who might be connected to a story through culture, language or social interests.

The status of storytelling in the UK has suffered from being perceived as an art form for children, unlike many other parts of the world, where telling stories is respected, understood to be a demanding art form, and performed largely for adult audiences. Many British oral traditions did not survive the loss of indigenous languages, widespread literacy, and industrialisation and the spoken word came to have less value than the written one. Stories that were written down were often censored or sweetened, contributing to the assumption that the material was for children. In fact traditional stories are gutsy and ambiguous and don't always have happy endings. UK storytellers have been actively working to dispel prejudices, to get recognition for storytelling as an art form, and to create forums where critical debate can take place. Venues and funding bodies have important roles to play in supporting the development of storytelling, in order that both tellers' skills and the profile of the art form can continue to be raised.

Many UK tellers have been inspired by British elders who are part of living oral traditions: Duncan Williamson and the late Betsy Whyte both Scots Tinkers, Grace Halworth from Trinidad, and Beulah Candapa from Burma. These storytellers have been vital role models passing on skills and stories.

Duncan Williamson is now in his seventies and is the bearer of over a thousand stories and an equal number of songs. He learned all this material purely by listening. He was born on the shores of Loch Fyne in and has lived most of his life in gellys – tents made of willow branches covered in canvas. Tinkers travel a nomadic route across Scotland doing seasonal work and stories are a vital part of their culture, keeping their traditions alive, entertaining round the fire or on the road, passing on moral lessons and teachings about family, nature and spiritual values. For the Travelers telling and listening to stories defines and cultivates community, affirming the continuation of a clan. Duncan's relationship to his material is very strong. He has committed his life to passing on his songs and stories. He describes how he hears the voice of the person who told him a tale resounding in his ears as he speaks. And listening to Duncan you feel the presence of an invisible chain of voices, linking past with present through story.

Storytelling is a personal art form and each teller makes their own repertoire of stories. Most UK tellers have repertoires focused on traditional stories – tales which have been passed on by word of mouth, told and re-told by generations of mouths and ears before being written down. Traditional stories are remarkably resilient and keep coming back in different forms, they are flexible and the same story can be re-told in different ways, each teller making their own version of the tale. If a story is to remain meaningful a teller needs to bring their living imagination to the old material, re-making it for their generation, renewing the story and bringing it into the present. The approaches of UK tellers reflect diverse cultural traditions.

Pamela Marre interweaves fact with fiction using Jewish folktales, her own family's personal experiences of immigration, and wider Jewish history. Pamela has created powerful programmes of stories for The Imperial War Museum working along side exhibitions such as The Holocaust Exhibition. She often mixes Yiddish with English revealing and sharing a hidden world.

Jan Blake draws on her Jamaican roots bringing folktales, language and cultural traditions vividly to life. She incorporates Jamaican dialect and patois into her performances. Through her performance Tales of the Orisha Jan has re-created African myths that sustain the African diaspora, and with percussionist Crispin Robinson has been bringing these tales to a wide audience.

Storytelling is like jazz, the teller improvises their version around the basic plot of a story. A teller needs to make authorial choices about structure, turning points, character, point of view, and image. Along with formulaic plot elements, each teller has a store-room of formulaic language to draw on. They can re-use and invent their own: formulaic beginnings and endings; epithets; descriptive passages; repeating and cumulative phrases, and poetic sequences. Using formulaic language is like playing a musical instrument – it's all about timing and individual interpretation. In performance a teller depends upon both creativity and reproduction and the possibility for variety is endless. Each performance is different and the audience play a central role in how a teller uses formula and invention to tell a story short, or tell it long!

So even though a story has been told a thousand times, there is a sense in which it is happening once and never again.

Daniel Morden and Hugh Lupton have explored formulaic and poetic language through their tellings of the Greek classics The Odyssey and The Iliad, bringing these written texts back to compelling live performances. Daniel and Hugh have worked with Cambridge University Classics Department to make a teacher's resource pack and 3 CD 's of their performances.

Hugh Lupton has been exploring language through a series of praise poems he has been writing. Psalms from the horses mouth weaves biography with local history and Hugh performs the poem with fiddle player Chris Wood.

Daniel Morden was born and lives in Wales and draws on Welsh folklore in both his writing and storytelling. He has also traveled widely creating books and performances about his story sharing projects in Haiti, Hawaii and the Yukon.

Stories speak in a language of images and a teller will aim to make images live in the listener's imagination. Visualisation is at the heart of the storytelling process, as teller and listener secretly cast a story with people and situations that are close to them, filling a story with their own experiences, values and memories, and giving it meaning. The physical presence of the teller is a vital part of a performance: the tones and rhythms of the voice, gestures and movement, eye contact, all become part of the story. Traditionally music always accompanied storytelling. Ancient Britain had a tradition of bards who sang stories, accompanying themselves with a harp like instrument. Although this grand style of storytelling, known as epic singing, is still very much alive in many parts of the world today, it did not survive in the UK. Only remnants of epic traditions exist in Gaelic, Irish and Welsh languages, and in folk ballads. Working with music and musicians has been a natural development among many UK storytellers.

Ben Haggarty has been working with Yo Yo Ma and the orchestra of The Silk Road Project, creating narratives for Ma's family concerts. Ben works with a variety of musicians from percussion to electric bass, exploring an equally diverse range of stories from Sumerian Gilgamesh to Beauty and the Beast. Ben Haggarty is founder of the annual Beyond the Border International storytelling festival begun in 1993. He is also director of The Crick Crack Club which promotes storytelling events for adults throughout the UK and is currently holding mini festivals throughout the year at The Barbican.

Nuala Hayes has been exploring Irish musical and narrative traditions in her long collaboration with composer/musician Ellen Cranitch. Nuala has supported and developed storytelling throughout Ireland and is director Scéalta Samhna the Dublin storytelling festival.

Sally Pomme Clayton has worked with a huge range of musicians from London Sinfonietta and Welsh National Opera to Middle Eastern groups. She was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and Apples and Snakes to create a performance for WOMAD 2004 with accordionist Janie Armour. During 2004 Sally worked on the epic Ramayana with The Unicorn Theatre, traveling to Sri Lanka to collect stories and creating a performance of the epic with a band of Indian musicians. She has traveled widely collecting and sharing stories. Recently publishing a book about storytelling traditions in Central Asia.

Storytellers have worked with the British Council in Scandinavia, Spain, Central Asia, Africa and South America. Traditional stories can build bridges across cultural, linguistic and geographic boundaries. Audiences whose first language is not English have been surprised and empowered by their understanding. They have enjoyed sharing the differences and similarities between oral traditions, spontaneously telling their own stories. Listening to a story can connect the listener with their past and ancestral history; it can re-awaken forgotten stories and produce the desire to speak.

Liz Weir from County Antrim in Northern Ireland has championed the power of storytelling to aid conflict resolution. She has inspired the many storytelling clubs which have developed throughout Northern Ireland creating unifying environments where all stories can be shared.

The Society for Storytelling is an organisation that gathers together information about the diverse range of storytelling activities in the UK. In particular it supports the large amount of storytelling clubs throughout the UK. It acts as a network between amateur and professional circuits and a source of information about events.

Oral narrative expresses something about our identity. A story can speak to the group and the individual. It can portray written and unwritten histories, imagine how things might have been and how they could be. It can carry us to the place where wishes are satisfied, forgotten things remembered, and sorrows spoken of. By telling stories we connect the events of our life. And through their unique way of talking about the truth, stories can take us and somewhere else and bring us back to ourselves.   

Recent books by storytellers:

Sally Pomme Clayton, Tales told in Tents – stories from Central Asia. Illustrated by Sophie Herxheimer. Frances Lincoln.

Helen East and Eric Maddern, Sprit of the forest – tree tales from around the world. Illustrated by Alan Marks. Frances Lincoln.

Hugh Lupton, Tales of Wisdom and wonder. Illustrated by Niamh Sharkey. Barefoot Books.

Daniel Morden, Weird tales from the storyteller. Illustrated by Jac Jones. Pont.

Duncan Williamson, The King and the lamp – Scottish traveller tales. Canongate Classics.

© Sally Pomme Clayton