Day 3

All Present

We continued viewing the documentary of the National Storytelling Festival 10th Anniversary.

We heard sample of Ray Hicks, Maggie Pierce, The Folktellers (Barbara Freeman and Connie Reagan-Blake), and Laura Simms.

We noticed the use of dialogue in the Folktellers performance of "No News, or, What killed The Dog". As a vaudeville routine the "story" dates back to turn-of-the-century entertainer, Nat M. Wills. The story has earlier variants (How the House Burned Down) that date back to the middle ages.

The point being that the storytelling revival has combined tent-meeting and rural "front porch" culture with stage forms. The national festival developed a showcase format to give audiences a "taste" of the various storytellers, using the term"olio" to describe the event. The term "olio" originally means "a miscellaneous mixture" ( Merrion-Webster online dictionary) in reference to food and comes to be applied to performance in the sense of "a miscellaneous collection (as of literary or musical selections)" coming from the minstrel show to vaudeville thence to storytelling.

We heard two "naive epiphany" narratives, one from Maggie Pierce and the other from Connie Reagan-Blake. The gist of such stories is: "I had no idea what this was until someone showed interest! then, surprise! I discovered I was a storyteller." The sense that storytelling as a vocation or avocation comes as a surprise reinforces the idea that it is somehow genuine, not contrived or intended, but fated.