Looking Ahead

Welcome back everyone,

This week we will begin to explore story composition as we work toward our final assignment (see below). Towards this end, you will all participate in conversational storytelling activities intended to explore your own "body of text."
We will also continue our study of storytelling history.
As I look at contemporary storytelling and contemporary solo performance, I see a preponderance of confessional, personal narrative. Generally, the storytelling movement celebrates the attaining of wisdom, maturation and discovery via personal experience often drawing from family memories. The overall feel is one of wholeness and wellness. The solo performance genre tends to expose trauma and distress via personal experience, and concerns itself with woundedness and recovery. The overall feel is one of brokeness and endurance. We see in both the exploration of retribution, redemption, and responsibility.
In the midst of all this, I am left wondering what has become of the fictional tale? What has become of the 3rd Person narrative? The bulk of storytelling history concerns itself with the confabulation: the creating and maintaining of myth, fable, legend, and romantic history. In the post modern era, we are without the super structures of the past: pantheism, polytheism, monotheism, divine right, supernatural governance, etc.. In place, we have the cult of the individual, a pervasive solipsism in which we can only examine truth through our experience.

We will explore these ideas as we continue.

Here's what you have to look forward to as we begin the second half of our course:

Reading:
World Of Storytelling: Chapters 3, 4, and 12.
Talk To Me: "Underneath the Lintel"

Other:
Friday's Father Act II: tbd
Doug Elliott, "Groundhogology": tbd
NC Stage "Underneath The Lintel": tbd

Final Paper: Compose a monologue play incorporating personal narrative, folk narrative, traditional and theatrical storytelling.