Tellabration!™ 2005

Tellabration!™ 2005 was a wonderful, day–long mini storytelling festival, with two concerts, a swap, and a workshop with one of the storytelling world's most respected members, Anne Pelowski.

Below are Ben Jacobs' writeup of the full day and Bill Gordh's more detailed description of Anne Pelowski's double contribution to the day.

Further information on Tellabration!™ events can be found on their official website.

A report on Tellabration!™ 2005

The Storytelling Center of New York City presented Tellabration!™ 2005 on November 19th. It was our honor to be hosted by the St. Hilda's & St. Hugh's School in Manhattan. Tellabration!™ is a day-long national event where storytelling organizations produce performances to celebrate the art of storytelling. The idea is that these performances all take place on or about the same day.

This year's Tellabration!™ offered a multifarious lineup:
 
Stories for Families with Anne Pellowski, Ishmael Beah, and Julie Pasqual;
 
a Storytelling Workshop with Anne Pellowski;
 
a Story Swap;
 
and the Evening Concert with Joe Cross, Ethan Lipton, Zero Boy, and Ed Stivender.

Anne Pellowski unrolls her amzing story–cloth.
 
At Stories for Families, children and grownups gathered to enjoy Anne Pellowski, a renowned storytelling icon who has been the inspiration and educator of countess other tellers. She has written one of the storytelling bibles, The World of Storytelling, and her latest book is Drawing Stories from Around the World. She used techniques of her own and from other cultures to tell an engrossing Aboriginal creation tale using sand, a stick, and an overhead projector. She also told an African folktale using the mbira (an African thumb piano), and an Indonesian folk tale using a storycloth which she created. As she told the story, the cloth was unrolled revealing scenes and images created from cloth that guided us on the story's journey. We were entranced by both her telling and how she used traditional cultural objects to tell the stories.

 
Ishmael Beah hails from Sierra Leone. His joyful telling of African folktales was supported by his recounting of the importance of storytelling in his culture. He told of us how he listened to the elders tell stories by the nighttime fire and how he was encouraged to participate. One of the folktales he gave us was "Why Spider Has a Thin Waist."

 
 
Left to right: Julie Pasqual and Anne Pellowski.
 
The other teller for the Concert for Families was a long-time friend and member of the Center, Julie Pasqual. With the cuteness of a puppy and the energy of a bolt of lightning, Julie is a seasoned teller who is a clown with the Big Apple Circus, a dancer, and a stiltwalker. The stories she told us incorporated her ebullient personality as well as her physical prowess. She is truly a joy to watch and to listen to.

Most of the audience stayed for the Storytelling Workshop with Anne Pellowski. Anne is famous as a storyteller who uses objects. She illuminated us by demonstrating how to use both everyday objects and cultural objects to tell stories. She demonstrated origami stories, felt board and drawing stories, stories using the mbira, and handkerchiefs. She then taught us about very diverse cultural techniques. She taught us about Eastern European nesting dolls and how they are used to tell stories. She got more in depth with the Aboriginal sand stories. And she delved further into Japanese telling with ekaki uta — a form which translates to "picture writing song," where the story is drawn while tellers and the listeners chant. Her presentation was informative yet simple and accessible, filling us with new ideas and inspiration. And just think, she did all this in an hour's time.

Story Swaps are always fun. We had a small audience for this one, but almost everyone in attendance shared stories.

 
 
Left to right: Joe Cross and Ethan Lipton with ukelele player Mike Stumm.
 
Our Evening Concert was a bit of a departure for us due to the diverse group and styles of the storytellers. The opening teller was Joe Cross, a Native American teller from the Caddo tribe of Oklahoma. Joe began with a welcoming invocation chanted by him as created rhythms with a rattle. He told a traditional tale of the Great Turtle Island, an Iroquois creational tale. Then he told the story of how he got his Indian name Mobese Little Bear and how he got his Anglo nickname Joe Boy. Then he told what seemed to be another personal story about how he was saved from a water moccasin bite by chewing gum. He really had us going and gave us that wonderful "Hey… wait a minute!" moment of realization that it was a tall tale.

The second presentation was by Ethan Lipton who describes himself as a post—modern crooner. Lipton writes and performs storysongs which comment on life, love, loss, and societal morass. Ethan has a laidback singing style and a droll sense of humor. Among his storysongs that were presented were "I Got a Place to Go" (about working an office job) and "Let Me Stay Home," an appeal not to have to go to his mother–in–law's home for a family gathering. He was ably accompanied by Mike Stumm on ukulele.

 
Zero Boy came next. Zero Boy is hard to describe but I'll take a shot at it. He is kind of a living comic book that beats all the traffic during rush hour. Zero is a performance artists and vocal acrobat who relates his adventures in Zeroland with the acuity of a Zen Master on amphetamines. He has an amazing talent for creating vocal sound effects, character voices, and sonic rhythms. The raucously presented Zeroland adventure was a reverberating account of his hippie days in Oregon when he needed to get back to New York although he had no money. We heard the sounds of planes and buses, all the people he encountered, his thinking out loud parts about what to do when meeting obstacles, the grunts, and groans and other weird noises taking us along this funny road trip.

 
Our final storyteller of the evening was the celebrated Ed Stivender. Ed is an acclaimed teller, author, and recording artist. He brought his banjo and told us traditional tales, a literary story about a tippling Irish fellow who met up with an angel, and an improvisational story created from unrelated words given to him by the audience. It was refreshing to see a teller of such an acclaimed reputation tell in different styles and versatility.

Tellabration!™ 2005 was a great way to enjoy the coming Thanksgiving holiday. All these different types of storytellers in one day! How lucky can you get? We learned a lot, we laughed a lot, we liked a lot.

Ben Jacobs.

Anne Pelowski in action

The combination of performance and workshop was a perfect setting to see Anne Pelowski in action. She mesmerized children and adults alike in the family performance with a dazzling array of tales from all around the world. The around–the–world aspect was only part of the dazzle effect. Her modes of presentation were what made these tales so special. I would say inventive, but the inventiveness was not of her making but does attest to her ability to collect such wonderful tales and such wondrous ways of telling them.

She shared a tale from Indonesia with a scroll of images that accompanied the tale. She told a cumulative tale accompanied with felt board characters and a breathful of words that got longer as the tale grew. She then told a wonderful tale from Australia. She set the scene of aboriginals sitting around the fire telling tales and accompanying them with simple drawings in the sand. She evoked this for us by using an overhead projector and a plastic frame with sand in it (there's the inventiveness!). She drew in the sand to accompany her telling of the traditional rainbow snake tale, shaking the tray to erase the drawing to make room for the next. It was wonderful.

The workshop followed with Anne offering us a chance to story along with handkerchief folding stories from Europe and some drawing tales from Japan. She had handkerchiefs available and the lights were on so we could fold and watch and for me, hoping that my neighbor was better at the folding than I was so I could copy them. It worked out fine!

This is the kind of performance and workshop you walk away from wiser in many ways and exhilarated to try out some of the stories. The next week I had an opportunity to try out the Japanese drawing story "The Octopus" on the group of just under 3 year olds. They loved it and asked for it again. The simple chant allowed even the smallest ones to join in on the telling.

Family Tellabration was a great afternoon and teachers, librarians and storytellers alike would be wise to buy Anne's new book, Drawing Stories from Around the World, published by Libraries Unlimited. It is done very simply and well illustrated so that even those who didn't make it to the workshop can benefit from these wonderful stories that Anne has gathered together and shared with us.

Bill Gordh.

Also in this section:
 
Remembering John Colligan
Greetings from Center Director Robin Bady
Fall Story Concert and Swap 2007
Remembering Ruth Lesh
Remember Selma Wiener
Tellabration! 2003 Report
Tellabration! 2004 Report
2004–5 Workshop Report
2003–4 Workshop Report