It’s About the Quality of the Listening…

A lot of things go into good storytelling.

And I learn a lot from each of the storytellers that comes to tell at Mosaic Storytelling Festival: Know your story well. Respect it and its history. Tell it over and over until you can recount it as if were something that happened to you. Feel the story’s internal rhythms; inhabit the story and let it inhabit you. Pick stories that you love — and let your love show.

We’ve had a chance to hear a lot of good tellers in the first two and a half seasons of Mosaic Storytelling Festival. It just seems to get better and better.

But I realized today that great storytelling is not just about the quality of the telling. It’s about the quality of the listening. When the group that is listening gives the story their complete attention, and lets their attention just deepen and deepen over the course of the hour, that’s when something truly extraordinary happens.

Today as Nathalie Vachon and Marylyn Peringer told their stories the listening just got deeper and deeper with each story. By the end of the hour, the storytellers — and the listeners — had created true magic together.

I don’t know which I love more, the first rate storytellers we are hearing (Diana Tso, Lorne Brown, Nathalie Vachon [accompanied by musician Ross Lynde and Japanese dancers Ran, Kengo and Takako] and Marylyn Peringer have all given extraordinary performances so far this season) or the first rate audience that is growing with the stories each time.

I think I love them both!