“The boy went to the king with the golden feather he’d found…” says Sarah Rundle, as she obliges our photographer on a sunny afternoon at British Council, Chennai. As she walks us through the story, she grows more animated, drawing us deep into it. The London-based actor and storyteller was in the city as part of the The Art of Storytelling India tour. With a host of stories from the Silk Road up her sleeve, watching Sarah perform is a delight. The storyteller also conducted a workshop for beginners in the city, and walked them through the magic of creating and telling stories using one’s imagination, voice, and body.
In an interview with MetroPlus, she spoke about the art of storytelling, what drew her to it and some of her favourite tales.
Excerpts:
What stories do you have in store for the audience here in India?
I have no idea what my performance is going to be like. What I do is, I write two set lists on my hands. On one hand is a list of stories from the Middle East and Turkey for adults and older children.
On the other, is one with tales from China, Mongolia and Japan that are simple and take five minutes to tell; these would have a lot of repetition and audience participation if my audience is families and young children. Back in the U.K. though, I usually have a better idea of who I’m going to perform for.
What are your workshops like?
What I’ve been conducting here are beginners workshops. I teach people how to break a story down into what we call the story skeleton; the bones. We break it down in a series of pictures and that makes it easier to remember a story, because a lot of our memories are visual. And then they learn to reclothe those bones with description.
The workshops here typically last three hours, but I’d love to be able to have a longer time. I would love to take a bunch of people to a house in the country for a week and just practise telling stories.
What stories do you usually tell?
In terms of repertoire, I take stories all along the Silk Road — Japan, China, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Turkey, Arabia, Palestine, Italy, Finland and folk tales from Britain.
Do you ever use props?
I don’t usually; I do use voice modulation a lot. But I do have a show that’s about two hours long about the English Civil War, where I have hats that I make the audience wear. Because they have to fight each other with spoons for the story. Then there’s a set of stories I do called the Eat Me: Tales of Food and Cunning, in which my audience gets food to eat, depending on the story. Bread and butter stories have bread and butter, Spanish medieval stories have meatballs and Arabic ones have sticky orange cake. I also have a set of Italian stories in which I sometimes bake hazelnut biscuits that the audience is served during the interval.
When was your first tryst with storytelling?
Well, it was about 20 years ago, when I was living in Manchester and working as a scientist. There was a little vegetarian restaurant in town, and once a month, they would have a storytelling session. I went to one and was drawn to the warmth and intimacy. So I started off by telling five-minute stories; that was my big break away from science, sort of like running away from the circus. I was in my 30s.
I moved to London and it just so happens that there’s a big storytelling scene in London. There are storytelling promoting groups like the Crick Crack Club that puts on large shows at places like Soho Theatre and British Museum.
What would you say makes a good storyteller?
A good storyteller must be a good listener. A story is like a triangle — one side is the story, the other is the storyteller and the third the audience. The storyteller has to be constantly listening and perceiving how the audience is reacting to the story. The audience also need to listen themselves and give an energy back to the storyteller.
In fact, Vayu Naidu, an Indian-origin storyteller, once said that it’s not the storyteller who constructs the story. The listeners construct the story in their own heads. The storyteller is supposed to reconnect the listeners with their own half-remembered emotions.
What are some of the stories you enjoyed listening to as a child?
For me, it was more story reading than storytelling. Books were a constant companion and joy in my childhood. One of the first stories I fell in love with was The Midnight Folk by John Masefield; it was full of magic. As a storyteller, I love certain performers such as Hugh Lupton; I could listen to him for hours. He always has something interesting to say; there so much magic and humour in his storytelling
