STORYTELLING IN PERFORMANCE NYU HUMANITIES COUNCIL WORKSHOP 2005-2006 Organizers: Timmie (E. B.) Vitz (French), Nancy Freeman Regalado(French), Martha Hodes (History)

OVERVIEW OF WORKSHOP PLANS:

This workshop aims to inspire scholarly reflection on the nature and importance of storytelling. In this endeavor, we have secured the participation of leading scholars and major performers from a wide array of schools and disciplines at NYU, as well as from outside of NYU. Participants come from NYU Law and Medicine, from the Columbia Medical School Program in Narrative Medicine, from the departments of Drama and Performance Studies in the Tisch School of the Arts, from the Draper Program, as well from many disciplines within Arts and Science including English, French, History, Italian, and Music.

Also participating will be leading figures involved in storytelling in New York City and several internationally celebrated professionals. We have arranged for scholarly participation by graduate students who are organizing a set of roundtables and who will help coordinate the workshop. There will be storytelling performances by undergraduates as well. Please see the appended schedule for the full calendar of events.

Storytelling is made up of three essential elements: the story itself, the storyteller, and the audience. Workshop events will address issues raised by each of these elements in their various modes, and by the ways in which they interact.

The story itself has structures and fundamental features which are studied, and debated, by scholars from a variety of disciplines. The form of a story, moreover, is often shaped by the purpose and the medium of its telling -- in live performance, in writing, or in another mode of representation. While drawing on the well-developed fields of narratology and motif-indices, we also seek to engage the relationship between story, reality and versimilitude, and to explore some of the many ways stories may be performed and studied.

The art of the storyteller is largely inseparable from performance, and it has been appreciated over the centuries and around the world, from the time of Homer up to Garrison Keillor. Some men and women are great storytellers: they have a remarkable ability to evoke the past, to create characters, to entertain, to console and to elicit emotion. Their voices, and often their bodies, have been central to their art. We intend to explore both some of the commonalities and the differences between the art of the oral storyteller and that of the writer of narrative.

The storyteller needs an audience. Originally, storytelling was fundamentally a dialogic art; traditional societies have long appreciated the important relationship of the storyteller to his or her audience in passing on the wisdom of the culture, and also allowing for orderly change. Narrative literature -- however sophisticated it has become in the West today and however far it has moved from traditions of oral storytelling -- often retains significant interpersonal features. It may focus attention on the relationship between storyteller and audience. Modern works of literary fiction and history, even works of psychology, law, and medicine, are typically recounted to absent readers by an omniscient speaker or narrator (who may be a remote and abstract figure). Still, they often contain important episodes in which a character tells a story to a group listeners whose reactions are important to our understanding of the story, history, or case as a whole. An important recent example of the interactive power of storytelling and audience comes from the conjoined worlds of psychology and neurology: Oliver Sacks’ influential work, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The role of the audience of narrative will be of ongoing interest to us in the workshop, for example, in terms of the kinds of pleasure that storytelling provides to them, as well as of the interpretive challenges that audiences confront.

As we focus on the questions raised above, we will also explore a number of general theoretical issues, among them: What are the formal and other differences between fiction and (ostensibly) truthful narratives? How does storytelling, in its different modes, mediate between ordinary reality -- the here-and-now -- and that which is new and “possible”? And how does it mediate between the ritual character of much storytelling (the models, genres, and precedents) and the storyteller’s freedom? What kinds of knowledge do we acquire from storytelling as opposed to purely cognitive or scientific knowledge? How and why is storytelling -- the telling of our own story -- important to the construction and maintenance of the self: of personal identity, and of mental and physical health? How do stories serve to define the identity of groups and promote bonding among individuals within the group? Narratives are often used (as in the law) to articulate adversarial relations and positions; how are they (or can they be) also used to resolve disputes? Narratives can be oral or written, heard or read; what does the live performance of a narrative, as of a drama, tell us -- give us --that reading the work does not? Storytelling is primarily a verbal art: how, then, do pictures, music and dance tell stories?

The workshop meetings throughout the year will explore in depth and detail such issues of storytelling in the professions, the Humanities, and the Arts. Events will include lectures and roundtable discussions with colleagues and students, and live performances by professionals and students. Rather than having many separate events, we have grouped speakers, roundtables and performances into a series of encounters on related themes. Our purpose is to enhance dialogue and further exploration of key issues.