A Prepared Performance

I'm going to start by sharing my personal experience and challenge, then apply it to sharing stories after trauma. It was interesting writing this piece, because I found out what it means to me as I wrote the first draft.

First, I love performing as a storyteller. I love to step onto the stage with a prepared piece and speak a playful tale filled with verbal acrobatics that amusingly entertains the audience. Yet, over the past few years, I've noticed that my desire to start with a prepared piece limits my ability to give what I consider a good performance. My favorite performances are when I have a piece scripted (to a point), rehearsed, and ready to shine, but I'm recognizing how the need for eloquence restricts my ability to speak from the heart/gut - especially if I'm trying new material - and this strangulation of material can kill a story. That's intense, and perhaps more intense than intended, but give me a moment while I try to parse out what I mean.

I believe my best material combines verbal gymnastics with bare honesty - and such a claim might read as pretentious, but I will be proud of my best works and I am confident that they are good. "Who Am I, Again?", my flagship piece about early recovery after brain injury, is an example of this, but I would also include some of the folktales I tell and a few other personal stories as high marks in my repertoire - these tales surprise and entertain an audience and can be told with merely a moment's notice. This is material that has been polished over years, and I'm starting to feel that all the glimmer from that polish makes the stories feel slightly antique. They're fun to look at, but don't provide the same thrill that comes from sharing new material.

I attend a monthly storytelling gathering here in Beijing, intended for sharing personal stories, and it is at these events that I have come to recognize the stalled creativity in my material. Each month has a theme, and often the theme is shared only days before the event. This presents the challenge of creating a story ready to perform in 72, or 48, or even 24 hours. Under these conditions, no one expects the performance to be flawless or the words to be coated in frosting, but professional arrogance causes me to place unrealistic expectations on the quality of my material - there are certainly some performers who can meet the challenge of prepared quality, but in my current situation I do not have that time or that ability. But I try, and on the day of the storytelling event I dig through my mind to find a story, concoct an interesting twist, create a clever way to word some action, compose the right joke, all in an attempt to find some trick that makes my story stand out, and all in the few minutes I have between teaching classes (my actual job). Then, that evening at the storytelling event, I get on stage to share and the words pour out like potatoes after a blender - I talk too fast, stumble over consonants, confuse poetic phrases, and my presentation ends with no flavor. There is no spice on these potatoes. After having scrambled the entire day, eager to share what I believe is a talent with spoken language, this story comes out as slop. Worse, my desire to perform, to show off, strips my story of honesty, and I believe honesty is what makes a story worth sharing.

So I've been thinking about this and have come to a conclusion - I need to stop trying so hard. Not in general, but specifically for these storytelling events, I must recognize that it isn't about performing a composed monologue, but about being honest and sharing a life event. Therefore, I have made that a goal for the next storytelling - when the theme for the month is announced, think of an event and then show up and _share_. And the term "Share" is important, because good storytelling is not about giving a performance to an audience, but working with an audience to give new life to a remembered event.

This comes back to sharing the early work of telling your story after trauma. When you are sharing your story, especially at the early stage, it's important not to be concerned about perfection or performance. The performance shouldn't be a thought in your mind. As you begin work on a storytelling piece, speak the story in a natural manner and let the narrative come from the memories you've put together in your mind. It is important to sort through these memories and sort them out in notes or a journal, but trying to give a composed presentation can limit what you naturally want to say.

As you go on with creating a more complete storytelling performance, there can be edits and poetry and memorization - and if you intend to perform on a more public scale, there should be extended composition and preparation, but this larger work will take at least 6 months to a year before you can call it complete. For an early telling, let the words be natural. Be honest, not composed. You don't need to impress anyone - you're sharing a story, not reciting a monologue.

When I started writing, I didn't plan that ending. I let my thoughts and words float from my mind, and funny enough, I discovered a pretty good message. That's also how storytelling should work - you can only discover what a story means by sharing it - forcing a path or structure to the piece limits your ability to learn from your work.

Thank you for reading.