Storytelling

What I've come back to in the making of this piece is the joy of storytelling. The audience and the theatremakers come together as a collective to share in a storytellers - some are the caretakers of the telling, some are the recipients of the story who will take it forth with them into the world. As caretakers, we must make sure that each moment of the tale is strongly planted in the audience's imagination, so that the story takes life beyond this telling, this theatre. The words we use to tell it must be such that they acknowledge their own insufficiency, so the audience is not left with the words but with the story. We want the story to overpower the production, not the other way around.

To what extent is this story our story? And why do we choose to tell someone else's story and not our own? The joy I'm finding in the myths and fairytales we've been looking at throughout this project is our ability to place ourselves within the stories without colonising them. The stories have origins, but they dont have owners. In some way we dont have to do them justice; we can use them as lenses through which to view our own lives, but always put them back on the shelf at the end of the day for someone else to look through.

The Pigeon's Bride is about communication, the public event, and the importance of listening to stories. One week out from the first public performance of our work Of feathers and skin, the self-reflexivity within the fairytale is subtly emerging; a hidden joy in the piece. Bridget and I have worked throughout this process with a great openness to possibility, to accident, to what might come to us as we simply bring an audience into a welcoming space and try to tell a story as best we can. I've been flexing my storytelling muscles on this work - The Pigeon's Bride is a more obscure fairytale, and I've been telling to select people in private corners to find the best words to excite the imagination and endow each event, symbol, action and revelation.

Trying to crack one of the text's more elusive symbols, we're on the verge of making a bold choice with this piece that will see it become 'ours'. We will bring our stories to the Bride's story, and I'm nervous to think that our imposition will knock it out of the sky. I want to fit our stories within this legend - the myths speaks volumes more than our stories, but I dont believe we can perform this piece without locating ourselves inside it.

So here we go. To tell our own stories. And perhaps we will hear a new story in return.