“You have to start it `Once upon a time.'” So says my daughter whenever
I read her a story now and start with anything but that timeless phrase. Though she’s only two-and-a-half, Rosalind already has firm ideas of what
stories are and how they should be told. It isn’t that her mother or I
consciously impressed any ideas on her. Rather, her own developing
intelligence, in hearing story after story after story, sensed something of
importance in what she was hearing and seized on it. Even at her young age,
stories as a form represent something to her, hold some kind of meaning for
her. And she’s making that known.
What are stories to kids? Stimulants for growing imaginations? Buffers for
reality? Reflections of culture? In looking for some answers, I went to a place
where stories and children are keeping company quite often these days: the
theatre. Over the past five years, theatre for children has been on the upswing
in Austin – stage productions for young people accounted for nearly a quarter
of the theatre produced locally in 1994 – and an increasing number of shows
have used storytelling or the basic story form as a basis for connecting with
young audiences. At Hyde Park Theatre, where the Children of Light Players
stage a different show for children each month, stories are an integral part of
most productions, and in Playfest ’95, the celebration of children’s theatre
running currently at the Dougherty Arts Center, stories figure prominently in
Austin Children’s Theatre’s Miss Mary’s Trunk Show and, as the title
makes clear, in Christopher Maier’s The Pied Piper of Stories.
Maier is a natural to talk about stories and kids. He has been studying and
presenting stories of many cultures, including folk tales, legends, myths and
rhymes, for more than a decade, with most of his performances being for young
audiences. He has performed and conducted storytelling workshops in schools,
libraries, museums, and senior centers all across the state, from Anson to
Waco, Cotulla to Prairie View. He was the emcee and featured storyteller at the
Austin Children Museum’s Storyfest for its first three years. In the five years
that he has been living in Central Texas, Maier has created 10 performance
pieces involving storytelling. He has even created a persona, the Pied Piper of
Stories, who has appeared at events promoting literacy and serves as the emcee
for Playfest ’95.
In discussing what it is that children get from stories, Maier distinguishes
among age groups and levels of development. Younger kids, who are still
struggling to get a handle on the vast, overwhelming world that surrounds them,
find stories to be a way of managing that world. “Every day, children are
flooded by so many new impressions,” says Maier. “A story helps to simplify
them and to organize them into a form.” It’s like being confronted with the
ocean, stretching from horizon to horizon. It’s so incredibly huge, it’s
overwhelming. You don’t how to begin to understand it. But if you fill a glass
with water from the ocean, you have a part of that huge entity that’s on a
level that you can hold and study and begin to understand. The world is the
ocean, and a story is the glass that gives a child a form of order.
As children grow and develop their sense of the order of the world, stories
begin to provide confirmation and reassurance of the world they know. “This is
when children begin to be more drawn into the rhythm and the repetition and the
singingness of it. I’ve heard people say that the three `R’s a storyteller
needs to remember are rhythm, rhyme, and repetition. It’s this wonderful way of
bringing order out of chaos. The best example is probably the cumulative tale,
you know, like the song `There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.’ You have
this basic premise and you keep adding on to it and coming back and adding on
more and coming back and always coming back and adding on. By the end of it,
through this miracle of symbolic communication, we’ve organized these
unconnected things into a world. Children need that. They want to make sure
this is the same world. A story has a form; it has a ritual that assures them
of that.”
One of the most important functions a story serves to a developing child is as
a stimulus to the imagination, and that is one of the driving forces behind
Maier’s work as a storyteller. “I’m interested that theatre has returned to
storytelling,” he says, “and I believe that part of the reason why is that when
you supply less to the audience, they have to supply more. When I supply two
brush strokes in creating the image of a character, they’re supplying the rest
in their own mind. They’re the co-creator of it.” Maier strives to keep the
descriptions in his stories simple enough that the audience is encouraged to
create the scene for themselves. In children in particular, this promotes their
abilities to think creatively and to envision situations and solutions and
enhances their initiative.
Beyond this, Maier notes, children are able to develop an appreciation for the
elements of the form – the story’s structure, the language involved – from
which they can begin to create stories themselves. “I do workshops at schools,
both primary and secondary schools,” Maier says. “One I call Tell Me
Why. I give the students the structure of a creation story or a
pourquois story, like how the elephant got its trunk. We start off
imagining something that they wonder about. It’s basically kind of teaching
them the story, the basic structure of the form, the look at the man behind the
curtain. Another workshop involves creating original folk tales. I strip down a
very basic story like the story of the three little pigs and then get the
students to rewrite it set in their world, say, their school. Once you start
juxtaposing a story they know everything about with the world they know – like
who in your school would be the big bad wolf? – you give them the freedom to
invent, the freedom to create. Second graders are just bubbling over with
material. But the third and fourth grade ages are the ages I really like. There
is an unself-consciousness and willingness to play in children that age that
they begin to lose not long after that. It’s a wonderful age.”
Maier notes, however, that while children may outgrow certain kinds of
stories, they never outgrow stories altogether. Our attraction to narrative and
to the spinning of yarns by a skilled storyteller endures. The reasons are
many, but one of the most important for Maier is the connection it provides
between people. “I think of storytelling as a cross between a formalized
theatrical experience and a conversation. You know how when we’re talking, we
check in with each other? It’s like that. And I can tell we’re all there all
creating it together. I’m humbled by it the more I do it.” n
The Pied Piper of Storiesruns through June 24 at the Dougherty
Arts Center.
This article appears in June 23 • 1995 and June 23 • 1995 (Cover).