Devising Stories at Home

Konnektiv Drama workshop – 17^th July 2013

Devising Stories

Once again, konnektiv are ‘floating’.  The Performing Arts Centre is no longer open to us, as it now the summer holidays.  Happily, unlike our previous experiences of having no workshop space, we feel reasonably safe in the knowledge that (strategic hiccups notwithstanding) we will have access to Doxey Community Centre from September.  

For the duration of the summer we have booked Gnosall Firestation up to 3 times per week, and so thankfully we are not actually homeless at this time.

However, this session, there was no venue, and so, we ended up devising stories in our Peel Street living room.  Fortunately the room is reasonably big.

Stories.  

Me and Merv devised a story last week in the Lake District, and told it to a bunch of friends around a midnight bonfire.  It went really well, everyone liked it.  It’s a story that wants to be retold, developed, and retold again.  We read the story again at yesterday's Konnektiv workshop.  It didn’t go quite so well.  It was ok, but seemed to lose something in the second impro. A lesson in not resting on one's laurels!

We explained how the story had been devised – simply from a couple of location based inspirations – old tumbledown stone cottages; being lost in the winding thinning roads atop the lake district hills (or are they mountains?); sat nav playing silly buggers, sending us the long way, changing its mind; a cow that roars to the morning sun, making a noise more like a dinosaur than a bovine creature.

All of these stimuli became features in our Lake District story.  Our group of friends recognised the features and through this identified with the story, engagement was high.  This was different with the second, Stafford reading, which was with a group that didn’t have the automatic engagement as the location was different.  Maybe a more thorough description of the scene would be useful, but then, maybe not…  people create their own images.

I think that we will be performing a story at the next Staffordshire Knot Storytelling club, (though I am not entirely convinced of this, having received mixed messages from the organisers.  Need to chase up!?)   The theme is going to be on Stafford folklore.  I have bought a book on this, which has lots of stories.  But Konnektiv are a group who devise to perform, rather than learn prewritten script.  And we didn’t want to tell a folk tale as such, rather, we wanted ours to be a ghost story.  However, like our Lake District story, and the folk stories in the book I have started to read, we wanted there to be a connection with actual reported facts, or gossip, or old wives tales.  Anything to tap into the local folk ‘zietgiest’.

We had been talking about this previously, and had decided that with Staffords history of ghosts, that this would be a good subject matter.  It has to be said that Stafford is not the most interesting place in the world.  It is extraordinarily ordinary.  Quite grey, but not too grey, that would be seen as extreme.  Just averagely grey.  Stafford.  But ghosts!  Wow, what a plethora of spooky sightings and goings on have been reported.  

Just the other week, my eldest daughter came home from work, with a story of a cleaner that had been found hysterical in one of the bedrooms of the Swan Hotel.  She had seen, it transpired, an apparition.  A man sitting in one of the rooms, who said to her the words “spit on the bible”.   

This was fantastic inspiration for us.  A quick internet search confirmed Stafford, our little town full of hanging baskets and litter free respectability, as a Very Haunted Town.  One of the most haunted spots, we discovered, is the Swan Hotel - this was built on the site of a Drowning Pond – used to put an end to people found guilty (or not) of witchcraft. 

Armed with these two facts, the group devised a plot.  It involved a priest with a dark, guilty secret, and a young girl accused of witchcraft.  It also involved the drowning pond, the witchfinder general, and the words “spit on the bible”.  Once the group had devised the basic plot (which I’m not describing in detail here, in case any of the blogs readers comes to the reading), I split the group into 3 pairs of readers. Here my creative input, apart from taking photographs, ended.  However, for the pairs of readers, the process had only just begun.  

Each pair had to work their own version of the story.  Adding detail, and, if they wished, changing detail.  

They didn’t have much time – 10 or 15 minutes.  After this each pair collaboratively performed their story.  Each story was engaging in detail and had some lovely moments of performance.  We got to see in less than an hour, how stories become adapted over time, sometimes with changes to detail, other times with great big structural changes to the whole tale.  The three stories, whilst similar in theme, could have been written in very different places, and under very different circumstances from each other, reflecting the variety of characters and interest of the people in the room.

Each story will be further developed, and at least one, maybe all, will be performed, at some point, at the storytelling club.

Another exciting development at Konnektiv Drama.