Looking behind the Performance

a peek into my process and a look at the new show.

This is the start of a commissioned piece, originally called Splinters

Hello Wildlings,

In this post I lift back the veil a little, so that you can all see how I design my one-woman storytelling performances. I have shared these in a range of countries, from Singapore to Ghana and Indonesia to Mexico. I am known for my lyrical style and use of rhythmic, poetic language. I truly love the way language can enable us to dance into a world of shared imagination. Below is one of my starting chants. I always use the same words to begin a performance and end a performance and I have a range of these type of chants. I feel they enables the listener to come back to a ‘safe-harbour’ and know the show is over.

This story is a gift for you
It's words are magic, it is true
For words they help us all combine
And stories help us all to bind
Together as a human kind.
Together as a human kind.
Let us start ....

I just want to say, that this is a post for my paid subscribers. I want to tell you here as I find it really annoying when I get immersed in a post and scroll down, only to find that I cannot read anymore without a paid subscription. That said, I do not put the paywall up until about a third of the way down, so please keep reading!

My shows always contain traditional stories and myths, often stitching together similar motifs and folklore from differing countries. They are primarily for an adult audience, (though I perform for children too, in a very different way.) In this post I will be showing you the journey of my new show, Mythcelium. I chart how it started as a commissioned piece for The Festival at the Edge, (though in a different guise) and how I am now re-working it - in light of the poly-crisis and my newfound fascination for The Mother Tree. These trees use mycorrhizal networks to provide nourishment and information to other trees. I have come to believe that myths are the mycorrhiza of humanity. In this new show I really want to highlight how they provide us with information and nourishment and help us understand what it means to be human in a more than human world.

If you are interested in seeing the debut performance online of this show online, here is a link.

Performing Splinters at Mezrab in the Netherlands. I worked with the incredible musician, Michael Stork

The show, Splinters was based around the motif of the Cedar of Lebanon. I wanted this to be hold the ‘frame story.’

For those of you who are new to storytelling a frame story literally acts like a frame that holds and contains other stories. One of the best examples of this is the story collection, A Thousand and One Nights. The frame story is that of the main character Scheherazade who tells a story every night to prevent her and her sister from being decapitated. She stops each story that she is telling to the Sultan, at a really pivotal point and thus she has to stay alive till the next evening so that she can continue the tale. The frame of her story, holds a multitude of other stories and some of those are frame- work stories too!

Within my frame story I wanted to include 3 other stories and weave them into the tree motif. Hence the title, Splinters. I created the show in 2016 during the conflict in Lebanon and I wanted to include stories that came from that area. An obvious one was the epic myth of Gilgamesh.