In the age of television and the Internet, is there a place for old-fashioned storytelling?

This story illustrates how outsider status may lead to a gratuitous flouting of category, a kind of rebellion of the absurd. The event, which took place at the Washington Storyteller’s Theatre this past August, was not typical. But, in its concern with using stories to define one’s identity, one’s place in the world -- the way one is likely to react to a given situation -- it has something in common with older tales, reveals something about the art of storytelling.

Why storytelling? Why now? In a time defined by electronic communication, in which radio seems an ancient technology long eclipsed by television, and television now struggles for predominance against the interactive Internet, what place is there for old-fashioned storytelling?

Two local venues attempt to answer these questions and revive the once-popular pastime: Washington Storyteller’s Theatre and Voices in the Glen.

Started by Linda Fang and Anne Mesritz in September 1990, the Washington Storytellers began as an attempt to replicate, in a small way, the traditions of Fang’s native Shanghai. There, storytelling is a serious art, with its own theaters and stars who retell traditional tales and novels on a weekly basis, and who may spend several evenings on the same story. Unaware of an American storytellers’ movement, Fang wanted to bring her country’s art form to the DC area.

In 1984, DC storytellers Jean Alexander and Bob Rovinsky attended a storytelling festival in Charlottesville, VA. Loving the festival, they returned home and wondered one thing: Why did they have to travel so far? They met with about ten other tellers, including Linda Chatham, who, in her experience as a librarian in Hawaii, had traveled across the road from an isolated building to bring the message of stories and books to schoolchildren. The group also had contacts with the Folklore Society of Greater Washington, and knew that good local storytellers abounded. So began Voices in the Glen, which takes its name from the location of their first venue, Glen Echo Park.

The Story Behind Storytelling

The storyteller movement has grown to include nationwide festivals in major metropolitan centers and still others hidden in remote corners of the United States. Contemporary storytelling is a conglomeration of organizations and events that traces its lineage to a 1973 Jonesboro, TN festival. Like so much else, in the wake of the social and artistic changes of the 1960s, the intention was to broaden and extend traditional storytelling, to move it from an occasional diversion for children to a serious art form with a largely adult audience. From a small audience at that initial Jonesboro event, storytelling has since blossomed to encompass an annual audience numbered in the thousands, as well as spurring similar festivals nationwide.

So just what is contemporary storytelling? What strikes me is its theatrical conjunction of old and new. The storytelling itself is old, which most of us now experience only as a flicker of the past, mainly as children hearing fairytales from parents or ghost stories around Halloween fires. Of course, friends continue to tell each other stories throughout their adult lives but much of storytelling's societal function has been removed. Instead of a shared event through which we construct communal meaning, we now hover close to a divisive and proliferating variety of electronic media.

Contemporary storytelling, like many recent trends, emphasizes communal experience. This new cultural paradigm becomes evident in the renewed demand for poetry readings and performance art, medieval and civil war reenactments, stand-up comedy, and urban legends. While largely amateur and communal, storytelling is now partly professionalized, with “name” tellers often presiding.

Old Traditions

Storytelling is, of course, an ancient art -- perhaps the first human art. (It would be surprising if it didn’t predate cave paintings, although we can never know.) It meanders through human history in African folktales, the bardic tradition of Beowulf and Homer, and in innumerable other directions.

Margaret and Ralph Chatham, of Voices in the Glen, trace a recent history in America that found a rich, if often informal, tradition in the early years of the twentieth century. Before radio and television, workers would tell each other stories while shucking corn, quilting, laying bricks. At parties, memorized recitation was a regular activity. And folklorists, who have long been active, were especially busy collecting regional stories during the 1930s.

Yet these quintessentially American stories are often not just American but part of a world heritage. Migrating from country to country, stories become a kind of global heritage with strong local flavor. The story of The Little Tailor, for instance, picked up strong regional dialects when transferred to New England, where Seven in One Blow became Strong Man Jack Killed Seven at a Whack. Appalachian elements were blended in, creating a rich stew, so that stories with unicorns and old lions are punctuated with exclamations of “Howdy king!” World literature and postcolonial literature, theorized by literary critics for their “bricolage” and “cultural hybridity,” have a longer history than is often acknowledged.

Because the telling of these stories has largely stopped and they have been extensively anthologized, Ralph Chatham describes them as “frozen in time.” If they had continued to be told, he points out, they would take on modern, new-fangled elements, twists he loves to put in his own stories, like having a message arrive by e-mail. He explains, however, that some venues enforce a greater fidelity to the original source.

Storytelling is a medium -- or more than a medium, a way of life -- with multiple niches, appearing in unexpected places. It investigates identity, time, and place.

New Tales With Hidden Roots

A recent Washington Storytellers Theatre sampler featured a selection of folktales from around the world, including a primordial tale of a woman, a garden, and a search for a hut; a Lakota tale of Iktomi, the original Spider-Man, who traded in his cleverness for good looks; and a classic English tale, Mr. Wolf, an early gothic piece half-Grimm half-Hollywood horror, with Freudian intimations of the search for sexual freedom and the danger that lurks beneath. Classically plot-driven narratives, these tales deal with the search for origin, with moral ideals, with the deeper regions of the psyche, all primordial staging-points for the search for what it means to be human.

The Washington Storytellers Theatre favors the personal. These stories maintain roots in the folk tradition, approaching similar questions in a more intimate way. Not surprisingly, many personal stories maintain a note of the classical folktale. Some could be seen as a recasting of Cinderella or The Ugly Duckling, while others include obvious folk elements like the primal threat and repetitive plot structure (one might compare it to The Cat in the Hat).

A few weeks later, a Voices in the Glen potluck -- more casual than the Washington Storytellers Theatre -- took place. The storytellers gathered in a circle of chairs. The evening was comprised largely of traditional folktales. Peasant youth encountered supernatural beings, solved paradoxical tasks, and, through honesty and good character, lived happily ever after.

Personal Voices in an Electronic World

Storytelling draws upon the mythic and the personal, upon a multiethnic spectrum of tales. In juxtaposing a variety of voices, including those suppressed in earlier times, it is questionable whether the medium reenacts the past or whether reenactment is even its goal. The mythic and often anachronistic nature of the older tales removes them from our everyday lives, while the personal touches add warmth. The experience is part illusion, part empathic identification, part reflection on our changing society.

The form of our architecture, from apartment complexes to suburbs, emphasizes isolation, our ubiquitous cars increase human separation, and our communication systems work counter to physical contact. Storytelling reinstalls a traditional art form, an oral and somatic human contact, a relationship of performer and audience. Most storytellers, though, reject those elements of tradition that divide people into xenophobic groups or isolate the disenfranchised “Other” -- racism, sexism, homophobia, classism.

Storytelling, then, is an evolving phenomenon in an evolving society, one simultaneously seeking rootedness in the past and revolution from the encumbering traditions of that past. Where will storytelling go from here? That, as they say, is another story.

A diasporic figure exiled from the great state of Indiana, Ethan Goffman works a motley collection of jobs in freelance writing, teaching, and Internet indexing.