Riverview Stories

The Riverview School Artists in Residence Project is underway! The adventure has begun.

I enjoyed the warmup session with the teachers on the third of their start of year professional development days. The energy was interesting - professional but playful. The story we created together is rough. It had to be, we didn't have enough time for anything but rough, but it does have all the components I'm hoping for in this project,  local setting - the skate bowl in Pickering Street, students as characters and some local flavour.

 

Skate Bowl from Google Street View in Hayden St, Riverview

It was good watching the teachers working out how to have a bit of fun with the process. One way was their choosing students who had been a little challenging for them last year as the characters in their story. I got so much pleasure out of seeing their linocuts and look forward to putting them together with the text of the story on the project blog.

Stories of place are such an important part of community and cultural development. We all live in place and are shaped by place. Our stories are shaped by place and our stories shape our places. Telling stories about our places helps us take pride in our country, our town and in ourselves.

The four introductory storytelling and story creation sessions in the library with the whole of school were rich and textured. Most of the sessions went well although the years 4,5,6 year session didn't get off to as good a start as I would have wished because the Queensland Times journo and photographer had arrived just before the start.

I'm looking forward to meeting with the four participation classes this week and working with them to develop their stories.

Daryll

Time to listen in 2012

This morning I put some suggestions into a project plan for a school Artist In Residence project happening in Riverview first term. It's all about encouraging students to listen to, tell, collect and share stories orally. Planning out the timing of valuable projects like this takes time. The session we had on Tuesday was a two coffee, 5 hour job. It will be worth it though when the stories start flowing.

As I sent my email reply off, I glanced at my incoming emails and it only took one response to a request to sign a petition about whaling and I was into Facebook. Facebook takes time but it is usually worth it. I found a link from shared by US storyteller Robert Bela Wilhelm to a New York Times article about taking time to listen to stories in Africa by Swedish author Henning Mankel called 'The Art of Listening'.

He's lived in Mozambique for twenty odd years and learned a thing or two about listening. I love his anecdote about overhearing two men talking about a friend who had died before he could tell the rest of an important story.  What I like about it is not the sadness that he didn't get to finish the story but that the friend had originally agreed to come back the next day to hear the rest of the story. True friend.

So my friends, what do I wish for you all in 2012?

Well time of course. Time enough to listen well to lots of stories.

I'm looking forward to my Riverview collaboration with Narelle Oliver, Lee FullARTon and all the teachers, students and parents at Riverview. It's called the Art of Story but maybe it should have been called The Art of Listen

Grandpa Chris Catches Fish for Christmas

It's still November but, for kinder children, it's definitely Christmas.

I had fun today at Jamboree Community Kindergarten. I did some of my usual jokes to start off with and I slipped in one about Christmas already being over and that I was sorry that they had missed out.

It's strange doing the northern winter snow stories in subtropical Brisbane. They like it though. This time I did my version of the First Gift of Christmas.

After that was my 'The Possum and the Garbage Truck Driver." It's good. They get lots of laughs about the garbage truck driver being outwitted by a possum and then by the kookaburra. Of course it finishes in a spirit of cooperation and friendship so that's appropriate for Christmas.

I had planned to do 'Grandpa Chris' which starts with the song 'Grandpa Chris catches fish to give to all his friends' and goes on to say what the other grandpa's are doing for the community in their active retirement. It didn't quite feel right for this group though.

I wanted something that involved Christmas and the children more so we created a new Grandpa Chris story called 'Grandpa Chris saves Santa Clause'. Some children get to help as well of course. It worked well and it definitely much more local coastal Australian summer in feel. (Santa's sleigh crash landed in a mangrove.)

'Ho, Ho, Ho. Deck the halls with lots of mangroves'
(photo Tatters; on Flickr)

I'm looking forward to retelling it over the next couple of weeks.

Giant With No Heart Rocks Terrace

Had the pleasure of performing the folktale 'Giant With No Heart' to approximately 900 Terrace students today for their End of Year Liturgy service.

Connor Finn was looking for a good story that would stimulate some thoughts about appropriate student behaviour over the Christmas holidays and that would fit in with the Christmas message. I gave him the choice of 6 or 7 folktales that  I thought would work with boys of that age group and he picked the one I thought would be best.

'Giant With No Heart' is both a dramatic and interesting story from northern Europe. It basically talks about how men get to be 'giants with no heart' and what to do about it.

I asked for some music students to play drums and cymbal to add some more atmosphere to the story and we went for it.

It worked. It's great to have 900 teenagers interested, involved and challenged. Hearing their energy as they debated how the story should end was amazing. Would the oldest brother win as he went for revenge or would the youngest brother win as pleaded for his friend? The story hung in the balance for some time.

Our percussionists were spot on. Loved the orchestral base drum but I couldn't talk them into loading it into my van after the show.

It was a really good try out for the Queensland Storytelling Guild's 70w amplifier system as well. It filled the hall quite well. I was able to play a mp3 sound effects recording straight from a memory stick.

One little moment afterwards was when I was just driving out of the school grounds. One of the students looked up and recognised me. It was good to see his smile.

Use of Stories Around the World

I keep on being pleasantly surprised by the number of people making use of stories in all sorts of creative ways.

I just replied to an email from Liz Gregory, a teacher in Rugby in the UK, seeking my permission to use my version of the traditional folktale 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin.'

She wants to 'create a compact unit of work as part of a mathematical investigation with cross-curricular ICT, music, environmental science and literacy links'. She pointed me towards an NRich maths activity based on the story. Here's the link - http://nrich.maths.org/1996

This activity is based around the number of people and rat legs that might exist in the story but there are so many other possibilities as well. The Piped Piper has so much potential to be used as a modern day parable around sustainability as well. That was one of the things I had in mind when I did my version of it. I look forward to seeing Liz's version.

Here are some 'rat plague' images:

From a series of images showing the areas in Sydney affected by the outbreak of Bubonic Plague in 1900. Taken by Mr. John Degotardi, Jr., photographer from the Department of Public Works, the images depict the state of the houses and 'slum' buildings at the time of the outbreak and the cleansing and disinfecting operations which followed.

Professional Rat Catchers (in front is a pile of dead rats)
Dated: c. 17/07/1900
Digital ID: 12487_a021_a021000009

I like this one of  celesteh Charles Hutchins of some grafitti in Killarney.



and here's the Pied Piper in Hamelin (photo by By sophiea sophie)

Meaning of Fairytales

I was going through my emails this wet Saturday morning and came across a LinkedIn discussion in the Folktales group about the prominence of the Wolf in stories like 'The Wolf and the Seven Kids' where the kids don't listen well enough to their wise mother and get eaten for their trouble. There was quite a bit of discussion about the wolf as representing Evil. I have always been a bit troubled by the quickness to ascribe evilness to any thing let alone animals. I responded in LinkedIn with the comment below.

"I'm inclined to look at the wolf as representing wildness that comes knocking unbidden at the doors of the house and family of civilisation. The three little pigs and the big bad wolf is another example of course and in this case the little pigs are actually constructing their own additions to civilisation at their wise mother pigs direction.

A interesting recent event in Australia developed mythic proportions and that was the case of the disappearance of the baby Azaria Chamberlain at Uluru. The parents claim was that a wild dingo had taken their baby from beside their tent and dragged it into the wildness of the surrounding bush. In this case the dingo/wolf was not seen as evil but the parents and especially the mother was. She was pilloried in the media charged and jailed. It took quite some time and a number of inquiries to establish that she was not at fault and had not killed her own baby.

Another example has been the dingos of Fraser Island where families like to go camping and fishing. They like to see the dingos as extensions of their family dogs but they are carnivores and a some children have been killed and mauled recently. A local woman, who loves/cares for the dingos and was feeding them because they were 'starving', was charged with doing so and dragged through the courts to prevent her with doing so. Her caring was creating more wildness in the Fraser Island camping sites because it encouraged the dingos to come into the sites and expect food even child food more often. At campsites of course civilization is quite flimsy and their are no fences or walls to keep children in and dingos out.

Peter and the Wolf is another interesting variation around the wildness aspect. It brings up the question of fear really well. I love the animated adaption by Suse Templeton of the Sergei Prokofviev's version. Here Peter is the counterpoint to the fear of his grandfather and the hunters and frees the captured wolf to return to the wildness.



I can't help wondering about these walls we create and the stories we tell. I think I'm going to have to come up with a different ending to my normal one for the Three Little Pigs. I normally have the little pigs succeeding against the 'big, bad wolf' and living happily ever after in 'their house made out of bricks and mortgage'. I wonder if one of the little pigs could learn about wildness somehow?

Bringing Back the Magic

Really looking forward to presenting my workshops at the Bringing Back the Magic Conference down the Gold Coast in a couple of short weeks time. Should be fun.

Hope so anyway because that's partly what the workshop is about - reminding Early Childhood Workers that one of the easiest ways of having Bringing Stories Alive for children is to have fun.

I was at the Fortitude Valley Centre today telling stories and had a wonderful time. Mind you I was a little concerned about the very young children because the three, four and five year olds were laughing so loudly that the little's were wondering what was going on.

After the show one of the boys came up and said, "Can you come back tomorrow?"

I had apologise and tell him that I was sorry, I couldn't because I telling at a library tomorrow.

He said, "Well when can you come back?"

I said, "Friday," knowing that it would be another group on Friday.

"Oh, I don't come to kindy on Friday, could you come tomorrow?"

Here's the workshop description for Bringing Back the Magic :

Bringing Stories Alive by Daryll Bellingham – having fun with stories and storytelling’ in a hands on and entertaining way is an essential skill for all early child hood educators. This workshop will remind you how easy it is to involve your children in rich storytelling experiences whilst also touching on a selection of other activities that may include improvising new stories, adapting nursery rhymes, creating local place stories, telling personal and family stories, putting children in charge, effective story time planning and addressing story time issues.


Have fun,

Daryll