Storyjamming: An Ancient Tradition
I ran across a passage in Robert Bringhurst’s book, “A Story as Sharp as A Knife: the Classical Haida Mythtellers and their World“, that I think will get you active and potential storyjammers excited:
Chapter Ten: The Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu, page 217
We could describe the interaction of Skaay and Xhyuu as nothing more than banter - simply a way of passing the time and making a couple of bucks from a gullible anthropologist young enough to be the older poet’s grandson and the headman’s youngest son or nephew. That description is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. In the impromptu mythtelling contest staged by Skaay and Xhyuu there is a structure – just the sort of structure that often seems to spring up out of nothing when skilled musicians jam. Skaay and Xhyuu are telling jokes and spinning yarns, but that is not quite all; they are also working within a tradition as demanding in its way as the Virginia reel, the minuet, the ballad, or the twelve-bar blues.
In Scotland, such a contest between poets is known as a flyting. But the Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu is different in character from the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy or other familiar Celtic examples. Classical Haida mythtellers don’t inflate their pride or anger artificially, nor do they confess even their subtler emotions directly; they speak through characters and events, the way musicians speak through notes, motifs and chords, and painters peak through colors, shapes, and lines….
…Just as the classical Haida poets avoid portraying or praising themselves directly, so they avoid the directly abusive language often found in Scottish flytings. Skaay and Xhyuu are survivors, not combatants: two old refugees from death who have somehow not forgotten how to laugh.
Myth is a language made of timeless, not of momentary forms. The themes of the Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu are not concocted for this occasion; they are original in a different sense. They are thousand- or ten-thousand-year-old stories put to current use; they renew the present world by rehearsing what is known of how that world came to be.
[bold emphasis added by me]
October 6th, 2008 at 1:42 am
An interesting field, that I hadn’t thought of investigating before - how different cultures have different traditions of interactive storytelling. It seems to me like flyting and other forms of compeitititive storytelling are one thing; cooperative storytelling is another - do the Haida mythtellers (in this book) compete while telling stories?
October 6th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Do they compete? Well, according to the book, sure, in a call-and-response kind of way; but then that resembles more the relationship of musicians jamming together, as the author mentions. Nobody can “win” or “lose”. In response to a story by one mythteller, the other has to respond with something that fits, that then inspires the first mythteller too.
It does occupy a strange ground; not really competitive, not totally collaborative.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:16 am
That kind of reminds me of the Tall Tale genre. Where people jam off of each other to come up with more and more ridiculous stories.
October 7th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Yes, definitely! How fun to see the persistence of this kind of tradition, even where it differs in interesting ways.
November 8th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
It got me. It got me excited. Yep.
Add in an audience and have the characters also speaking in enigmas to the individual tangles of relationships as seen by two wise storytellers and this colloborative/contest becomes a pwerful tool for community maintenence.
November 8th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Also, gaging the audiences reactions would make these bouts of talespinning into prime excersizes to hone skills and build repetoires for augmenting the more momentous storys - seeing which techniques and twists inspire delight and which result in all the kiddies staring at butterflies will clue the would be storyteller and the expert alike in on what works and what doesn’t as they reach up with the pawlike extensions of their imaginations and grab strands of the mythweb embracing and gluing our world and spontaneously slam them down, showering sparks of fables on the tinder heads of awed spectators, igniting the life affirming brilliance we all hunger and thirst for.
I can envision all sorts of fun with this.
Yep. Excited.
November 17th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Cool!
December 20th, 2008 at 3:04 am
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