An audience member made my words into images!
Over a 9-week period I participated in a storytelling workshop. The culminating experience on the 9th week was a live performance. I stood in front of about 30 people to tell a 10 minute story I wrote and developed in the weeks prior.
I loved making people laugh. I love
d the energy of the room before, during and after the performance. I made new friends. I relished in the art of craf
ting stories that could be told with universal themes, connections to people, and reflections on life. I looked forward to each week because there were 6 other people that came prepared with their own bold, true, hilarious, sad, scary, and adventurous stories.
An a-ha moment I had came later, after the class/performance. I was listening to Melissa Peet, the Academic Director for the Integrative Learni
ng and MPortfolio Initiative at the University of Michigan. Mercy College was selected to partner with her FIPSE Grant in 2011. She was visiting our campus and was talking about how lifelong learning must include learning FROM life. She described a process of deep reflection, meta-cognition, that can only happen after you have described an experience. In the storytelling class it took 2 or 3 ‘tellings’ of a story for the REAL meaning to surface. The deeper themes and higher-order thinking needed those re-tellings (and audience/peer feedback) to sus out how I felt about a story, how it relates to me now, and how others can connect to it.
Here is the story I told at the RISK! show, it was also featured on the RISK! Show Blog.
NOTE: Please don’t watch this at your place of work, the ending is rated R!
Tags: performance, The-Moth