SING ALONG! ACT IT OUT! EVERYONE JOINS IN!
TELLING AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION STORIES FOR YOUNG CHILDREN
Young children love to squirm! Let’s face it, human bodies are not designed to sit still and passively listen for long periods of time. You can invite your listeners to wiggle in a manner that adds artistry to the tale or you can allow them to fidget in a way that is destructive and distracting. Active listening is an important skill to develop. Audience participation stories can help children learn when to be quiet and when to join in.
I have noticed that when the listeners join in they enjoy themselves more. There is a deeper involvement with the material, the concepts, and inherent wisdom in the story. When you invite them to become the main character and chant the refrain along with you they internalize the lessons to be learned. It is also a lot of fun to hear 300 children shouting in their best giant voice, “I challenge you to a duel, choose your weapon and I shall more than match you!”
Most collections of folklore do not include side notes on what the teller should do while telling the tale to engage the listeners. One of your jobs as “the artistic interpreter” is to add the element of audience participation. As you read the text look for repetitive lines or actions the audience can pantomime with you. The question is: How can you engage your audience emotionally, kinesthetically, intellectually, and sillilariously!
The audience is your partner in the storytelling process. The teller, the tale and the listener are a dynamic team. Following is a brief list of techniques that I have found useful:
- Make eye contact! Simply looking into each person's eyes, speaking to individuals, is the best way to emotionally hook the audience. I like to tease young tellers that they are not telling the story to their shoes. They are not talking to the ceiling. They are talking to people so look at them.
- Ask rhetorical questions: Have you ever felt, (seen, done), this before? Do you know someone like this? How many of you have been fishing? Rhetorical questions hook the audience intellectually.
- Use local metaphors. Compare elements of the story with tangible places, events and people. Say, for example, "The rock was as big as this room" or "The owl’s wings were as long as my arms." It is like saying, don’t think about purple elephants. What are you thinking about? A local metaphor hooks the audience’s imagination.
- Use refrains. Many stories have a chorus or a key line that repeats several times through the story. Invite them to repeat key lines with you like a chorus. For example, if you are telling “The Three Little Pigs,” you can split the audience in half. Half will say “Little pig, little pig, let me in.” And the other half will say “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.” If the story does not include a choral response you could always make one up!
- Some classic folk tales contain cumulative lines, where you repeat the first line and add a second, repeat the first two lines and add a third, and so on. Invite the audience to chant these lines with you at first and then let them say them on their own as they learn them.
The African story of “The Talking Yam” is a perfect example of this. Invite the audience to say everything that is underlined. The first time they repeat after you. The second and third time they say it with you. And the fourth and fifth time they say it on their own:
A man goes out to harvest some yams when the yam says, “
Take your hands off of me!” His dog says, “
You better listen to your yam!” He grabs a branch off the tree and the tree says, “
Put that branch down.” He goes to put the branch down and the branch says, “
Put me down gently.” He is about to put the branch on a rock when the rock says, “
Get that thing off of me!”
The man runs off, thinking he is losing his mind. He meets a fisherman who doesn’t believe him as he repeats the whole story. Then his net says, “
You better believe him, he’s telling the truth.”
They meet a weaver who after hearing the whole story says, “It’s too hot a day to be running.” But his cloth says, “You’d run too if it happened to you.”
Do you get the idea?
- Encourage participation by giving your listeners a job or assigning them a character. With the story I call “The Seed,” I start by teaching the audience a simple wind song: Say “Shoeee” as you breathe out and “Aaahh” as you breathe in, “Oohh” as you breathe out and “Eeee” as you breathe in. Let’s try it all together, but make it sound like the wind, “Shoee, Aahh, Oohh, Eeee.” Now you can be the wind and make wind sounds. Whenever I say "the wind blows," and raise my right hand that is your cue. In the British tale “The Old Woman in the Vinigar Bottle” the audience can say the fairies part, “In the morning when you arise, spin ‘round 3 times before you open your eyes and say, “I wish to see what I wish to see.” And / or they could be the Old woman who keeps “complaining and complaining and complaining.”
- There are dozens of stories that contain a string of characters who are working towards the same goal. Invite listeners to join the lineup. "The Giant Turnip," a classic Russian story, is one of my favorite in which I keep adding kids until I have 5 - 15 helpers as my grandson, wife, granddaughter, horses, cows, goats, dogs, cats, and a mouse all pulling on the turnip. We link arms and grunt three times, “uhng, Uhng, UHNG!” The last time I invite the entire audience to grunt with me so no one feels left out.
- Another way to include the audience as actors is for the storyteller to act as a puppeteer. You can choose as many actors as there are characters in the story, calling on listeners as you need them and then returning them to their seat when their scene is over. Grab their hands as you stand behind them and manipulate them as you would a puppet. When it is time for them to speak ask them to repeat after you, but make sure you are loud enough for the audience to hear in case the child does not speak up. For example when I say “and the hunter went walking” I want you to walk in place. When I say, “And the hunter said, “Good Morning,” you just say the good morning part.
- It takes a lot of nerve and a flexible teller to let go of the reins even a little, but if you are brave, you could invite the audience to participate as co-authors. At first you may ask for help in naming the characters or describing the setting, but as you grow in ability and confidence you could let them shape the plot by asking, "And then what happened?" or "How would you solve this problem?"
- Teach them a song! Everyone loves to sing even if they won't admit it in public. A simple sing-along song can also be a fun transition from one story to the next. The best way to teach a short song or chant is to sing it through to give them a feel for it. Then ask them to repeat lines until they get it and then sing it all together. A well-chosen folksong or an original song written just for the story can also deepen the impact of the story by repeating the main idea in new words.
There are many ways to involve the audience and create a space for magic to happen. Often this is not written into the story, but with a little imagination and rehearsal you can find ways to celebrate and build on the relationships between the teller, the tale and the listener.
- From “The Giant Who Was More than a Match,” by Aaron Piper in Lighting Candles in the Dark. Friends General Conference, Philadelphia, PA. 1992
- “The Talking Yam” (also known as “Talk, Talk”) from Favorite Folktales From Around the World by Jane Yolen, Random House, N.Y., N.Y. 1986
- “The Seed” from Learning From The Land: Teaching Ecology Through Stories and Activities by Brian “Fox” Ellis, Teacher Ideas Press, Golden, CO 1998
- “Old Woman and the Vinigar Bottle” from Favorite Folktales From Around the World by Jane Yolen Random House, N.Y., N.Y. 1986
