During the past 25 years professional artists based in England and Wales have taken a lead in a global movement that has been examining stories and their transmission in their oral form. The majority of our most accomplished tellers of oral tales can now be found under the collective banner of the Crick Crack Club (CCC), writes Ben Haggarty.
Much as a publishing house endorses poets, the CCC promotes storytellers from here and abroad who demonstrate the highest integrity in their engagement with their chosen artform, leading to inspired, quick-witted public performances and ground-breaking community and educational work. We promote our own events and work in partnership with others to provide informed advice on programming and devising projects. In 2003 we have provided the storytellers for a broad range of events including the Guardian Hay Festival Gods and Monsters tour, the British Museum?s 250th birthday celebration, the tenth Beyond the Border Wales International Storytelling Festival, and the launch event for Britain?s first purpose-built storytelling venue ? a 300-seater roundhouse at the Ancient Technology Centre in Cranborne. We have also recently entered into a new partnership with the Barbican in London, to showcase adult performance storytelling in the Pit Theatre.
Experimentation, the fostering of new talent and the development of new material are central values of the CCC. The highly individualistic artists associated with the organisation, such as Hugh Lupton, Daniel Morden and Jan Blake, are committed to ongoing creative dialogue and mutual mentoring. They have discovered the secret of unleashing great scope for self-expression through working with the discipline of re-interpreting traditional narratives. In skilled hands, the sharp edges of the global heritage of folktales, fairy tales and myths can be honed until their emotional relevance slices through time to the present.
CCC storytellers have pioneered work at all levels of education from pre-primary to tertiary and have taken an international lead in pioneering site-specific storytelling in environmental centres, at heritage sites and in museums and galleries. They have produced rich collaborations with artists from a range of disciplines - from sculptors to scriptwriters. History, anthropology, archaeology, comparative religion and psychology become the raw material of their work. The demanding variety of working contexts entails developing extensive repertoires of many hundreds of narratives and mastering appropriate compositional and performance techniques. As a consequence, the CCC holds that it takes from seven to ten years for a storyteller?s mastery to emerge.
The versatility of oral storytelling means that, alongside public performances, repertoire and processes can be explored through workshops in a rich diversity of applied community contexts. CCC storytellers work regularly with the elderly, in offenders institutions, in areas of rural and urban deprivation, with refugees, the mentally disturbed, the blind and with those undergoing rites of passage into adulthood, parenthood? or death. Storytelling processes develop the synaptic links between imagination and language ? leading to confidence in oral communication. Storytelling content awakens the imagination. Our storytellers are in the business of opening doorways to sub-conscious realms of memory and dreams.
Ben Haggarty is Co-ordinator of the Crick Crack Club.
t: 020 8841 9098;
e: epicstory@aol.com;
w: http://www.godsandmonsterstour.com and http://www.beyondtheborder.com