The gift of storytelling may be one of life's most powerful-and envied-skills. A well-crafted narrative can keep the people, values, and life lessons you hold dear alive and give you the power to influence others. Now, The Art of Storytelling: From Parents to Professionals reveals the tried-and-true methods experienced storytellers use to develop and tell entertaining and memorable stories. In 24 enthralling lectures, Professor Hannah B. Harvey demonstrates how to master the art form's basic principles with the same dynamic energy that has made her an internationally recognized professional storyteller and award-winning educator. Even if you never plan to set foot on a stage, knowing what a professional storyteller does in the process of crafting and delivering a tale allows you to enhance the stories you tell everyday-to your children at bedtime, in your conversational anecdotes, and in your presentations at work.
The Art of Storytelling: From Parents to Professionals
Enhance the stories you tell every day in your personal and professional life by learning the methods experienced storytellers use to create and tell memorable tales.
Overview
About
Dr. Hannah B. Harvey is an award-winning teacher, an internationally recognized performer, and a nationally known professional storyteller. She earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies/Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was also a teaching fellow. While teaching at Kennesaw State University, she received an Honors Program Distinguished Teacher award and an Alumni Association Commendation for Teaching Impact. As a performance ethnographer, Dr. Harvey develops oral histories into theatrical and solo storytelling works that highlight the true stories of contemporary Appalachian people. Her ongoing fieldwork with disabled coal miners in southwest Virginia culminated in a live ethnographic performance of their oral histories, Out of the Dark: The Oral Histories of Appalachian Coal Miners, earning her a directing award from adjudicators at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival in 2007 and three year-end awards from professional critics in 2005. Her written research has been honored by the American Folklore Society and been featured in Storytelling, Self, Society, of which she is managing editor. Dr. Harvey has delivered award-winning performances and has conducted workshops at festivals and universities in the United States and around the world. She has performed as a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival in Tennessee; received accolades for her performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland; and led intercultural workshops at the University Hassan II, Ben M'Sik, in Casablanca, Morocco.
Trailer
01: Telling a Good Story
What qualifies as a story? Learn the significance of storytelling in various cultures; the ways this art is distinct from other forms of performance or literary thought; and how the craft of professional storytelling can help you improve your own storytelling abilities. Listen to tales from the professor's life and get an introduction to the "storytelling triangle."
32 min
02: The Storytelling Triangle
Telling a story is a three-way dynamic relationship between you, and the story, and the audience. In the first of three lectures that analyze this storytelling triangle, look at The Old Maid and other stories in depth to understand how the process of storytelling works. Then, consider why you're drawn to certain stories.
31 min
03: Connecting with Your Story
What kinds of stories appeal to you most? Look at the variety of stories that are available for you to tell and some practical resources for finding them. Assess the intellectual, social, and cultural connections we develop with stories and identify how you can add depth and context to the stories you tell.
37 min
04: Connecting with Your Audience
Focus on this second aspect of the storytelling triangle-your relationship with your audience-by looking at the physical, social, emotional, and intellectual contexts of this relationship and how stories work to bring audiences together. End with an exercise that helps you identify stories that connect with a variety of audiences.
29 min
05: Telling Family Stories
Examine the hidden meanings of the family-story genre, including why we tell family stories, how stories organically emerge from families, and what remembering these stories entails. With these hidden meanings in mind, consider how you can tell your own family stories in a way that captures your audience's attention.
31 min
06: The Powerful Telling of Fairy Tales
With classic stories, fairy tales, and myths, there's a lot more than "they all lived happily ever after" going on beneath the surface. Use Little Red Riding Hood and other fairy tales to understand the psychology of storytelling and what fairy tales do for children in particular. Then, see why the themes of these tales can be just as appealing to adults.
34 min
07: Myth and the Hero's Journey
Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are modern examples of a "hero's journey." Use ancient myths from East Africa and ancient Sumeria to break down this structure and investigate why the archetypal figures and pattern of separation, initiation, and return found in the hero's journey resonate so deeply. Pause to consider how you can apply these ideas to craft stories that reach your audience on a me...
31 min
08: Tensive Conflict and Meaning
Dissect the layered process professional storytellers use when preparing to tell a tale, which involves an interconnected cycle of talking, writing, imaging, playing, and rehearsing. Explore the concept of "tensiveness," the dynamic quality that reveals a story's opposing forces; then step back from one of your stories to see the potential relationships between the larger parts of the narrative.
31 min
09: Giving Yourself Permission to Tell
Engage in "stretching" exercises to learn to let go of things that may hold you back from telling your story, and give yourself permission to play with the story, make mistakes, and really immerse yourself in the narrative. Listen to the story Mama's Wings to identify its tensive pulls and unifying themes and images.
29 min
10: Visualization and Memory
Learn to visualize a story's people, places, and events through interactive exercises that get you "seeing" the story in front of you. Explore techniques that help you remember a story without memorization, and methods for immersing yourself in the scene while shifting into "epic mode" to focus on your audience.
31 min
11: Discovering Point of View
There is no such thing as a purely objective narrator. Consider how the narrator's perspective and point of view guide the audience through the story, and how even the most familiar stories can be reinvented by narrating from another character's perspective. See why age, gender, heritage, economics, and temperament shape your vantage point.
30 min
12: The Artful Manipulation of Time and Focus
Explore how you as a narrator can artfully guide the audience's experience of the story by looking at techniques for controlling events, manipulating time, and making the past tense feel present. Consider when to take your narrator out of the characters' conversations to increase the pacing and energy.
31 min
13: Narrator-Bridging Characters and Audience
Begin thinking about the narrator's relationship with characters and how control may be ceded to certain characters at points throughout a story. Learn how using focal points can distinguish between personalities, and establish the physical and emotional relationship you have with those characters through storyteller Motoko Dworkin's performance of a Japanese folktale.
32 min
14: Developing Complex Characters
How old are your characters? Are they "head-centered," "stomach-centered," or something else? Experiment with gestures and body postures that add depth and dimension to your characters. Then, gain insight into how you can develop characters into memorable people your audience really enjoys seeing in action.
32 min
15: Plot and Story Structures
Does your story need to be told in chronological order? Use your storytelling journal to organize the pieces of your story into a structure that conveys the underlying meaning. Learn to separate plot from emotional arc and gain tools that are useful when you're developing the frame, structure, and resolution of your story.
30 min
16: Emotional Arc and Empathy
From ghost stories to family stories, empathy is crucial in giving your audience an emotional entry point and permission to feel. As you turn from plot sequencing to the development of your story's emotional arc, learn how to build a compelling beginning and emotional climax through an exercise that explores the motivating desire of your primary character from first- and third-person perspectives.
31 min
17: Varying the Narrator's Perspective
Learn to build dynamic tension through your characters and achieve satisfying resolutions. Stories and exercises teach you how to treat third-person statements as if they're first-person accounts and how to let secondary characters narrate for themselves or serve as "little narrators." Understand ways to personify the negative force your protagonist is struggling with so it becomes a "little chara...
32 min
18: Vocal Intonation
Focus on using vocal intonation to evoke the "sensorium" of a story for your audience with a lesson on how the voice operates, featuring warm-up techniques. Perform mouth and tongue stretches and articulation exercises, then learn how pace, pauses, and sound effects can create character distinctions, contribute to the emotional arc, and draw in your audience.
30 min
19: Preparing to Perform
Synthesize everything you've learned so far by integrating the elements of storytelling in writing and performance exercises that help you look at your story from various angles. Create a story outline, tell a "side-coached" version of your tale, do an exaggerated run-through, and write a script. Finally, consider the meanings your story holds.
32 min
20: Putting Performance Anxiety to Good Use
Whether you consciously deal with performance anxiety as a barrier to communicating with others, or you want to become a more energized and engaging storyteller, this lecture is designed to teach you the physiology behind performance anxiety; the correlation between anxiety that debilitates and energy that enlivens; and practical tools for channeling nervous energy.
30 min
21: Adapting to Different Audiences
Consider the physical parameters of informal and formal storytelling scenarios; how stories emerge in these different settings; and what specific audiences-from children to employees-typically need from a story. Learn how to handle yourself as a storyteller in relaxed situations, boardroom settings, and the classroom environment.
32 min
22: Invitation to the Audience-Mindset
How do you get and keep your audience's attention? In this lecture, you'll learn about on-ramps and off-ramps-how to lead into your story and make it relevant, and how to conclude gracefully. Acquire specific tools for putting your audience in the proper mindset to listen, whether you're engaged in conversation, giving a presentation, or telling a story to children.
33 min
23: Keeping Your Audience's Attention
Once you've hooked your audience, how do you keep them from straying? Learn general rules to live by as a storyteller and ways to keep your audience engaged, including the use of audience participation, props, and repetition. Learn to adjust to what the audience needs in the moment and to cope with interruptions.
33 min
24: Remember Your Stories-The Power of Orality
Wrap up the course with some final considerations for keeping your audience interested, from the technical aspects of microphones and PowerPoint, to the more nuanced ways that you can read audiences and understand their needs on the spot. Finally, return to the nature of orality itself as a cultural force that shapes us all.
33 min
