What's the Story

Essays about art, theater and storytelling

Anne Bogart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317703686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Anne Bogart is an award-winning theatre maker, and a best-selling writer of books about theatre, art, and cultural politics. In this her latest collection of essays she explores the story-telling impulse, and asks how she, as a 'product of postmodernism', can reconnect to the primal act of making meaning and telling stories. She also asks how theatre practitioners can think of themselves not as stagers of plays but 'orchestrators of social interactions' and participants in an on-going dialogue about the future.

We dream. And then occasionally we attempt to share our dreams with others. In recounting our dreams we try to construct a narrative... We also make stories out of our daytime existence. The human brain is a narrative creating machine that takes whatever happens and imposes chronology, meaning, cause and effect... We choose. We can choose to relate to our circumstances with bitterness or with openness. The stories that we tell determine nothing less than personal destiny. (From the introduction)

This compelling new book is characteristically made up of chapters with one-word titles: Spaciousness, Narrative, Heat, Limits, Error, Politics, Arrest, Empathy, Opposition, Collaboration and Sustenance. In addition to dipping into neuroscience, performance theory and sociology, Bogart also recounts vivid stories from her own life. But as neuroscience indicates, the event of remembering what happened is in fact the creation of something new.

Acknowledgements

A special thank you to Rena Chelouche Fogel, who walked with me through every step in the realization of this book. Her taste, patience, love, intelligence and ability to see both large and small issues were all crucial. Thank you also to Brian Kulick, Todd London, Ellen Lauren, Janet Wong, Ross Wasserman, Julie Rossi, Leon Ingulsrud, Alona Fogel, Amlin Gray and Matthew Glassman for their supportive notes and ideas. Thank you to Megan Hiatt at Routledge for her sharp focus and attention. And finally thank you to Talia Rodgers for her continued belief in and support of the project of these books.

1 Narrative

DOI: 10.4324/9781315780832-2

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

(Karen Blixen, novelist)

When I was 16 years old I began to keep a journal. In addition to descriptions of my daily activities, I wrote poetry and song lyrics and generally tried to keep track of my wandering heart and romantic yearnings. Little by little the writing became a habit. During my year as a college sophomore in Athens, Greece, a friend who everyone called “the Flea,” proposed a new technique for journal writing. “Write three observations every day,” she said. I found the task challenging. It is easy to write, “Today I went to the bank and then to a taverna with the Flea.” But to form an opinion and develop a point of view requires effort and imagination. “As I entered the bank I found the juxtaposition of my life to those on the streets outside uncomfortable. The homeless are more prevalent this year than last.” Or, “The mood at the table in the basement taverna, our favorite one in the Kolonaki district, was more somber than usual. Perhaps the pressure of exams has distracted us all.”

In writing the previous paragraph I turned the materials of my own life so many years ago into a story. I wrote and rewrote until the description felt like a journey, or story, for the reader. In telling a story I funnel my observations and feelings through a particular lens. The result is the distillation of experience into a communicative form, into expression. Without the process of compression and distillation, there is no expression, only description. And expression communicates more effectively than description.

I am a product of postmodernism, of deconstructionism, of a general rejection of hierarchical narrative and objective truth. For much of my life in the theater I have resisted the comfort and tyranny of stories. But the times are shifting. I would like to propose that we have reached the end of postmodernism. We are on the cusp of a new paradigm, as yet unnamed, only partially inhabited, unfamiliar and novel. The pecking order of top-down organizational structures and hierarchical control are losing strength. It is becoming increasingly clear that the hegemony of isolationism is not a solution to our present global circumstances. Our understanding of action and responsibility is changing. We know now that our tiniest gestures have large-scale effects, as do the outward ripples of a pebble thrown into a pond. In moments such as these, of upheaval and change, stories become necessary to frame our experiences. It is the role of the artist to “wright” new fictions. Those who can formulate the stories that make the world understandable will redefine the experience of those who live in it.Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in the context of a story rather than in a list; and they even rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into a narrative rather than presented in a legal presentation.

Human beings like stories. Our brains have a natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and learning from them but also for creating them. In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story.

(James Wallis, video-game designer)

From their ancient origins and continuing through today, stories bind societies by reinforcing common values and strengthening the ties of shared culture. But they do more than that. Stories give order and meaning to existence and are less costly than direct experience because with stories it is possible to collect information without having to personally undergo the experience. Also, fiction provides a playground and a workout for cognitive functionality. In the Darwinian sense, those who tell stories are sexually attractive to others, and stories, like taking drugs, give the teller a chemical charge.

The most significant human exchanges occur through narrative. Even a well-told bedtime story can permanently alter the synaptic pathways of the brain in the listener. I believe that the stories that we tell, about ourselves and about others, matter. The clarity with which I tell a story can affect what will eventually come to pass because I will end up living the narrative that I describe. What is the story I am telling? Does the story that I tell and retell inevitably become my particular experience and the experience of people around me?

It is possible that novelist Jeanette Winterson became a writer because she did not agree with the story that her mother told about her family and she did not concur with her mother’s definition of what makes a good human being. Winterson needed to tell her own story in her own way, and writing became a battle about whose story would rule. She rewrote her story in a veiled fiction entitled Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a novel that became a bestseller in Britain, and more recently in an autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Perhaps the battle between Jeanette Winterson and her mother was a battle of interpretation. The parent struggled to maintain her own identity and the identity of her daughter, a person she invested in and described in her own way. The child attempted to rewrite the story into a tale that makes sense to her. And so, it seems to me, storytelling can be an act of survival.

The practice of storytelling begins in the day-to-day minutiae of one’s own life. Because we are meaning-making machines, we translate our experiences into potent narratives. We tell stories to make sense of our experiences. Through this act of translation, we develop opinions and assumptions about how things are. The human impulse to tell one’s own story is one of the basic human rights and freedoms in democratic societies. Speaking effectively, and communicatively, whether onstage, in poetry, in a book or in conversation, can free one from the prison of the past. Speaking a story can be an act of letting in light.

Think of the hero/prisoner in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” A group of people lives chained inside a cave, facing a blank wall. They watch shadows projected on the wall thrown by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and they ascribe meaning to these shadow forms. A prisoner, freed from his shackles, walks out of the darkness of the cave into the blazing sunlight. What makes him a hero, and in Plato’s case the best sort of politician, is that after witnessing the startling vision of trees and sun and landscape, he turns around and re-enters the cave to tell the story of his journey to others who had until then imagined that life is simply the shadows teasing them. He suffers their incomprehension but the act of return and his attempt to enthrall the others with the story of what he has seen and experienced in order to fire their imaginations is ultimately what makes him a hero.In the theater we construct journeys for audiences utilizing the tools of time and space. We create societies, tell stories and propose means by which people can live together with increased humanity, empathy and humor. An effective production communicates in ways that infiltrate the audience in multiple layers, weaving details and scenes, narration, imagery, symbolic action, plot and character. Learning to “wright” stories effectively is a lifetime study.

The hunger for stories is not a body hunger, but it is a huge and fierce hunger, and it is as necessary for human well-being as food is for the body. We have to make stories and then we have to consume stories or our brains don’t work right, and when we consume stories, we are consuming life. Stories carry energy, they make patterns in the way we think and behave, and we have to have them to live in a social order.

(Jo Carson, poet and playwright)

In the heat of a performance, the actors and the audience are readers and writers at the same moment. An actor reads the room, takes the temperature of the audience’s listening and makes instantaneous decisions about how to, in turn, write upon the stage. The audience reads the actor’s writing from one moment to the next. They collaborate in the joint effort of the creation of the theatrical event.

The human mind is tuned to detect patterns. A baby swiftly learns to read patterns in its surroundings and begins to write back. In “writing back,” the mind attempts to craft ordered narratives from random input. The brain circuitry pores over incoming information, filters for patterns and arranges those patterns into stories. This inborn appetite for meaningful patterns in turn translates into a hunger for narrative.

In order to write effectively we must learn to read well because it is impossible to write anything without reading first. Great writers are effectively great readers. To read teaches one to write. Reading is a lifelong study. The substance of the world, its “literature,” is vast and unendingly rich, a sea of multitudinous differences. To mature is to open up one’s relation to the world through an increased ability to read creatively. The ongoing challenge for every artist is to remain fresh to the world, to continue to find novelty in each experience, even as the years pass by and one’s perception tends to surrender to the assumptions about what and how “things” are.

Reading and writing is a joint effort that has consequences. When the writing is effective, that is to say when the art is effective, the reader’s world, that is to say the receiver’s world, expands to meet the writer’s, and in that very interaction, the world is altered just a bit.

The essential tools for reading are a combination of focus and awareness. The two are not identical. Focus is a consciously directed attention. Awareness is a wider, spongier cognizance. When too focused we miss out on the flow of random, undigested bits that help us to understand the bigger picture. Without awareness, we miss a significant percentage of the creative process.

Jonathan Franzen, in his book of essays entitled Farther Away, describes his realization that in order to write the kind of book that he dreamed of writing but felt incapable of doing, he would have to become a different kind of writer and in order to do that he would have to become a different kind of person.

If we engage deeply enough in the experience, reading the writing of others can alter us profoundly. I believe that we can become “a different kind of person” simply by exposure to powerful writing, even within the duration of a novel or a play. Reading offers opportunities for transformation through our imaginative engagement with art. A lifetime of transformative reading can help one to become an effective agent of the artistic experience, to communicate with clarity and power and to become the writer one wants to become.Whether or not there are any actual connections between the incidents we live through daily, our minds are designed to string these events into storylines. We produce reasons for our actions that seem rational and plausible, and yet the motives that we assign to our own actions are often fictions designed to help our lives make sense. But the stories that we tell others and ourselves about our lives end up becoming the lives we live. And so, I believe that the way we describe our lives and ourselves is a creative force behind the experience of life itself.

A well-lived life should be worth attention. At the very least, you should find your own story engaging. In presenting yourself to yourself and others, then, you should keep in mind the rules that good playwrights follow. Like a good character ? you should be making choices that are explicable ? choices that appear to be coming from a mind in working order. Your choices should be reasonably coherent with each other, also, so as to support the thought that there is a real person ? you ? behind those choices.

(Paul Woodruff, philosopher)

A friend wrote and prepared to direct his own film. A producer was in place, money had been raised, casting was complete and the crew had arrived on location. Just before the shooting began, the producer announced sheepishly that all of the funding had fallen through. Devastated, my friend and his wife went for a walk in a local graveyard. “What is the story we want to tell our children about this experience?” they asked themselves. Ultimately they decided to cash in their life savings and fund the project themselves. They chose the story that they wanted to tell, consciously put their resources in service of that story and realized a remarkable film entitled Big Bad Love.

Most of my days are lived within the confines of the evolving narratives that I spin about who I am. Therefore, “What is the story I want to tell?” is a pivotal question. The narratives that I choose determine the sort of life that I will live because I create who I am with the stories I tell. I write myself into existence by the stories that I tell about my life. I also write with my posture and with my manner of walking and speaking, and I write with words and with my actions. I write fuzzily or, with extra effort and deliberate thinking, I can write clearly. I impress myself upon and into others. I write and I am also written upon. My DNA writes upon me and my family writes upon me. I am written upon by the experiences that I undergo, by the people that I meet, the books that I read and the music that I listen to.

I am also an inheritor of great stories, myths and parables that formed who I am and how I think about the world, including my morality and ethics. Many of the stories that I tell are adaptations of these formidable fictions. But I can also be a transmitter of new stories. Perhaps I can think of my life as a play that I “wright.” I construct and reconstruct narratives. Ultimately the story that I “wright” is a fragment of an interconnected accumulation of many stories by many other “wrighters” in a worldwide web of linked stories.At the Theater Communications Group Conference in Baltimore in 2009, “Generation Y” representative Nadira Hira bounded onto the stage and announced that she would not be using any PowerPoint in her talk. “Hooray,” I thought, “What a relief!” After several days of presentations and lectures with nonstop visual information displayed behind the speakers, I was relieved to be spoken to without technical support and accoutrements. Hira went on to explain that her generation is moving away from PowerPoint lectures because they understand the physical intensity of speaking directly to an audience.

When you change the way an individual thinks of himself, you change the way he lives in his community and thereby you change the community in some way.

(Jo Carson, poet and playwright)

What do they understand?

A PowerPoint presentation, with its bullet points, charts and graphs, activates a very small portion of the brain ? the Broca and Wernicke areas. These brain regions process language. Words are decoded into meaning. That’s it. When a PowerPoint presentation is in process, the brain shuts down to a small area of function.

In comparison, metaphor, storytelling and emotional exchange between people or portrayed between characters can stimulate the brain as a whole. Stories are journeys of the mind that provide the opportunity to enter into other people’s thoughts and feelings. If I can engage a person’s imagination, I will have managed to link our brains one to the other. Our brains synchronize, one with the other.

Our present-day culture is inundated with instantly available information and I am as addicted to the high of information as the next person. But what is the difference between apprehension and comprehension, between information received and information processed? Without the real experience of processing information, can insight, point-of-view or even transformations occur? I do not think so.I use stories as a method of teaching. By telling my own stories, the ones that have helped to shape my thinking and action, I can offer my students a slice of my original experience and insights. If interested enough and open to what I have to say, they can live vicariously through my own life-encounters. Of course they translate my experience with their own memories, associations, thoughts and desires. But in telling the stories, there is the chance that my brain might synchronize successfully with theirs. When our brains are properly synchronized, I am able to share my hard-won experiences with my students.

Telling stories is our way of coping, a way of creating shape out of a mess. It binds everyone together.

(Sarah Polley, filmaker)

Princeton psychologist Uri Hasson calls this synchronization “braincoupling.” The listener’s brain activity mirrors the speaker’s. According to Hasson, the greater the coupling, the greater the mutual understanding. Communication between brains is made possible by a shared neural system that links the production of speech to the perception of speech. If receptive and if we use our imaginations, the stories that we hear can give us an approximate sensation of undergoing the experience itself.

Words are powerful stimulants of brain activity. By simply telling a story, I c...