Storytellers undercover: I swear I am a folklorist!

Soooo. New Orleans. The week before Halloween. Voodoo Fest. 80-something degrees. Live music.
And the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society (of which I am a member since... two weeks ago?)

It was Dr. Sobol's brilliant idea to apply with a panel on gaming, popular culture, and storytelling to the AFS conference about the Continuity and Creativity of Culture. Our small but powerful team of undercover superheeeerhm, I mean, storytellers, consisted of Kevin Cordi (representing improv role-playing and creative drama), Patrick Gerard (representing storytelling in video games), and yours truly (representing traditional tabletop). Our panel was scheduled for 8am on Saturday, which, given that the hotel was a corner away from a Friday night on Bourbon Street, was less than ideal, but that did not break our momentum at all.

New Orleans, by the way, is a lot of fun. I have been there four years ago, visiting my friend, Angela, and I have been planning on going back ever since. When I was not sitting in a folklore panel, we were wandering around in the French Quarter, visiting touristy places, eating good food, and listening to good music.

When I was sitting in panels... well, that was actually a lot of fun too. For example, Milbre Burch and her husband presented an amazing two-hour panel on their project of interviewing 90 storytellers all around the USA, and gathering more than 200 hours of footage. They showed us snippets of this great project, and the familiar faces - Ray Hicks, Kathryn Windham, Dovie Thomason, Gioia Timpanelli, Olga Loya, and many others - were greeted with sighs and smiles and nods from the audience. They definitely had a lot of important things to say about stories and storytelling.

Kay Stone's presentation on the Grimm tales and their legacy was also fascinating. I have not heard Kay tell before, but Kevin drew my attention to her part in the program, and I was glad he did. Kay is a folklorist and a storyteller, and a great combination at that too! She told interesting variations of Grimm tales to illustrate her point: Japanese Hansel and Gretel, Native American Cinderella, original Snow White etc. It was as enjoyable as it was thought provoking, and especially appropriate for 2012. Grimm tales are in this year!

Another highlight of the event was the panel with the creators of Treme from HBO. If you have not seen that show yet, go home and watch it! It's a lot of fun, and one of the best shows I have seen since the Wire, which is no coincidence. I personally enjoyed the talk with the creators, writers and producers a lot more than if the actors had been there: it was interesting to get a glimpse of how such a story, in the broad and true sense of the word, is created by a team. Also, they were all very friendly, and fun to talk to.

All in all, my first folklore conference felt like a success. I have been to archaeology conferences before, and had my fair share of storytelling gatherings. Folklorists are generally less talkative and sharing than storytellers, but as we have seen, there are exceptions on both sides, and plenty of crossover between the fields.

Also. New Orleans. Nuff said.

N is for New Orleans and its amazing storytellers!

And by New Orleans, I also mean Louisiana in general, it just does not have the good manners of starting with an N. Oh well. Once again, I am bending the A to Z rules to be able to blog about something I would have blogged about anyway!

As for storytelling in Louisiana: I probably don't have to tell anyone how amazing their stories are! There is my dear friend Angela Davis, who visited the Holnemvolt Festival in 2011 and people still talk about her performances. Then there is storytelling master Gay Ducey, whom I have met when I was an intern at the International Storytelling Center, and listened to her tales for 5 days straight, and loved every minute of it.

And, more recently, there is our very own Danielle Bellone!

Danielle had her Finest Hour performance this Saturday. For those of you who did not graduate from the ETSU Storytelling Master's program: Finest Hour is the performance you do at the end of your practicum schoolwork, before you graduate. You organize a storytelling event, invite teachers, classmates, friends and family, and dazzle them with your very best.

And she did!

I have told with Danielle before, quite often, and I have to tell you up front, she is an absolutely amazing storyteller. She is great with kids (and always has something up her sleeve that sticks with them, as a gift to the teachers... it is usually in the form of a song, simple, repeptitive, and gloriously annoying on the long run). She is also great with adults; she uses language beautifully, smiles like the sun, and chooses her stories very, very carefully, so they fit her like a glove.
She took the concept of the Finest Hour very seriously.

It was a great set of stories! She told a personal story about her childhood, and made us laugh; she told a Haitian folktale and made us sing; she told a Greek myth and she made us cry; she told a tall tale and made us groan; she told a great piece of her poetry and made us sigh. She ended with the story of the Light Princess, and she made us laugh, cry, groan and sigh, and fall in love with the story from beginning to end.
Many storytellers underestimate the importance of story choice; Danielle doesn't. You can tell that she loves the tales she tells, and that is what gives them that extra polish, and makes them shine.

Also, we had jambalaya after the peformance, and that was great too. Not that she needed to bribe us with food to sing her praises.

Keep an eye on Danielle Bellone, she is a storytelling master :)