It Takes Two • Telling Tandem

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Comment by Roger Jenkins on April 19, 2008 at 3:57am

I have done most of my tandem telling with my good friend Dennis Tan, who is hearing-impaired. Even though most of our telling has been for hearing audiences, building our stories around sign means that our style is as much visual as verbal. We mostly do Asian stories (we're Singaporeans) and ones that have a repetitive strucutre often work well for us as the audience learns to identify signs as they come around again (and again) and I can (pretend to!) be lazy and back off on the vocal narration, letting the audience fill in the blanks (voicing the signs they now recognise.) So there's also an element of advocacy in our work, in celebrating the power and pleasure of sign language. (FYI the deaf use American sign - though not ASL - here.)

Anybody else working with in a hearing/hearing-impaired tandem?

Roger

Comment by Patti Christensen on April 2, 2008 at 10:11am

I have two different tandem partners, James with the Patchwork Players, and Panchita where we do bilingual English/Spanish stories. James and I also use the "yes we are married, just not to each other" line. Somehow, people assume that the only way you can have good chemistry in your telling together would be to be a married couple. I think it is good for kids to see two adults working together that AREN'T married to one another...

Comment by B.Z. Smith on April 1, 2008 at 11:21pm

The Story Quilters begin with that perfect tale that we BOTH love. From there we read, read, read....Can we find other versions of the same tale? Similar motifs? We work at immersing ourselves in the new story in order to have the tandem version be our own.

Scripting is critical at first. Through scripting we can establish a balance of voice, shared narration. From there we begin to create a dialogue from which unfolds the story. Occasionally we take turns writing scripts--both adaptations and original pieces. Other times we write them together. We try to make sure that each story has just the right amount of focus on each of us as individuals while keeping the ensemble as the primary focus. We include tandem-spoken words, BUT carefully, not overdoing nor under. Too many tandem lines--OBNOXIOUS! Too few--Coming out of left field with no connection to the whole.

Once we get to blocking, the fun begins. No story dares go out to the wide world without a goodly amount of rehearsal and a lot of trust in each other. Best of all, when that story has been told in tandem for about the tenth time it starts to take on a life of its own!

Cynthia Restivo and I have been working together as the Story Quilters since 1995. She is my third tandem partner. Yes, we're married, but not to each other. However, we both acknowledge that tandem telling is just that--A marriage!

Comment by The Patchwork Players Story Theatre on March 27, 2008 at 11:22pm

Still trying to get a hang of how this all works. We THINK we uploaded a handout of Sample Stories for Tandem Telling (hotlink below). We use this with groups where people are wanting to begin exploring tandem telling. These are quick "bones" of stories that we have found work well as tandem tales. (Please let us know if you can't get it to open.) Feel free to play around with these stories. They are not the actual version of any tales that we tell, but are ripe to put your own clothes on them. Most have two distinct characters and some simple action or dialogue. Hope you find them useful.

Comment by The Patchwork Players Story Theatre on March 27, 2008 at 11:18pm

Sample Stories for Tandem .doc

Comment by Patti & Panchita-Bilingual Storytelling on March 27, 2008 at 11:14pm

We love telling tandem in English and Spanish....mostly with Patti leading telling a bit in English and Panchita following telling in her own way in Spanish. It is very important to us that we are each telling, not translating word for word, which is very boring! Panchita believes that there should be a lot of treats that the Spanish speaking listener can find along the way. And we both try hard to be very broad with our expressions and visual cues so that those in the audience who are NOT bilingual will not get lost in the process. Anybody else have experience telling in two languages?

Comment by StoryMasters™ • Linda Day & MyLinda Butterworth on March 25, 2008 at 12:02pm

Thanks for the thoughts on tandem it is very useful and well written. Bravo!

Always a tale to tell,
MyLinda

Comment by The Patchwork Players Story Theatre on March 25, 2008 at 9:26am

Here are some thoughts that we wrote a while back about the topic:

Thoughts on Tandem Telling and Story Theatre
By: Patchwork Players-James Nelson-Lucas and Patti Christensen
When we hear the word “storyteller”, often that brings to mind someone sitting quietly on a stool on stage or a person spinning tales around a campfire. Although many tellers rely on call-and-response from the audience, storytelling on the whole is a solitary art.

There is another form of telling that calls for two (or more) tellers. This is sometimes known as “Tandem” telling. There are many ways to do this, perhaps as many as there are storytelling duos.

One of the most famous types of tandem (or group) telling was developed by Paul Sills in Chicago with his Story Theatre work. (See www.paulsills.com for more on Story Theatre.) Sills and his mother, Viola Spolin, did the earliest developmental work in the field of American Improvisation. Story Theatre is in fact a blend of traditional storytelling and acting techniques.

People sometimes ask us, “Isn’t tandem telling just the same as acting?” Well, yes and no. Two persons telling a story can look at lot like two actors acting out a scene, but there are some significant differences. First, the charge of actors is in fact to ignore the audience, with the audience being able to “spy” on the actors through the “fourth wall” at the front of the stage. The actors are talking to one another. On the rare occasions this “wall” is broken, it is done for specific impact, an obvious contrast with the “normal” way theatre is done.

In tandem telling, as in any storytelling, the actors are talking to the audience. Often times, in fact, inviting audience participation.

Actors most often are delivering memorized lines. As a rule, tandem tellers, like most storytellers, are “telling” the story not word for word which allows for the story and the telling to change over time and sometimes with each telling. (There are exceptions, with both individual tellers and duos that prefer to memorize, but these are more the exception than the rule.) In Story theatre, it is more important to “know” the story than to memorize the story.

In traditional theatre there may often be someone who is in the “narrator” role. Storytelling, of course, heavily uses the narrator role: that is usually whoever is telling the tale. However, in the tandem or Story Theatre style, rather than the narrator being separated the narrator is usually integrated right into the story. A teller can flow right from narrator into character: “Once there was a rabbit with very large ears who had a problem ‘I have such large ears that I can hardly hold my head up…’ ”

Having two or more people on stage lends itself to a more theatrical presentation. You can have two tellers sitting on chairs telling, but there is certainly a draw on the tellers to use more physical movement and “acting” in the story; if for no other reason than to give one teller do something to do while the other talks.

As the Patchwork Players, a team of tandem tellers, we tend towards the dynamism of Story Theatre style. We feel free to bring in our acting and improvisation backgrounds to enhance our storytelling. We take a story and create that story anew for each audience. Paul Sills envisioned Story Theatre as a community or communal experience; a kind of egalitarianism where the Audience is as integral as the Tellers, and the Story brings them together. We invite you to join us in creating stories.

Comment by Pamela Hanks on March 24, 2008 at 11:28pm

I've heard other people tell tales together before but never tried it until this year. So far I and my good friend Ginger Parkinson are working on ONE tandem tale. Everytime we get together we practice it and sometimes the 15 minute story takes the whole time because we find something new in our telling, or we realize we haven't told it in a long time and we have kind of forgotten how we decided to do it. The last time we got together, we rewrote our story map because it was so outdated. Our story has really grown and the old story map was holding us back.

I am finding that it takes quite a lot of practice time to make it seamless. It is also helpful if we are both in the story the entire time. If one of us gets distracted while we are telling it, then we miss an entrance.

We are working on being in tune with each other and knowing the story really well, (you know, when you can tell the story on the spot in your sleep), so we can be more spontaneous in our delivery.

I've seen tandem tales that look like plays but our first tale together is not a play. We are just two storytellers sitting down and sharing a story with the audience together.

Comment by StoryHarmonics ~ Lawrence Howard & Lynne Duddy on March 24, 2008 at 11:09pm

Hey Tandem Tellers, Lawrence Howard of StoryHarmonics here. Thanks for the invitation to join the group. Sorry if I'm slow in responding; I've been sick with a nasty cold and haven't been online for a few days. I am very interested and intrigued to see that a number of folks who are not regularly part of a tandem team have joined the group --- that's great. Lynne and I tell tandem quite often but we also each tell solo, and I think it is important to have both perspectives. Generally, it seems to work out that quite a bit of our kids' programming is tandem (and sometimes includes marimba music), while most of our adult stuff is solo, which makes sense because most of our adult stuff is personal material. We have one really great adult tandem story, which is the story of how we met and became a couple, interwoven with a traditional tale about how men and women first met and got together (with much difficulty and many misunderstandings, of course!). We go back and forth from the traditional tale to the personal story, drawing parallels between our own experience and the mythic archetypes. It is really fun. We also tell a long, convoluted Celtic legend in tandem, complete with over-the-top phony Irish accents for comic effect.

OK, I will throw out a topic to get the conversation started: When a story is told in tandem, does it become a play? What is the difference between storytelling and acting? Does it matter?

I eagerly await your thoughts, ideas and opinions!!

Sincerely,

Lawrence

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