Storytwisting: A Guide to Remixing and Reinventing Traditional Stories

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CHAPTER ONE

An Eye - Opening Experience

I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that

rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s

rather curious, you know, this sort of life!

LEWIS CARROLL¹

A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO, we offered a series of storytelling workshops to adults in England. After sharing guidelines and tips for how to learn a story to tell, we gave students several short folk tales to peruse. Each selected a favorite. As it happened, an Irish teller selected a Jewish story complete with a rabbi, Jewish school, Yiddish words, and challah. After spending workshop time on technique and practice, each participant had an opportunity to tell his or her tale for the rest of the group. When the Irish teller performed his story, the classic Jewish folk tale did not pop out of his mouth. He transformed it into a full-blown Irish story, complete with parish priest, church, Irish whiskey, soda bread, and a touch of the Irish language.

The workshop participants delighted in his story and the storyteller delighted in telling a tale that burst with Irish humor. It was a joyous performance, but not just because the story was well told. First, the story was transferred to a cultural context that was more familiar to the teller and his audience. Second, because the expected story was altered and set in an unexpected place, it was particularly intriguing for those of us who knew a more traditional version.

Was the story he told the same as the one that he read on paper? The plot of the story remained the same and the basic meaning of it was unchanged. However, the setting and the characters were as different as could be. In a discussion that followed the presentation, the Irish teller maintained that he loved the story as it was written, but he knew that telling it as a Jewish tale would not be as meaningful to his audiences as it would be with his added Irish accents. By making changes to the tale, he translated it from one culture to another while preserving the basic essence of the story.

The storyteller could have chosen to present a Jewish story to his audiences, educating them with new cultural information to offer a multicultural experience. Instead he made a different choice. He chose to relate the essence and humor of the tale without the cultural clothing. He believed that the familiarity of the Irish setting would invite his listeners in and allow the humor of the story to be featured more prominently. It occurred to us that the process we witnessed in the workshop was comparable to the way many traditional stories have been passed among people for millennia.

But this experience opened our eyes to something else.

Where the other listeners enjoyed a humorous Irish tale, our experience was different from theirs even as we laughed right along with them. Every Jewish element that was transposed to Irish culture took us by surprise. It was like walking down a familiar street only to discover that all the trees and flowers were planted in new places and the houses were different colors. Experiencing old and new at the same time is an intellectual and emotional adventure.

Not only was it great fun to hear his tale, it also taught us a great deal about Irish culture and values. You see, every alteration in the story was significant to those who knew the Jewish version. With our expectations shaken up, each narrative change was a red flag that commanded our attention. Our grasp of new cultural information and the meaning of the story were both amplified because his altered version was overlaid on one we already knew.

The natural human tendency to change stories for different audiences, coupled with the powerful connections such stories offer listeners, is the impulse behind this book. Change is integral to the oral tradition. Storytwisting channels change to craft new stories from traditional ones.

There are multiple ways to denote the alterations made to traditional stories—they are told, retold, adapted, based on, fractured, adapted and retold, to name a few. According to storytelling and folklore scholar Margaret Read McDonald, if a story is told by someone, it is spoken in the words of an indigenous storyteller or transliterated from that teller’s words when written down. A story is retold when a platform storyteller or author hears or reads a story and recasts it into his or her own language. Finally, McDonald indicates that the words adapted and retold are interchangeable.⁶ For storytwisting purposes, there is a need for an additional category, to denote stories with an intermediate degree of alteration, tales that are less than fractured and more than adapted or retold. The term adapted retelling fulfills that need. Further discussion of adapted retelling follows.

Definitions of Key Terms Used in this Book

When read in order, this list sheds light on ideas that are relevant to storytwisting.

Traditional Story—a tale in the oral tradition. Some examples include folktales, myths, legends, fables, urban legends, and older, literary fairy tales that have entered (or re-entered) the oral tradition.² Traditional stories are in the public domain.

Retold or Adapted—a traditional story that is composed in a storyteller’s own words. The terms adapted and retold are interchangeable.

Straight Retelling—a retold or adapted tale that is faithful to the plot and story elements of a traditional story. Compare to twisted or storytwisted, below.

Adapted Retelling—a straight retelling of a traditional story that contains a sustained transformation of a story element, such as a shift from prose to rhyme or a change in setting. There is no expectation that the audience will recognize the source tale(s).

Intertextuality—the reverberant echoes of a pre-existing story in a new tale; a conversation or dialogue between the story being told and the tale upon which it is based.³

Fractured—a story that carries a sustained twist or transformation of one or more story elements. It also contains implied or explicit social commentary, intertextuality, shaken expectations, and/or is self-referential about stories or storytelling process.

Storytwisted or Twisted—an umbrella term for an adapted retelling or fractured story with a sustained twist or transformation of one or more story elements, purposely altered to resonate with audiences. Compare to straight retelling, above.

Parody⁴—pokes fun at a tale type, such as fairy tales, or a specific story, like Cinderella.

Postmodern—refers to a contemporary style of art and literature that incorporates parody, intertextuality, and self-reference; often reinterprets social and literary thought.⁵

Mash-Up—when story elements from two or more pre-existing stories are included in a single new tale.

Personal Folktale—a term we coined to describe a storytwisting tale type where a folktale is told as a personal story, as if it happened to the storyteller.

Story Rap—a traditional story told in rap style. Story rap is the term we use to designate rap versions of stories.

Historical Fiction Folktale—a term we developed to describe a traditional story that is reset in a time period of the past.

Wordplay Story—a traditional tale retold in a number of playful, linguistic formats, such as puns or spoonerisms (where the speaker transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words—a pack of lies vs. a lack of pies).

For purposes of this book, we distinguish storytwisted from straight or untwisted tales. Straight stories are adapted or retold tales in a storyteller’s own words. A storytwisted tale is defined as an adapted or retold story whose function goes beyond a straight, faithful rendering of a folk or fairy tale. Storytwisted tales with intertextual recognition, self-awareness, shaken expectations, and/or implied or explicit social commentary are fractured. Storytwisted tales devoid of such intentions are adapted retellings. Generally speaking, storytwisted tales differ from untwisted stories in one important way. Where straight retellings present an intact tale, storytwisted ones, like fractured stories and adapted retellings, carry a sustained twist or transformation of at least one story element, purposefully altered to heighten the story’s resonance with audiences. For more discussion about retelling, see Chapter Two: Storytwisting Strategies.

Storytwisting: A Transformational Process

When stories are told, stories are changed. This is the essence of the oral tradition. If the changes are subtle, the integrity of the traditional story is preserved in each retelling. Over time, this process yields a body of beloved stories that are familiar across generations and sometimes across cultures.

But when a familiar tale undergoes significant change, it is sometimes defined as a fractured tale. Fractured tales are familiar stories told in unexpected ways. They carry new messages, updated content, or offer a cockeyed view of beloved stories. Often humorous, sometimes poignant or searing, fractured tales pay tribute to tales of the past while winking at life in the present.⁷ A straight, un-fractured retelling represents a story in much the same way that a painted portrait represents the likeness of a person. In contrast, a fractured story is more like a Picasso, with a rearrangement and exaggeration of features that are re-formed into an unexpected, artistic whole.

Fractured stories work best when based on source stories that are familiar to the audience and the storyteller, such as cultural stories told within a culture. When fractured stories are told, the comfort of the familiar tale juxtaposed against the revelations of a reimagined version offers cultural insights that resonate with audiences. They often also make us laugh.

But what about stories told in multicultural settings?

While there are no specific tales that are native to every world culture, there is, for better or for worse, a body of stories that cross cultural and national borders. To borrow a term used by the scholar Donald Haase, these stories are transcultural.⁹ Many cultures know them. They form the canon of European-derived folk and fairy tales told in America.¹⁰ Filling library bookshelves, these stories are taught in schools, are depicted on stage and screen, and appear in the visual arts in Western culture. The Tortoise and the Hare and Cinderella are two examples of that sort of tale. Etched into the popular imagination, these stories are recognized by people of many different cultures and age groups. Because they are familiar to many people, they make excellent fodder for fractured stories.

Fractured Stories vs. Fractured Fairy Tales

When stories are fractured, people often think about fairy tales, partly because famous childhood stories were humorously reimagined in an old cartoon segment called Fractured Fairy Tales from the Rocky and Bullwinkle television series. According to the scholar Ruth B. Bottigheimer, fractured fairy tales are based on traditional fairy tales. She further explains that parodies and fractured fairy tales are similar, but parodies have a different purpose. Whereas parodies mock individual tales and the genre as a whole, fractured fairy tales, with a reforming intent, seek to impart updated social and moral messages.⁸ Scholarly thought about fractured fairy tales is very important for storytellers to review, but the term itself is a bit confining. In addition to fairy tales, other story types can be fractured, like local legends, Aesop’s fables, urban legends, and tall tales. For that reason, when we use the term fractured story, we mean any story type that was or will be fractured or parodied, including fairy tales.

The story-making approach for fractured tales can work equally well on unfamiliar stories. As our Irish storyteller demonstrated, audiences enjoyed his tale even though they didn’t recognize the tale upon which it was based. They heard one story while we heard two. Furthermore, although there was one dominant message of his story, audience members experienced different story genres. Those who did not know his Jewish source listened to what we call an adapted retelling. Those of us who knew the source tale heard a fractured one.

Both tale types result from a transformation process, a process we call Storytwisting. While that process is the same for both, the difference between them lies in the intention. Fractured stories are a meta experience—both the older story and the new one are recognized by the audience. Reverberant echoes bounce from story to story to storyteller to story listener. In contrast, adapted retellings have no submersed agenda, no self-referential content or in-jokes. There are no reverberant echoes to excite or distract listeners. This critical difference, the awareness of one story or multiples, affects the composition and performance of such