Listen In On The Story Circle

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by Tess Wheelwright | Jun 27, 2006 11:56 am

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Posted to: Arts

Click here to hear a group of storytellers like these cutting loose over the shocking misadventure of one particularly bold loverboy. They got the tale un-previewed during the “report back” session after an Arts & Ideas “Alternate ROOTS” story circle—and whooped their group pride all the harder.

For more telling, touching, and sometimes saucy audio from the Alternate ROOTS crew’s visit to New Haven, read on and click away.

Click here to read Melinda Tuhus’s first-hand report on her experience with Alternate ROOTS, the group of professional storytellers that visited New Haven from New Orleans as part of Arts & Ideas. They rolled into town on the assumption that “Everybody has a story to tell”—and they were right.

Click here to listen to some background from John O’Neal (picured below), the artistic director of Junebug Productions, on Alternate ROOTS —if only for the rich and wonderfully time-biding quality of his speech. Learn from the source about the technique by which plays come out of story circles, and hear O’Neal laugh at his mic-happy companions.

Click here to hear why he’ll never have another home than New Orleans.

Click here to listen to one earnest reflector’s account of how intimate strangers can become in the process of discovering their common human denominator—but only after the teasing song improvised by other group members welcoming an uninvited “poacher” into their circle.

To hear how one especially rhythmic group learned about the way childhood “whoopins” play out in adult psyches, click here.

Click here for a mournful rendition of “Motherless Child”—and a more sober report from another group on the experience of abandonment, and the effect of Katrina to shake out “who loved you and who didn’t.”

Another group continued the pattern of musical reports, crooning their collective loneliness in an Uprooted Peoples blues.

And click here and here for another reporter’s micro-breakdown of the range covered by the stories in his circle, from embarrassing wet-dog-smelling cars to love and loss, to blame and guilt, and to healing song.

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