The Story 2011 was an enormously varied experience – to be expected, as it’s a conference about stories and storytelling, and is deliberately geared towards bringing together people who practice storytelling differently. But despite the variety of approaches and disciplines, there were a few core themes that speakers kept returning to – one of which was the value of listening (and indeed, a focus on the listener as a necessary counterpart to the storyteller) and the other was a healthy scepticism towards the idea of storytelling itself. I’ve given my game away, for me the particular highlights were Karl James talking about The Dialogue Project, and Adam Curtis talking about the naivete of digital utopianism and the power structures of digital spaces – both of which, I think, have a lot to say about feeling and thinking, and the seductiveness of narrative – and I’ve only just started to work through what I think about the many excellent and provocative points they made.
Karl James, has worked as a performer and director for many years, most recently working with Tim Crouch on his ground-breaking plays My Arm, An Oak Tree and The Author. Alongside this, he runs The Dialogue Project, using conversation to explore people’s life stories. Some of these conversations have been used as an installation at the Latitude Festival, creating intimate wormholes from the noise and bustle of a festival into someone else’s innermost thoughts. Karl’s work is story-telling at its rawest – honest, open conversations that are beautiful, tragic, shocking and inspiring. – from The Story 2011
To be utterly up front about it – I wasn’t expecting to be moved, to feel quite so sharply in a room full of people, but Karl James’s talk was moving. The discussion was framed around a few well-chosen excerpts from The Dialogue project – each one dealing with a person who had undergone (or was undergoing) an emotional crisis, talking about themselves in an incredibly intimate way. The initial conversation was private, and the marks of that privacy were still audible even when played to a larger audience. At the same time, our attention was drawn to the idea of self-presentation – placing the kind of dramatic storytelling that many of us do in fictional contexts, into a personal sphere – the way in which we understand ourselves and our world through stories. James at one point talked about the importance of getting to people before they’ve started to establish their own stories – and that’s an idea that stuck with me. Stories can be dangerous as well – he talked at length about a school in which pupils were underperforming and disengaged, and the stories they told were almost all about feeling disrespected and ignored – and acting out as a result.
Recognising what story people are presenting is a powerful thing – in some cases, it means that we can attempt to rewrite those stories, change interactions, indentify habit and attempt to untangle it.
But this idea of the danger of stories, the seductiveness of narrative, their tendency towards emotional fulfillment and conclusion – is one that was picked up by Adam Curtis’s talk a little later in the day.
Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker who has created some of the most original and challenging documentaries of the last few decades. His films dig deep into the stories and propaganda of the twentieth century, weaving complex interconnections between the ideas, people and culture that have defined our times, and preserved the power of our elites. His ongoing blog for BBC uses the BBC archive to pick apart the back stories to contemporary events, from Mad Med era Madison Avenue to the No 10 ‘Nudge’ unit. There is no-one else right now who is more lucid, challenging and engaging on the subjects of media, propaganda, power and storytelling, so we’re really pleased to have Adam signed up. – from The Story 2011
I don’t particularly want to badly summarise what Curtis’s talk touched on – but in the broadest of terms, he was talking about the ‘dangerous naivete’ of digital utopianism, and about narratives on the internet. He suggests that they tend to be associative and experiental, a different kind of narrative that is in danger of privileging feeling over thinking, personal response over critical engagement, whimsy over information. I’m not sure whether I entirely agree – but it felt appropriate and important when the talk touched on the way in which digital spaces reflect real ones. The internet is not an apolitical utopia – as Curtis said, “the architecture of the internet is plugged into the structures of power in the world”.
The images and ideas and portrayals of selfhood that we are presented with are steeped in the sociopolitical imagery – I think Curtis is particularly astute when he mentions the notion of the “circle of friends” – a recurring image in television, and certainly a familiar one from the social networks of online spaces. Small groups of friends, more than ever, are tastemakers and filters through which we perceive culture – we view the world through our twitter friends & RSS aggregators and livejournal friendslists and facebook status updates. (Not that I think that this is an entirely new form of tastemaking or an internet-only phenomenon – not in the least, but on the internet these traces are solidified & set, we can watch them emerge and alter.) The overabundance of information and news available online is often contextualised via our friends circle – a small group of storytellers. Or really, I think we could think about them as a small group of listeners as well – we pick and choose how to present ourselves to these different, overlapping circles very carefully, after all – their eyes are always on us, and we change under the weight of their gaze.
Which brings me back to something Karl James said when talking about his experiences interviewing people for the dialogue project – “that’s what listening does, it makes people articulate”. It’s a lovely sentiment – and not just because of the ambiguity in the last word, is it adjective or verb, possibly both. Listening changes the conversation, it works a subtle alchemical change in the speaker. The story is really a co-creation, the kind of listening we do alters it – and really starting to engage with that makes stories even messier. The distortion of the listener is not always a good thing – the child self-censoring in front of the parent, the employee changing an analysis looking for a boss’s approval. The hierarchies and relationships and dynamics of everyday life all come crowding in to the pristine narrative space.
We talk a lot about how to tell a story well – and as a natural counterpoint, shouldn’t we also think about how to listen well? To listen kindly, to pay attention but try not to distort the shape of the story we’re hearing into the shape of the one we want to hear. To separate out an articulate silence – one loaded with meaning or one that is pregnant with possibility – from a censored silence, an avoidance or elision. To listen well and distinctly, because sitting in the audience is not the same as sitting on the sidelines.
-
I’ve skipped over many of the interesting presentations and people at The Story in the interests of brevity – but, intrepid blog readers, what did you enjoy?
share
Some lovely reflection, Meg. Would loved to haveSalvador and amanda heard more of that thinking vs. feeling debate. I think the increasing brevity and speed of information exchange tends to favour a process of immediate reaction (minute by minute review of new Radiohead album, Tweeting while watching a drama) over reflection. A good story can be great at reversing that process: making you feel in and of the moment, even though the words took bloody ages to form as they have.
Hm, yes, touched briefly on the idea that the digital space works slightly differently because we can see evolving responses but as you say, there’s a lot more in that. Process rather than conclusions – a profusion of fragments. Which is very experiential, non-narrative. But also gives the impression of being somehow more real because it is less ordered – which is not always the case.
Adam Curtis was very lucid on the subject, actually, and I really wish I’d taken more notes. But at one point he said that the internet reflects individualism as the dominant ideology of our time – and that these status updates and fragmented tellings will one day be regarded similarly to the way in which we now regard Stalinist social realism – “emotional realism”. I’m very inclined to agree – the scattershot hides the mannerism, in the same way as shaky handheld film footage attempts to obscure the professional cinematographic eye.
This is such a beautifully considered piece of writing.
“Listening changes the conversation, it works a subtle alchemical change in the speaker. The story is really a co-creation, the kind of listening we do alters it – and really starting to engage with that makes stories even messier.”
If I didn’t believe that, I couldn’t do what I do. For me we co-create more than we know. It’s happening anyway. So let’s work (together) with it. But not just with people we instinctively harmonise with. Understanding difference is the challenge of our age for me. I choose to practice that (modestly) as generously as I can. I don’t want to shock people or hijack them. I want to step into their space and let them step into mine if and when it’s possible.
And in terms of difference /
There’s me and Adam Curtis at The Story.
Adam’s extraordinary talk was utterly compelling and insightful and then at times so aggressive.I wasn’t ready for some of the images he put on screen. And he gave no warning. Of course he didn’t. He decided to put it out there. And challenge us. Which he did.
His style is more of an artist than mine. “Deal with this” he was saying.
And we need to be challenged directly sometimes; in a way we’re not expecting to be sometimes. So I’m glad he did it.
But I’m sorry I missed some of what he said because my brain was furiously trying to deal with what I was seeing.
As someone who co-directed Tim Crouch’s The Author I’m conversant with the idea and power of brutal images. And yet I felt a little bit brutalised by the self-immolation images. In much the same way as some people have said they felt brutalised by the images we create in The Author. The difference is that in The Author nothing is shown. Only described. Or re-presented. And I’m glad of that.
To some extent, we author our own experience and our own story. Messy or not.
Thanks again for stimulating my thinking. I have much more to consider thanks to your words.
KJ
Thanks for this response, Karl – and I’m pleased that I didn’t mangle your meaning in getting to grips with it.
The distinction you draw between your talk and Adam’s is illuminating, I think, partially because as I organised my thoughts about The Story I used the same metric (feeling directly challenged) but placed both of your talks on the same side of the line. Up in the post I spoke about my response to your dialogue excerpts as being “moved”, but it was not so clean a feeling. I think, listening to a father talk about his daughter’s lack of fear felt, to me, quite brutal. And in a strange way, more immediate thann the image of a burning monk. Partly because of the distance of imagery – that particular image is one that has been repeated, it has accreted so many meanings, to me it is almost more metaphorical than real. Adam’s talk deliberately attempted to recontextualise it, to remind you that it is real and that is a real person burning – which is brutal. Yet somehow it feels more comfortable and known than listening to a man talk honestly about his personal grief – perhaps partly because we are slightly numbed to brutal imagery, to visual representations of violence and destruction, and can’t help reframing them within the context of the cinematic or theatrical.
To me, what characterised both your talks was a kind of rawness – they both left me viscerally affected. Though your approaches to the material are completely different (your silence is kinder, less invasive, whereas Adam’s is all about stirring up material, reframing, recontextualising) I think the affective result can be similar. To me, I think, there’s a common thread to be found in the idea of not looking away, even when it can be uncomfortable.
[...] http://www.thisunrealcity.com/blog/?p=298 [...]
[...] James told us how listening constructively can help a person tell a story. Asking ‘useful’ questions – rather than ‘helpful’ leading questions – leaving vacuumous pauses to draw out [...]