In the Public Lecture courses of New York City, it has been found
that storytelling programs composed of folk tales draw large
audiences of grown people who enjoy the stories quite as much as
do the children.
In various institutions for adults as well as for children, where
the library has been a mere collection of books that counted for
little or nothing in the daily life of the institution,
storytelling is making the books of living interest, and is
giving to children, and to grown men and women, new sources of
pleasure by taking them out of themselves and beyond the
limitations of a prescribed and monotonous existence. Just as the
games and folk dances are making their contribution to
institutional life, so storytelling is bringing the play spirit
in literature to those whose imaginations have been starved by
long years of neglect, and is showing that what is needed is not
an occasional entertainment, but the joy of possessing literature
itself.
Professional storytellers who have recently visited towns and
cities of the Pacific Coast, the Middle-Western, the Southern,
and the Eastern States, not covered by this report, bear
testimony to an interest in storytelling that seems to be as
genuine as it is widespread. It is apparent that more thought is
being given to the subject than ever before. Wherever
storytelling has been introduced by a "born storyteller" who has
succeeded in kindling sparks of local talent capable of
sustaining interest and accomplishing results, storytelling is
bound to be a success. All reports testify to the need of a well
defined plan for storytelling related to the purpose and the aims
of the institution which undertakes it, and to the varying
capacities and temperaments of the persons who are to carry it
on.
THE SPECIAL STORYTELLER AND THE REGULAR ASSISTANT
The professional storyteller has played a large part in the
successful establishment of storytelling, and is destined to play
a still larger part in the future development of the work in
playgrounds and other institutions, by raising the standards of
the playground library, or settlement worker, who is expected to
tell stories. This she will do not by elaborating methods and
artifices to be imitated, but by frank criticism of native
ability, by inspiring courses in story literature, and by proper
training of the much neglected speaking voice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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