It’s ten o’clock on a Monday evening, and I’m about to tell a story to a large room full of strangers. The only guidelines I’ve been given are that it must be true, be about something that happened to me – and not to a friend of mine – and take about five minutes in the telling. I’ve already watched nine stories unfold on stage this evening. Some have been light-hearted and upbeat, some more poignant or confessional, and many a merger of all of these.The room has embraced each one, laughter and gasps of shock or indignation filling the air as required. There’s very much a sense that this is not stand up. The audience do not posses the more hostile air of a crowd looking to be entertained. More simply, they’re looking to be moved, in whichever way the story-teller dictates.
This is the wonderful world of The Moth, an organisation dedicated to the art of storytelling. It kicked off in the United States in 1997, when founder George Dawes Green, who had been telling stories on his porch in Georgia to his friends and neighbours, noticed the parallel between the effects of his storytelling and the attraction of the moths hitting the lights above him, that his audience were like moths to a flame. He took the name with him to New York, and later would pick up a Peabody Award, recognising The Moth’s contribution as a public service.
It wasn’t an altogether smooth transition from porch to stage however, and by all accounts, George’s first formalised event was a bit of a disaster. They quickly identified the need to structure the evening with a set of guidelines and this evolved into the two main kinds of Moth events that take place today, the Mainstage and the StorySLAM. Certainly the Mainstage events are a great forum to witness the craft of storytelling. The storyteller has worked with a Director to tease out and enrich the tale so that, as Dublin organiser Julien Clancy puts it, ‘they get up and tell a beautiful story that has its own natural arc to it, but which at the same time offers a whole other elevation of art.’ He reckons the StorySLAM, by contrast, is that bit more rock n’ roll, as you never know what you might hear. ‘People will come up and follow all the rules and they’ll be brilliant, and then people will come up and break all the rules, and they’ll be the story everyone will remember. So it’s an awful lot edgier, we have no idea what stories are going to be told, and that’s the most terrifying and thrilling part of the whole night, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Everyone presumes we have to approve the stories, but honestly, there’s none of that at all.’
The first Mainstage event in Dublin took place last September, when the artistic and producing directors of The Moth were in town. The pair quickly fell for Dublin and the reams of listeners that first event attracted, and quickly recognised the demand for a StorySLAM here, which Julien and the team have been coordinating since October. Does an event like the StorySLAM particularly lend itself to Irish storytellers and audiences, I ask? Julien mentions that quite often during the evening, there might not be a full contingent of storytellers in the hat, but at the interval, when the audience have begun hearing the stories, another troupe will volunteer their names. Similarly, in the pub afterwards, he says people begin to volunteer their stories more freely, spurred on by those they’ve just seen on stage.
‘I do think that’s because we are quite guarded. It’s often the kind of thing that, as the night goes on and the stories come out, people do look for a safe place to get a story off their chest,’ cites comedian Colm O’Regan, who has been hosting the Dublin StorySLAM since it began. ‘I think at the start of the night they might feel a little reticent, it’s always that feeling of “Sure, who’d be interested in my story?” but that tends to melt away when they hear other people’s stories, and see the position the storyteller is in afterwards. Often there are stories that people feel much better for having told. Though it is refreshing that often an Irish person will start by saying, “Sure, this one’s a bit of a fuckin’ mess, can we give it a go?” and then the storyline might be really good and enjoyable. There’s that Irish way of telling a story that lets the story slip out and gather momentum maybe from events or a turn of phrase. Whereas an American might be more declamatory and start with more of a ‘This story I’m going to tell you’ opener. The storytelling tradition here in Ireland is bound up in the sheanachaí thing, but they’re very much a performer. He’ll light a fire and there’s a style, but ordinary people telling stories is actually more interesting and also more recognisable. But from the same token, when people from outside of Ireland tell a story, the style is different but you get transported into this timeline or whatever just like that. So I think each style brings its own best facets to the storytelling itself.’
If telling a story to the room poses a daunting prospect, then Colm’s job as host also requires its own set of skills. The unknown nature of each story, means that the audience are in a perpetual state of suspense, and depending on the tale that’s gone before, it’s his job to bring them up or down so that they’re better able to come to the next story refreshed and ready for whatever it might bring.
‘You have to let each story breathe, you can’t just leap up and play a bit of music. I suppose as the host I have to let people know that I’ve been listening to all the stories, and that I’m hosting the night as a whole. So it’s thinking about the show, and the audience, and keeping the storytellers in mind. There’s a certain amount of excitement too for the audience, that even we don’t know which way this is going to go and in what order, and neither do they. Sometimes I forget to say to them, “Don’t worry, this will shift in tone,” because it’ll be all over the place, and they can’t feel tense because a funny story jarred with something from earlier. Or even within the same story, the tragedy and the comedy co-exist very well together. The audience seem to be able to go with whatever emotion is there at the time and for me it’s about not trivialising the sad things. It’s a sort of management of the tone of the night. With stand up, an audience doesn’t have that fear that it’s going to range in tone so much.’
Was there a certain ease in the transition from stand-up comic to storyteller when Colm took his own story to the Mainstage? ‘My stand-up would be quite story-ish anyway, so it gives you the skill of beginning, middle and end. Though I’ve noticed from listening to other people’s stories, that often they’ll start in an intriguing way – often part of the way through – and once they’ve established the scene, if it’s October 1997 walking home on Fifth Avenue or whatever, then they go back, with a “and how I got there was as follows”. You couldn’t do that in stand-up because people wouldn’t have the patience to wait for you to work up to it.’
‘There’s a certain ego in stand-up that is refreshingly absent in storytelling, particularly for people telling that story for the first time. In stand-up you obviously act up a bit, so I enjoy the truer nature of the stories, but actually also, in telling them in this form, it allows you maybe to find the parts of the story and truths within it that you hadn’t considered. When people leave a comedy show, I’m pretty certain they’re able to get the jokes out of their head, but I’m sure that the stories they hear at the Moth don’t leave them as quickly.”
I ask Julien about the various additional guidelines I’ve seen floating around the internet. Launching into a rant (or equally unwelcome, stand-up skit) misses the mark, but I get the impression that it’s the sincerity of the story that’s most prized, even if, as Julien points out, that sincerity is attached to a story that you might have thought mundane. ‘You just get up and tell me a story about the time you forgot your keys and locked yourself out and had to wander the streets for six hours but then finally managed to get back in, because it’s all about telling stories that are very relatable. It doesn’t have to be huge dramatic stuff. It can be something that’s incredibly everyday. Having said that, there are certainly some guidelines you can follow to make it a Moth story. One of those is to start in the action. So instead of the backstory, – “I’m Julien, and I really like milk” – you don’t need to hear any of that, just “I was in a shop, buying milk”. Now you’re in the middle of the scene, you’ve brought the audience with you, and they want to find out what’ll happen next.’
He thinks a lot of the need people feel to set the story up comes down to nerves, and that the key to it is just to know what you’re first line is going to be. ‘Ideally you have to have some kind of arc. I mean, there’s no definitive way to tell a story, but you are looking for some kind of arc, some kind of journey taking place.’ The best tales are those in which you have some sort of stakes, and the audience can identify and empathise with whatever you stand to gain or lose over the course of your narrative. By having stakes, the audience immediately cares what happens to you.’
‘And don’t hang around! Don’t say, “…and that’s how that ended up, and he went to college a few years later and now has two kids and a wife, and the other man I actually met up with him a couple of weeks ago, and he was doing fine”. You’ve already killed it. That can be a nerves thing too, the feeling that you need to explain. But The Moth is unique in that it’s a fast, powerful story that leaves an impact, so get out of there!’ Colm too, suggests I exit with similar haste: ‘Some people pre-ramble a bit too long, but you’ve only five minutes. Listen out for the two little bells. There’s a bell at five minutes and a bell at six. If at five minutes you haven’t got to the nub of the story, you should try and wrap it up quickly. Don’t say, “Fuck it, I’ll go for ten!” The audience get really tense then because they’re looking at us, and at our expressions, so you won’t get the benefit of them anyway. A cliffhanger will do – tell them they’ll hear the rest next month!’
All too suddenly, and with only Julien and Colm’s advice for armour, it’s my turn to speak. It’s much hotter under the lights than I’d imagined from my spot in the darkened audience (‘not cardigan weather down there at all’ observes Colm gleefully when he runs into me afterwards) and I can hear an audible shake in my voice, induced by nerves I’d hoped might lie dormant. It’s immediately apparent that storytelling is just *so* different a medium to any kind of public speaking that I’ve come across. The effect that I, as narrator, am having on the audience making the telling of my story so unique an experience. It’s great to feel, and even at times, hear, so many people invest themselves so wholeheartedly into something that didn’t happen to them, but to me (even though during the telling of my tale, I can’t help but find their empathy unsettling, the still of the room, almost unnerving in its intimacy.) Next time, I suspect, it would come more easily to me, from selecting a story in keeping with the theme, to drawing out its natural arc and relaying the stakes. But herein lies the merits of a forum like The Moth, where the emphasis lies in the crafting the stories, as well as the act of telling them to an audience, to create a rare kind of connection found in the fact that they have not paid for a performance, and are instead celebrating the vulnerability of truth.
The Moth StorySLAM takes place every month in Dublin’s Sugar Club and will be hosting a special SLAM in the Spiegltent on September 14th as part of this years’ Tiger Dublin Fringe Festival. The very first Moth GrandSLAM takes place on November 6th in The Abbey Theatre. For tickets & more info on all dates visit www.themoth.org.
Words: Julia O’Mahony
