d'bi young, professional storyteller
If you believe the newspapers, the art of storytelling in Toronto has been dying for 20 years. Dan Yashinsky might be surprised to hear it, though. He founded Toronto’s annual Festival of Storytelling in 1979 and this week, he’s shuffling over 65 performers from four continents into 11 days of programming, beginning March 25.
Not only is storytelling not dead, it’s diversifying. Outside of the festival, niche storytelling groups have cropped since then for the old crowd, the Generation Y crowd, the parent crowd and that crowd of Grown-Ups who want to Read Things They Wrote as Kids. And that’s not counting the groups who meet unpublicized under candlelight and bed sheet ambience in the city’s kitchens, barns and living rooms to tell their true or made-up stories.
Storytelling probably won’t die because it’s good for us, and it’s good for our communities. The journal of the Vanier Institute of the Family devoted its entire August 2007 issue to the importance of storytelling in strengthening family and community ties. In “Stories and Community,” anthropologist Clifford Geertz went so far as to say that “storytelling also helps to create new communities, as paradigms, feelings and emotions are shared personally through experienced narratives.” Storytelling isn’t going anywhere in Toronto because our city is always forming new communities. Stories provide the narrative.
Storytelling, though, has, and probably will still, change. While I’ve noticed that Toronto’s storytelling landscape is getting bigger, it is also compartmentalizing. Aside from festival events, which draw diverse artists together, storytellers rarely go outside their own circles to hear the stories of other age or ethnicity groups. Yashinsky, who also founded 1,001 Nights (a weekly “old crowd” event) in 1979, recently attended a storytelling event populated by 20-somethings. “I asked a performer,” he said, “’would you walk to another bar three blocks away if you knew there were people telling aboriginal stories there tonight?’ He said ‘probably not.’”
Posted on March 3, 2011 by ashleighgaul