Watch a short introduction from Caroline Baldock.
Storytelling is an ancient performance art. Long before writing existed there was a need to record evidence of creative thinking, which helped to allowed mankind to understand the complexities of the world he lived in.
Mankind needed to understand what stars were, the sun, the sky, the creatures of the world, fire, water and their relationship with his world. Life also gave the hominid another problem; what happens after death? Was there a spirit world? Could the spirit world be contacted during life and how could that be done?
So the search for hallucinagenic drugs to give them access into that spirit world became and still is an obsession. Mushrooms, mould on corn, peyote cactus were discovered, the connections they provided for the mind, however fragile, gave mankind hope.
With the ability to see, what they thought was a spirit world, stories then were told through these experiences. Slowly as mankind developed and changed and became Home Sapiens the world of his past, his tribes and friendships became a story worth telling.
Slowly through the process of development mankind began to notice his human behaviour had a pattern, hatred, jealousy, love, condemnation, joy, passion, relationships between step-mothers and step-fathers their children, all these facets of the human condition needed to be explained and what better way than to fictionalise them.
When the lion takes over a new pride he kills off all the cubs from previous mating? Well it is simple, it is about spreading genes his genes; those facets of animal life are imbedded in the human too. Storytelling provides a transitional layer between reality and imagination. It explains the inexplicable, the magical, the unavoidable, death.
In Henry Gee’s opinion, the one thing which places mankind on a different level to animals is his ability to tell stories.
References:
- Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola, Estes
- The Storytellers Way, sourcebook for inspired storytelling, Ashley Ramsden and Sue Hollingsworth
- The Accidental Species, Misunderstandings of Human Evolution, Henry Gee.
