Tell Me a Story: a Guide to Traditional Storytelling

Awaken Your Inner Storyteller With Workshop Proven Techniques

4.10 (29 reviews)
Udemy
platform
English
language
Creativity
category
Tell Me a Story: a Guide to Traditional Storytelling
256
students
2 hours
content
Mar 2020
last update
$59.99
regular price

What you will learn

Awaken your inner storyteller

Embrace your own storytelling style

Overcome inner obstacles to telling stories

Practice simple techniques for remembering story outlines

Use imagination and gesture to flesh out the details of your story

Weave a relationship with your story

Connect to self, nature, and others through story

Build your storytelling confidence with practice

Perform your first oral, traditional tale to an audience of your choice

Engage with the worldwide storytelling renaissance

Bonus Lecture: Introduction to Story Medicine

Description

Oral storytelling is a lost art that is beginning to revive across the world. Once it was a rich and integral tradition, passed on through families and communities. Stories carried important cultural knowledge and wisdom to be shared down through the generations.

In the space of less than a century, this art has largely disappeared from our communities and families.

  • Tell Me a Story will introduce you to the art and craft of developing this ancient skill, using proven story-learning techniques to help you remember the structure and detail of traditional tales.

  • The course includes opportunities to reflect on what stops you from telling stories now and to clarify your vision of the kind of storyteller you’d like to become.

  • You will be encouraged to explore the deeper meaning (for you) of the stories you select to learn – building a relationship with your story, making it your own and reflecting on its ‘story medicine’ gifts.

In a world now mapped by digital hyper-connectivity, so many of us are disconnected from the natural and human communities that surround us. Renewing the art of storytelling may offer a remedy for reconnection. As we sit by the family fireside, or in forests and by streams, listening to stories told from memory, with gesture and expressive voice, we feel our hearts and minds awaken to ancient ways of relating to each other, to nature and to the sacred.

We begin to remap ourselves and our world into wholeness.

A well-told story is spellbinding: we walk away with fresh insights, challenged by questions or mysteries—our emotions and spirits stirred into new possibilities of becoming.

Toko-pa Turner writes in her book ‘Belonging’: “There is a world behind this world. The old cultures used to be in constant conversation with it through the sacred practices of storytelling, dreaming, ceremony, and song. They invited the Otherworld to visit them, to transmit its wisdom to them, so that they might be guided by an ancient momentum. But as we succumbed to the spell of rationalism, the living bridge between the worlds fell into disrepair. As fewer made the journey ‘back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,’ we forgot how to find the Otherworld.”

Reclaiming your inner storyteller builds a bridge between you and the Otherworld to enable many magical journeys back and forth for years to come.

Who is this course for?

  • You are a parent who would like to spend more creative and meaningful time with your children

  • You would like more social confidence – new ways of sharing old wisdom with friends

  • You would like to reconnect with the magic of your mythic journey and draw inspiration from the old tales

  • You are keen to reconnect to your ancestral heritage and lands

  • You long to reconnect to Mother Earth by learning nature tales and telling stories outdoors

  • You feel you lack the skills or presence to tell a story well

  • You think your memory is not good enough to remember a story

  • You want to deliver wisdom and insights in a more spacious way that is not didactic or moralising.

During this course, you will…

  • Recognise your innate storytelling ability and experience

  • Discover many online resources and books for traditional stories

  • Practice tried and true story learning and telling skills.

  • Gain insight into your life’s journey through traditional tales

  • Glimpse the power of story medicine

  • Build a relationship with your story to make it your own while retaining its key elements.

  • Practice your story in different ways and contexts

  • Be introduced to the worldwide storytelling renaissance.

At the end of this course, you will

  • Feel more confident in your unique storytelling style

  • Trust yourself to improvise your story, rather than trying to remember it word-for-word

  • Never be short of ideas or resources for story-finding

  • Have begun your own oral story collection

  • Understand the importance of building a personal relationship with the stories you tell

  • See parallels and symbols in traditional tales that offer solace, encouragement, and inspiration for your life’s journey

  • Enjoy being creative and experimenting with how you practice and tell your story.

  • See many ways you could contribute to the worldwide storytelling renaissance.

The course is taught by Nicola-Jane le Breton, a creative writing teacher and arts facilitator who runs a storytelling development project and monthly workshops in her home community in Western Australia, together with theatre director Silvia Lehmann.

Enrol now to learn a uniquely insightful and powerful approach to storytelling.

Content

Introduction and Welcome

Introduction
Downloadable workbook and reference material for the course

The Storytelling World

You Are a Born Storyteller
Which Story Will You Learn First?
Understand the Structure of Your Story Through Time

Story Mapping

Mapping Your Story in Pictures and Symbols
Fleshing Out the Details with Gesture and Gaze
Build a Relationship with Your Story

Imagination

Embody Your Story with Imagination
Gossip, Share and Perform Your Story
Rinse and Repeat

Renaissance

Bonus: Story Medicine
The Oral Storytelling Renaissance

Reviews

Dr.
July 21, 2020
Interesting topic. Excellent presentation. So many great examples and doable exercises. I will never look at storytelling the same way. So many insights.
Terrye
July 4, 2020
Wow, Nicola-Jane you really are a storyteller! Your voice is so engaging I found myself smiling as I was listening to your lectures, you really pulled me in. During this course I found my self remembering stories of my family and my own with new eyes, with new emotions. Thank you for awakening this within me. You have a beautiful and needed talent to share with us all. I highly recommend this course, you'll be surprised what it awakens within you.
Len
May 5, 2020
It was a great coarse for story telling for beginners, and lots to think about and will probably listen to this coarse a few more times.
Susan
April 3, 2020
This course offered me practical steps for how to choose and prepare stories I can tell with confidence. It also inspired me to think of storytelling as a way to engage with others in meaningful, insightful ways, and as a way of becoming a change maker in the world.
Filippa
March 31, 2020
I really enjoyed Nicola’s Storytelling Course. I think of myself as having a very bad memory (my nickname as a child was “sieve head”!), so I really appreciated the strategies she gives for memorising stories like mapping the bare bones and drawing a simple bird’s eye view in the form of symbols on a map. Nicola is humble and speaks to us as an equal, a guide who is sharing her experience as an emerging storyteller and inviting us to step into the magical world of storytelling with her. For full disclosure, I am Nicola’s sister and I initially signed up for this course to support her, but I have really been inspired by her course to learn some stories to tell my children. I can also tell you that Nicola brings a wealth of experience as a writer and teacher, and her vast array of skills come through in this course. She has been passionate about stories and writing for as long as I can remember. Storytelling is a wonderful art and I hope it continues on an upwards trajectory as a re-emerging art form that draws community together and fosters connection.
Peter
March 23, 2020
I want to disclose that I'm Nicola's husband and she invited me to take and review her course. My perspective is naturally very different from that of anyone who doesn't know Nicola, or even that of her friends. Nevertheless, I hope my response to her course will help you decide to dive in or not. Having seen and heard Nicola's emergence as a storyteller over the last couple of years, I have felt her passion for storytelling. Although I knew she had come a long way—because I've heard many of her stories—I was taken aback by the quality of her teaching and storytelling in this course. Nicola is not only a storyteller; she is also an inspirational and engaging teacher. I was struck by how well her teaching skills and storytelling skills are integrated and mutually reinforcing in this course. Nicola demonstrates the truth that the best way to learn is to teach. She holds the teaching space beautifully. I now better understand why students feel safe and nourished in her writing courses. I know Nicola put her heart and soul into preparing, recording and editing this course—a calling that demanded much energy and time. And the quality shows. She takes you gently by the hand and leads you on a journey towards unleashing the storyteller within you. I was moved by her clear and articulate teaching voice, animated expression, and the coherent structure and content of her interactive presentation. The exercises and activities she provides are essential, as this is a practical course. And I know her invitation to share on the discussion forum is genuine, because Nicola embodies a spirit of service. As she foreshadows in the course, Nicola recently headed from Australia to the UK to undertake one of the world's leading storytelling courses, Story Telling Beyond Words, at Emerson College. Because of the pandemic, the 13-week course was aborted after two weeks and she has returned home. Yet even in that short time, mingling with experienced and emerging storytellers from all over the world, she has learned much and been further inspired to pursue her vision with gusto—of co-creating a storytelling and eco-education centre in Denmark, Western Australia.
Heather
March 22, 2020
What an interesting area to learn about Nicola-Jane! I’ve always been fascinated by fairy tales and myths and legend. I love the way you instruct, firstly explaining the fact that we are all story tellers and that the story finds us! It’s sinking into my bones, what you have said! The resources are great and very clear with plenty of encouragement from you to do our homework as we go. The emphasis on structure and detail in constructing our stories is what you are particularly experienced and knowledgeable in and this comes across easily and fluidly in your teachings. I’m certainly very keen to get started on my own story telling adventures now that I have the confidence and tools I know I will succeed. Thankyou! It’s a great course.
Margaret
March 18, 2020
This was a perfect match for me because I really needed clear practical information and guidance from the perspective of someone who is not an actor but just someone who is enthralled by storytelling. The presenter delivered a passionate appeal to the storyteller in me and in a beautifully lucid and very alluring way. I am hooked and will be looking for storytelling opportunities and fellow storytellers from now on.
Dr.
March 16, 2020
This was such a great course. Much different than usual storytelling courses because it created a structure to build a story on. It gave many examples of different types of stories so you can use them in different situations.
Larry
March 16, 2020
I am in the process of preserving our family history primarily through the telling of stories. This course has helped me know how to concentrate more on the structure and detail of these stories before telling them. The instructor is very knowledgeable about this. She has given me many ideas about methods and techniques of storytelling that can make my stories something the hearer will find most valuable. For me, she sums up the course content toward the end in the lecture "Story Medicine" where her passion shines through in a most powerful way. This course will help you learn how to be a great storyteller!

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2869020
udemy ID
3/13/2020
course created date
3/22/2020
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