Story Circles

About: Story Circles
By Roadside Theater

Each one of our stories is a gift to those who are listening, with the quality of the listening a gift in return to the storyteller.

The stories we’re able to tell ourselves and others, those we can understand and imagine, define not only what we believe to have already occurred, but what we believe to be possible in our individual and collective lives.  Story Circles engender appreciation for the unique intellectual, emotional, and spiritual qualities of each participant, and develop oral expression and listening skills.  Each one of our stories is a gift to those who are listening, with the quality of the listening a gift in return to the storyteller.

Roadside’s ensemble members grew up without television, immersed in a world of local stories and oral histories.  The oral tradition, often in ballad form, is the most prominent feature of our shared Scots-Irish heritage, and it has shaped the content and determined the form of our plays.  If you have ever sat around with friends and kin singing, spinning tales, and recounting histories, you will quickly see where we’re coming from: the play’s lines suddenly doubling and overlapping within a general motif of call and response.  In our Appalachian performance tradition, as well as in other performance traditions into which we have been invited to perform (the southern African American and Puerto Rican traditions come right to mind), call and response extends beyond the stage to include the audience. The grand result is the rich choral effect of harmony and counterpoint that is group storytelling, whether on a front porch or in an auditorium.   

Not only can the oral tradition effectively generate content for building plays from scratch (Roadside has created 58 such plays), but, after performances of the staged play, Story Circles with audience and cast can provide a nuanced feedback loop for audience members to integrate the play’s experience into their own lives, as well as for the play’s artists to deepen their understanding of the performance.  In effect, such circles continue the play’s action into a new Act, providing a way for the community to talk to itself about the play’s themes, and for the performance itself to mature.  Based on this experience, sometimes community leaders will invite Roadside to help their community discover and publicly present its own songs, stories, and oral histories.  A basic building block of these extended community cultural development residencies is the Story Circle.  

In the course of sharing stories, difficulties in a community often rise to the surface, including issues from which its members are suffering.  Roadside’s Story Circle methodology supports a basic principle of such community change work: those who directly experience a problem must make up the generative base for devising and enacting the solution.  In this work, Roadside first uses its Story Circle methodology to help individuals discover their own truth of the issue, and then to test and develop that truth in dialog with other community members.  By periodically collecting and organizing the knowledge about the issue generated by the stories, communities have an informed basis for recommending change, abetted by an enhanced sense of mutual trust.  To sustain the momentum for change, the process of individual and collective learning about the issue must continue to inspire and shape action.  

 Because stories are so powerful, they can easily be used for purposes of domination and exploitation, rather than collective development.  Consequently, Roadside is formal about its methodology, and we encourage those interested in the method to contact the company for training.  The training includes how to become a Story Circle facilitator and how to use Story Circles to create plays, is a lot of fun, and can be accomplished in two days.

Story Circle Guidelines -- Spanish

Here, in Spanish, is a summary of the Story Circle methodology Roadside developed for creating and developing original plays and for telling and listening to stories in communities across the US.

Frequently Asked Questions About Story Circles

Booklet: You and Your Community's Story

Story Circle Guidelines
By Roadside Theater

Here is a summary of the Story Circle methodology Roadside developed for creating and developing original plays and for telling and listening to stories in communities across the US.

The Origin of Roadside's Story Circle Practice

Roadside is often asked about the origin of its popular story circle practice. Like other aspects and significant components of our work, Roadside’s use of story circles developed in a natural, unforced manner from our play creation process and audience engagement aspirations.

Roadside’s founding ensemble members grew up without television, immersed in a world of local stories and Appalachian oral histories. The oral tradition, often in ballad form, is the most prominent feature of our shared Scots-Irish heritage, and it has shaped the content and form of our plays.  

If you have ever sat around with friends and kin singing, spinning tales, and recounting histories, you will quickly understand where we’re coming from: our play’s lines suddenly doubling and overlapping within a general motif of call and response that extends beyond the stage to include the audience. 

Sitting in a circle telling each other stories and sharing songs is one of the strategies Roadside typically uses when creating a new play. It wasn’t long before we discovered that audience members likewise welcomed the opportunity to tell their own stories prompted by the emotions and ideas that they had just experienced in the performance. 

The audience’s stories also helped us deepen our understanding of the drama we had created. In effect, such audience storytelling continues the play’s action into a new act, providing a way for the community to talk to itself about the play’s themes and for the performance itself to mature.  

Here’s one specific example that spurred further development of our story circle methodology. Hearing in 1989 from southern colleagues that racism was on the rise in their communities, Junebug Productions, the African American theater company from New Orleans, and Roadside began creating a musical play about the historical relationship between black and white poor and working class people in the South. 

Like Roadside, Junebug created its plays from oral tradition, so it was natural for the two companies’ artists to sit in circles listening to each other’s personal experiences of race and class. Such story circles helped us better understand our differences and more clearly see the present historical moment. 

When touring the play to communities in the South and beyond, our goal was to bring together white and black poor and middle and working class people. Usually, the black and white audience members had not heard each other’s personal stories, although they lived in the same community. So our challenge was to create a way for these audience members to hear each other across the dividing lines of race and class. This challenge prompted us to further formalize our story circle methodology.

Because stories are so powerful, they can easily be used for purposes of domination and exploitation, and Roadside’s formal method has developed in order to prevent such misuse in favor of our collective development and well-being.

Story Circle Training

Roadside's Story Circle methodology is deceptively simple. Because stories are so powerful, they can easily be used for purposes of domination and exploitation, rather than collective development.  Consequently, Roadside is formal in its approach, and we encourage those interested in the method to contact the company for training.  The training includes how to become a Story Circle facilitator and how to teach others to facilitate Story Circles.  It's a lot of fun, and can be accomplished in one day or less. 

Two Women Reflect on Their Rural - Urban Experiences
Thursday, September 18, 2014

Donna Porterfield:

As an adult, I discovered that my parents, my brother, and I each remembered in detail the events of one particular year – the year we moved from a small farm in Berkeley County, West Virginia to a two-bedroom, third floor apartment in the Washington, D.C. suburbs of Fairfax, Virginia.

For me, at age nine, the move was both upsetting and exciting. It was exciting coming from a four-room school to a sprawling brick school with a shiny cafeteria and a library with more books than I’d ever seen in my life. My new teacher was a good one – smart and kind. When she saw that kids were making fun of me because of my “hillbilly accent,” she read us Tom Sawyer at our after-lunch rest period, introducing the class to the concept of dialect. And, she chose me to be the Class Library Assistant, which meant I could go for one hour a week and work in the school library. I was elated.

Most weekends, we travelled back to West Virginia. We stayed at my maternal Grandma’s house, where my brother and I spent a lot of time up in her cherry tree (me on the lower branches, he at the tippy top). We were surrounded by aunts and uncles, cousins, and neighbors, all of whom could tell us kids what to do and give us down the road if we didn’t do it. We were encircled by love and nature, and still too young to be responsible for the hard work and living the adults took on. At age ten, Fairfax, Virginia was exciting, but Berkeley County, West Virginia was paradise.

Once, after spending the day at the Porterfield farm with my father’s mother and his brother’s six daughters, my cousin Ellen and I wandered down the lane toward the barn. I looked out over the field of wheat in the evening light, and it took my breath away. I convinced Ellen to climb up on the fence with me and sing “America the Beautiful,” all the verses, with particular emphasis on “Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.”

Moments of paradise can be experienced, but paradise itself doesn’t live permanently in any place I’ve been. The making of a close, loving family doesn’t depend on living in the country. Every community, rural or urban, has it assets and liabilities, and we make of it what we must. For me, living in a rural community where most everyone knew everyone else – and everyone else’s business -- taught me to accept people for who they are, because even if I didn’t like them, didn’t agree with them, I could depend on them for help when help was needed. One day recently, I was looking at my brother’s Facebook page and noticed he, too, had listed his home town as Martinsburg, West Virginia, despite all the many places we have lived. 

Savannah Barrett:

This past June, I attended the Americans for the Arts annual conference where I listened in on a creative placemaking panel. The panel was all urban, and early in the discussion my friend and mentor Judi Jennings raised her hand to ask that we recognize the lack of rural representation. The moderator responded sincerely by asking the audience to raise their hand if they lived or worked in a rural community. Although I recognized his question to the group as an effort towards inclusivity, I felt that his framing of that question lacked nuance. I was surprised to feel so personally affected, and in that moment began to recognize something important in my view of rural: I realized that although I could raise my hand at this moment in my life, when my work with Art of the Rural stations me in rural communities as often as my urban Kentucky apartment, there had been many instances when I wouldn’t have been represented in that question.

In that moment, I was reminded that many of us who identify culturally as rural don’t live and work in rural places, but are still among the most passionate advocates for rural communities. Not because we live or work in rural areas, but because we have a deep connection to a rural place, and because that rural place belongs to us, and is sometimes, even if not all of the time, where we belong.

That sense of belonging, of ownership, is hard to come by for my generation. We’re more fluid, less tied down, more transient than any generation before us. I’m grateful to have inherited that sense of belonging, and the one place that I consistently belong has been along the hills, fields, homes and creeks of my family’s homeplace in Grayson Springs, Kentucky.

The homeplace has been in my family for seven generations. I was raised up there alongside the entirety of my extended family: My great-grandparents, grandparents, my Memaw’s siblings, one great aunt, one family of second cousins, all of my aunts and uncles, all of my first cousins, and my family have lived on this land during my lifetime. The land is sacred to me. It is the physical place that roots me to the people I love most, and to some aspects of my personality that I most value.

As a child my mother took me to my great-great grandparents’ house, by then abandoned and home to the visitations of livestock and woodland creatures. She walked me across the creek while telling me about the swinging walking bridge that used to hang along the path, to show me the poetry she and her first love had written on the wallpaper. I’ve hiked to this homeplace with my Memaw, with great-aunts, with my own younger brother and sister. The house seemed to me the bearer of our history. I swam in front of the house as a child, and picked blackberries in the fields above it. I know the stories from this home so well that when I imagine them, I conjure the oppressive heat always present when I’ve visited, and I smell the water in the air from nearby Lizard Creek.

I left this land in 2004 to attend college at the University of Louisville. I was the first person in my family to go away to college, and remain the only member of my extended family to live further than seven miles from the homeplace. Although I returned on a sometimes weekly basis until moving to attend the University of Oregon, it was moving away from this place that revealed its overwhelming role in my life. My sense of culture is almost entirely gleaned from experiences I have had on this land, and because I have been a witness to so many people’s life and death on this property, I sometimes feel that my family’s lifeblood is literally contained in the dirt and water of that acreage.

The material artifacts of my ancestors have always fascinated me. I carried boards from that homeplace with me to Oregon to be comforted by the place that is the vessel of my spirit, and to remember the people that connect me to it in perpetuity. I’m proud of my little piece of rural America, and although I’ll likely move in and out of it over the course of my life, I know that it will always be the place that is mine, and, in one way or another, the place that I am.  

Video: Story Circle, The Significance of Art in Your Life (Part 1)

Roadside Theater facilitated a story circle with Appalachian Media Institute staff and AMI 2013 Summer Interns. The topic was "tell a personal story about a time when art played a significant role in your emotional, intellectual, spiritual growth."

To learn more about the Appalachian Media Institute visit http://www.appalshop.org/ami/

Video: Story Circle, The Significance of Art in Your Life (Part 2)

Photos: Illinois State University Story Circle

Jewish and Arab Israeli teenagers and first year Acting MFAs meet on the stage of Illinois Shakespeare Theatre on August 14 to share personal stories "about what makes me, me." Roadside's artistic director Dudley Cocke facilitates.

"Thank you for your work on the Story Circle--definitely the greatest impact of all the activities I've heard about these 2 weeks!" - Roger Schmidgall, regional coordinator, Friends Forever, host for the visiting Jewish-Arab Israeli teenage leaders.

Photo Credit: Jim Carrol from Fields of Vision

Photos: AMI Story Circle

While AMI students interned at Appalshop, Roadside conducted a story circle with them. Stories for this particular occassion were based on the prompt, "What you taught or learned in the past year. "