May 2012
5 posts
a welcome for winter
Jeanette Acland is a recoginsed leader in the practice of Godly Play, meditative storytelling based on Montessori’s teaching method. It has a marvellous freedom to wonder without the all too familiar guess-the-right-answer practices religious education can fall into. Jeanette and I are offering a welcome to winter – a gentle day near the Darling Gardens, with stories, poetry and Godly Play...
a Winter Retreat – would you trust these women?!
“Look Jeanette, here we were a few weeks ago in autumn, but come winter we’ll need some stories.”
“Okay, so what do you suggest?”
“June 2, Athol Gill Centre, Clfiton Hill. You do Godly Play for grown ups, I’ll do stories and poetry.”
If you trust these two, and can keep Saturday June 2, you could join us!
To book/inquire email Jeanette...
telling in tassie
Tassie last week offered a moment on ABC radio, a workshop with a bunch of young people, and an afternoon concert at Pilgrim Uniting Church – one of the beautiful old churches in Launceston. Later this year I am hoping to return to tell stories in some of the schools.
April 2012
5 posts
Northcote Town Hall - Limber up your story memory
It was a pleasure to teach this course last year and it will run again next month at Northcote Town Hall.
It’s a great venue and suits the purpose of the workshops. Here’s the blurb –
Most people don’t’ trust their memories – but there are ways to befriend the skills you have forgotten! We will go through various pathways, gestural, visual, aural to get to know short traditional folktales....
Tribute Writing Workshop
I have been thinking about making tributes a lot lately, they are a very particular lens. Whether it’s a speech at a birthday party or a tribute at a funeral, there are ways of stitching words together, working to make them honed and strong. As someone who is a legendary klutz on a sewing machine, I regard this as my handiwork, patching together stories and images and sayings...
1 tag
tasmania coming soon
a lovely opportunity for a concert in Launcestson - stories about story! I have discovered a nice little stash of folktales, fables and biographical stories that tell about our relationship with story. Ah! If you know people who live in this beautiful part of the world please let them know the details:
Stories all the way down, concert in Tasmania, April 28 4pm Pilgrim Uniting Church...
March 2012
5 posts
1 tag
Keys to Re-enchantment again
A few pics here of the beautiful group we had for the second Keys to Re-enchantment workshop, you can see us here in the Chapel of Hope at the Athol Gill Centre in Clifton Hill. The venue was perfect, only 3km from Melbourne CBD and opposite the Darling Gardens as well as excellent coffee in Queens Parade. Julia Reid is an inspiration and I love telling stories and poetry with such an open-hearted...
Port Fairy Folk Festival
Returned to the much loved and hugely subscribed PFF this weekend. The storytelling is a small treasure in the midst of it – a lovely session on Sunday. A traditional selkie story from Andrew McKenna won the Pat Glover Memorial Storytelling Award this year and several others of us told biographical stories in addition to some verse from the judges. Jackie Kerin has made a sustained contribution...
Reciprocal shaping
Before I set off for Cape Town a fellow story-lover loaned me George Steiner’s book, Real Presences where he talks about the act of learning by heart and the reciprocal shaping it forms in us.
Now that I have left South Africa, I am remembering the landscape, the sculptural plant life, the thrum and harmonies of the human voices. These are some of the sensate components of memory. It feels like I...
Finland Africa Australia
It is wonderful to be receiving emails from Europe and Africa and NSW now as friends from the Cape Town course are taking stories back to their various communities.
Just to give you a picture (and see photos below!) we were 14 course participants aged between 23 -72 and came from South Africa, Uganda, Swaziland, the Netherlands, Australia, the USA and the UK (including our teachers from Emerson...
February 2012
13 posts
thresholds
One of the pieces of teaching I thought was memorable and elegant in the Storyteller and the Community course was about tresholds in stories. Sue Hollingsworth is a master of the art of the biographical story and it was delicious to watch her teach and coach. The difficulty many people have in telling their own experience is knowing how to structure their story which can begin as just a...
shoe repairs and the Masai warrior
I like to travel light but I always take sturdy footwear. I went through a fair bit of shoe leather in Cape Town and found myself in a shoe repair shop in Rondebosch, negotiating with the particularly tall repairman to fix my sandals while I waited. In a fine piece of storytelling he told me he was descended from the Masai and proceeded to regale me with visceral details of their lion hunting...
cling wrap and the new fresh
One of the downsides of 20 years experience as a storyteller is that sometimes I get it all a bit too perfect. I could see this in myself and occasionally in others on the course with a history of performing - we tended to have things covered. The beauty of storytelling is in managing the delivery to a particular audience. Herein lies the magic.
It is like improvising a meal while your guests...
africa in fungi
Found whilst hiking near Kirstenbosch last week!
Heading home now, but no doubt there will be stories basting as the 5 week course has now drawn to a close. Sigh. Consoled myself for the long flight with an airport read of The Elephant Whisperer, a memorable story set in South Africa, about the emotional intelligence of these magnificent creatures. The editor in me had to take a back seat, I...
why did the zebra cross the road?
Travelling in South Africa has its quirks, but it has been nowhere near as ugly as the warnings suggested. There was one moment when coming off the train a little later than intended, I found myself with several women friends being tooted by numerous taxis as twilight moved into darkness. Riffing on the much loved opener from Pride and Predjudice I declared,“It is a truth universally...
Mama Rhino
While the Rondebosch United Church have been remarking on the fact that it took a storyteller from Australia to tell them they had a storytelling course around the corner, I have discovered that one of the stories told here exists in a book that has been on my shelves for 20 years. Mama Rhino discovers a red dress in a shop window and it proves irresistible to her. Well, guess what happened to me...
1 tag
yellow and re-enchantment
I did not expect my own take home knowing from the first Keys to Re-enchantment workshop would be about clarity, but my decisiveness is now called forth by yellow! Julia Reid suggested that colour can assist in reminding you of a chakra you want to pay attention to so you can see the results on my little desk here at Rondebosch.
Two notes re workshops:
The forthcoming Keys to Re-enchantment...
diversity - a no brainer
Here are our feet – the course participants for The Storyteller in the Community in Cape Town. Below are cups laid out at a place I only visited once…
telling in the townships
This weekend I visited the township of Kayamandi on the outskirts of the university town of Stellenbosch in the wine country outside of Cape Town. I joined an environmental education program and told stories to 40 children – a smaller gathering than the 300 children at the Reading Club at Philippi township last Saturday. The young woman who translated into Xhosa was fantastic. After the program I...
1 tag
Ways into Story - workshop in Rondebosch
Looking forward to this workshop I will be offering at Rondebosch United Church in Cape Town on Wednesday Feb 15, 6- 8pm.
I love teaching people how to remember a story by gesture as well as walking forwards and backwards through it until they really know their way around. We’ll also do the ring model – engagement through story – which is a lovely shorthand way of remembering how to hold the...
mixing your drinks
Cape Town can serve a good coffee, but ask for an iced coffee on a hot afternoon and you are likely to be served something approximating an icecream thickshake – to be avoided at all costs. I managed yesterday to explain my preference for an iced coffee with discernible ingredients. Just to wind it up one more notch, in the storytelling course we have been working on separating out ingredients in...
storyteller in the community week three
Sue Hollingsworth and Ashley Ramsden are skilled, experienced and amazingly fresh in their teaching. Today they unpacked some of their process with us, examining the work of story and the unanswered questions that sit inside it. Aligning the metaphors and themes of a story with questions related to the community context is a fine art. Here they are at work with our group and the butcher’s...
bright
drink it eat it wear it… Africa does it best
January 2012
8 posts
stories in Cape Town
here is a taste of the concert series and the delightful Erin Hall surrounds
a few notes from week one
This week working on folktales we did this deceptively simple exercise in groups of three. The teller and listener were seated, facing one another with the third person - the witness - a little to one side. The listener had permission to interrupt the teller at any point and ask a question about the story and the teller was obliged to respond, no squibbing. When I was the witness, I felt I...
storytelling in Cape Town
So here I am day three, the first week of this five week storytelling course with 14 fabulously diverse humans . We meet like strange and beautiful birds, in Erin Hall, Cape Town every day 9am – 4pm. Try beginning the day dancing and singing with people who do harmonies and bring out the djembe drum at the drop of a hat. I know, it’s tough.
The hall, the humans, the singing, the landscape and the...
1 tag
Keys to Re-enchantment workshops
The first Keys to Re-enchantment workshop by the sea is done and the March workshop awaits. I loved my role of offering poetry and story into such an open-hearted learning space. A great group of participants with Julia Reid at the helm.
One of the memorable pieces was about the four chambers of the heart; the open heart, the clear heart, the wise heart and the courageous heart. The...
Internet Dating Part II: Green’s Bush & Bushranger...
As luck would have it, on the weekend we were hosting the Portuguese storyteller, my husband who is a committed bushwalker, was organizing a daylong hike for a small group of friends. The plan was to walk through Green’s Bush to Bushrangers Bay at Cape Schank on the Mornington Peninsula.
When we set off the kookaburras were laughing at full tilt, “Such a quantity of sounds” remarked our guest. It...
Internet Dating Part I The Portuguese storyteller...
Portuguese storyteller, Luis Correia Carmelo contacted me when he found my website through the Storytelling Guild of Victoria. We laugh that he is my first internet date, which is amusing if you know that I am heading towards the same age as his mother-in-law. Luis is researching a PhD articulating the craft of storytelling and was visiting Melbourne to give a paper at a conference organised by...
A voice like lapping water
I am fossicking back through my storytelling library. Here is a description of storyteller Alice Kane, who lived in Canada and carried the tradition of oral storytelling from her Irish childhood. I still have a recording of her voice telling Irish Wonder tales. She is described by Robert Bringhurst,in the introduction to The Dreamer Awakes,
“Once, long ago,” she said, and half an hour later with...
1 tag
a school visit
Here’s a little extract from the newsletter of Acacia College where I visited late last year.
“Being still isn’t something that comes easily to many students, and school is often such a busy place that it’s easy to have each day full of activity. With the use of gesture, by simple repeated words, and through storytelling, Julie gave us the gift of stillness. She reminded the students...
December 2011
1 post
story basking : there'll be more
So now we have had the first two story basking events. An hour of stories and poetry at the end of the week, just before sunset. The resonance of the upstairs tiny chapel at the Athol Gill Centre is perfect. The program began with acknowlegdement of traditional Wurundjeri custodians; skipped through to the Sufi poet Rumi then to a Greek folktale as well as stories of place that I...
November 2011
1 post
between posturing and collapse...
On Friday I had lunch with the marvelous arts educator Julia Reid. She is a voracious reader and currently running some classes at Melbourne Uni in creative practice. As usual she had a stack of books on the go.
I once helped her pack up her book collection when she was moving house to live by the sea. I was gob smacked at the range and beauty of her reading tastes and have since made regular...
October 2011
1 post
intro
Welcome to the blog of Julie Perrin –lover of story. I hope you will enjoy these whimsical and sporadic noticings about story and life – from wonder tales to biographical fragments. Melbourne, Australia is home for me; here I ply my trade as a storyteller and teach people aspects of the craft – telling stories from memory face to face with listeners.