Fascinating Speakers Talk About Belief in Storytelling
For one of the last classes for my workshop this semester, my professor had a bit of a surprise in store for us. Instead of having us do a regular workshop, he promised a special guest. When we arrived in class, there was not one guest but three: a rabbi, a magician, and an actor. It may sound like the set-up for a joke, but the evening turned out to be one of the most interesting and valuable classes I’ve ever had.
Basically, our professor had brought in these very different people — with very different professions — in order to have them all talk about their trades and belief. How do these different crafts people get people to trust them, to believe in the different stories they were telling, and be moved or entranced by their very different performances? The rabbi spoke movingly about the wall of skepticism that most people hold up on a regular basis that he had to find holes in, through which an openness toward spiritual experience could emerge. It was a difficult task, but like creative writers, he often used stories to touch and connect with people. The stories from the Torah are often moving, sometimes mysterious, but always an interesting avenue into concepts of morality and faith.
The magician taught us about the magic of showmanship and performance. After wowing us with a few elegant and fairly spectacular card tricks, he began to break down the elements of the trick for us, showing how he had gotten us fully engaged. It was not the essence of the card trick that engaged us. As he said, all card tricks boil down to the same moment — “Is this your card?” To make that moment of surprise and delight fresh for us, he used small, peripheral moments of showmanship to throw things in doubt or throw us off the track. He entertained with jokes or by pretending to make a mistake; he used small unnecessary flourishes, such as making it seem like his shadow was moving the deck of cards. All of these things, the little bits of icing on the cake, were actually what made the final moment of revelation more delightful and real. It was just like in fiction, when the small details of everyday life make the big moments seem more poignant.
The actor, too, spoke fascinatingly about the power of possession. The most successful choices in his acting, he said, were often not about the big shouts or body movements, but about small things that seemed to come over him almost involuntarily, like twitching his eye in a moment of heightened grief. He did not calculatingly make these choices, but it was almost as though the energy and attention of the audience came into his body and possessed him, leading him to make choices that were bolder and more human. While the writer does not have his audience seated in front of him, he can imagine the power of his reader’s attention, and make choices with greater verve as a result.
It was truly a rare evening, one that I feel very lucky to have been able to attend. It was wonderful to see these very different artisans and to see how similarly they approached their crafts.
