When I first started storytelling back in 1993 I was very attracted to telling Inuit stories and used to ask my self~what right do I have to tell this story? When a story is not from my culture, why do you I want to tell it so much and how can I get under the skin of it.
How? When I have not been to where the story comes from?
This was a difficult question to answer.
I first met Tim Bowley in 2004 at the PalavrasAndarilhas (Wandering Words) in Beja. He appeared to me a tall tree with a boyish twinkle in his eye. Beside him sat CasildaRegueiro, to “translatell” his stories into Spanish. Their pas de deux was wonderful to watch but what impressed me most was his voice and how it held us in a firm embrace and took us on journeys to far corners of the world but to places that were so close to our hearts. It was a mesmerising evening!
Tim started coming to Portugal in the end of the nineties to tell and give training (1998 in Braga and then 1999 in Lisbon) and became one of the first international storytellers to gain attention from the Portuguese audience. Since then he has told stories to thousands of smiling listeners and shared his experience and knowledge with hundreds of teachers, educators, librarians and storytellers. But how come only then did I cross paths with this great storyteller? I was hooked from that moment on and drove miles to see him and Casildaand later also with Charo Pita whenever they told stories in Portugal. Amongotherplaces, Timtold in Braga, Beja, Lisbon, Oeiras, Pombal, Vila Nova de Paiva, Montemor, Vilamoura, Óbidos, Tavira, Coimbra,..
I was lucky enough to start chasing tale tellers before the crisis hit when libraries and municipalities in Portugal could still hire the best to come to our little garden by the sea. Tim Bowley is a name that brings smiles to many manyfaces here in Portugal. He has given several workshops, one of which was an intensive course in Oeiraswhich I was fortunate enough to be a part of, and many wonderful story filled evenings all over the country. Some of his stories and collections of tales have been published in Portuguese and are in the hearts and on the tips of the tongues of many storytellers here.Rare is the storytelling session, especially with children, when I don’t wip out his book, “Jamie and the acorns”, to play with the audience with the repetitions and remind us of the cycles of life and how important it is to persist in protecting them.
Article published in Telling in Tandem by Tim Bowley and retrived by our webside with author's consent. Lots of thanks, Tim.
I must admit that when I first received the invitation to contribute to this book, I had never before heard the term 'Tandem Telling' in spite of spending the last twenty five years as a Storyteller. I assume it means people who tell as part of a pair or group, each telling a tale one after the other. If so, this is quite a long way removed from what I and my telling partner do, although I suppose you could definitely call it 'tandem telling'. I live and work in Spain and, due to a congenital British inability to learn a foreign language to anywhere near the level required to tell, I work with a Spanish partner who translates the story into Spanish as we go along, so, rather than interchanging story by story, we are swapping phrase by phrase.
On hearing this described, many people think that it must be very boring to listen to but, wonderfully, magically, mysteriously, the reverse is true and the listener gets two versions, two interpretations, of the same story. Add to that a rythmic interplay of male and female voice, the music of two different languages running side by side, two perceptions of each event in the story, and the effect is hypnotic. There is a shamanic exercise in which someone whispers into one ear of the acolyte while another whispers something different in the other. The effect is to break the hearer free from his normal level of consciousness and propel him into another dimension. I believe that telling in this way has something of the same magic about it and actually increases the power that storytelling possesses to lift the listener out of everyday reality into worlds where anything is possible.
