Music and Storytelling with Nick Hennessey
On Monday 11th Jackass Youth Theatre took part in a 4-hour evening workshop at Jack Drum Arts with renowned storyteller Nick Hennessey, as part of the Highlights cultural events programme. The aim was to introduce the young people to the art of storytelling, focussing on stories from the North and the incorporation of music, movement, and rhythm into performance.
On Monday 11th Jackass Youth Theatre took part in a 4-hour evening workshop at Jack Drum Arts with renowned storyteller Nick Hennessey, as part of the Highlights cultural events programme. The aim was to introduce the young people to the art of storytelling, focussing on stories from the North and the incorporation of music, movement, and rhythm into performance.
Nick facilitated a series of engaging and inspirational activities interspersed with captivating moments for storytelling. His manner of delivery brought a real immediacy to the possibility of what the young people could achieve as storytellers in their own right.
The young people discovered how a story changes every time it is told – the teller places her or his own stamp and style onto the tail. This empowered the young people to fully engage with a vast and potentially intimidating tradition with bravery, creativity, and individuality.
Nick supported the young people to explore description and the tension between sparse clarity and elaborate detail, and when to use each. We played with pace, rhythm, music, and movement with a view to developing an ensemble piece of storytelling to share with the public.
The session culminated with the group tackling the Child Border Ballad, ‘Tam Lin’. The eldritch tale of elves among men was unknown to most of the young people, and the masterful telling by Nick held them positively spellbound.
The group will use the stories and tools from the workshop to develop a piece of performance storytelling to showcase as part of ‘paperscissorbook’, the Highlights Contemporary Craft Tour, this coming Autumn.