Speaking Out

Storytelling and Creative Drama for Children

Jack Zipes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135887544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

In his successful Creative Storytelling, Jack Zipes showed how storytelling is a rich and powerful tool for self-expression and for building children's imaginations. In Speaking Out, this master storyteller goes further, speaking out against rote learning and testing and for the positive force within storytelling and creative drama during the K-12 years.For the past four years, Jack Zipes has worked with the Neighborhood Bridges Program of the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis, taking his storytelling techniques into inner-city schools. Speaking Out is in part a record of the transformations storytelling can work on the minds and lives of young people. But it is also a vivid and exhilarating demonstration of a different kind of education - one built from deep inside each child. Speaking Out is a book for storytellers, educators, parents, and anyone who cares about helping kids find within themselves the keys to imagination.

Spreading Tales, Opening
Minds—Sample Sessions

Fig. 6.1 Students at Lucy Laney School carrying a set in to the school.

6
FAIRY TALES, ANIMAL FABLES,
TRICKSTER STORIES, AND PEACE
TALES

The curriculum of Neighborhood Bridges changes from year to year, and it is essentially set up so that we can explore the basic short narrative genres of storytelling and expose the children to them. We teach through modeling the art of storytelling, animation, coaching, and discussion. We use traditional and untraditional stories to give the students a knowledge of the canonical tales, and throughout the course of an academic year, we animate them to write, read, draw, and produce their own tales and skits. Because our curriculum is large and extensive, I focus on several key sessions in this chapter and the next to demonstrate how we use the tales within the flexible structure that we have developed. Our structure allows for substitution of different tales and exercises. Teaching artists and teachers in our program are given free rein to experiment as they see fit.

The Importance of Working with Canonical Fairy Tales

During weeks two through five we introduce such tales as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Puss in Boots,” “Rapunzel,” “The Frog King,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Cinderella,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” with the intention of exploring why the tales have become canonical.

Fairy tales constantly seep into our lives without our realizing how deeply they infiltrate our bodies. Some linguists and biologists argue that we are actually born with a capacity to grasp language and grammar through genetic evolution. We seem to be disposed to learn and pass on certain narrative forms with ease, as though they were part of our nature. Perhaps this is why fairy tales flourish in all kinds of forms. They are not just tales for children, never were, and never will be. They are relevant metaphorical means of communication in which we discuss and debate social, political, and cultural problems such as the formation of gender roles, sibling rivalry, social class conflicts, revolution, social codification through dress, and so on. As a genre, the fairy tale has cultivated specific recognizable conventions and motifs for narrating important messages that have a bearing on our lives. Consequently, we are more apt to remember and recall a fairy tale than other generic forms because this specific genre has provided us with an effective linguistic mode to deal with what is relevant and special in our lives and is with us practically from birth to death.

The fairy tale is not just an oral or written narrative. Today it can be a TV commercial, a poster, a napkin, a T-shirt, a videocassette, a postcard, a film, a play, a musical, and so on. It has been condensed and expanded through mass media and technology. It rarely assumes the same form twice, although there are basic constellations in the canonical tales that recur constantly. These canonical tales, largely disseminated through the works of Charles Perrault, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Hansel Christian Andersen and established in the nineteenth century by all kinds of cultural institutions, are now known throughout the world. Though “impregnated” with codes of Western civilization, the tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Rapunzel,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Tom Thumb,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Bluebeard,” “The Frog King,” “Puss in Boots,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Red Shoes,” and so on have become globalized and are distributed throughout the world in different forms by cultural conglomerates such as the Disney Corporation, which has played a major role in leaving its imprint on specific fairy tales, including ones that originated in Asia. In many instances, there are local versions that contend with the mass-marketed products, and artists who have a more contemporary if not progressive perspective on social relations often contest the meanings of the canonical tales.

I specifically use the word progressive in an ideological sense because most of the canonical fairy tales tend to be sexist and conservative in their approach to topics of gender, justice, and government. Although they are narratives of hope and reveal the triumph of the oppressed, the happy ending of the tales generally involves a restoration of the status quo with power largely in the hands of men. This critical comment is intended not to dismiss the tales but to reflect on the fact that they were institutionalized in Western civilization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when our attitudes toward sex and government were less democratic. Thus, the canonical tales and their offshoots represent the spirit of their times; these narratives became very much contested in the 1970s and continue to be questioned and challenged today.

For children, not to mention adults, it is socially important to be familiar with the canonical fairy tales to understand interliterary and intercultural references. This does not mean we need to valorize canonical literature as superior to popular culture or other noncanonical works. It simply means that it is important to be knowledgeable about icons and social codes to navigate one’s way through institutions of all kinds and to be able to use them to one’s pleasure or advantage. In part, to become the storyteller of one’s life means that a young person must learn how to use, manipulate, and exploit social and cultural codes, especially linguistic and semantic ones, so that she or he will be able to contend with the constant bombardment of signs, often commercial and propagandistic, that occur every day. To know how to cope with a fairy tale is the first step of coping with one’s desires in relation to other human beings in a social context fraught with conflict.

In the Neighborhood Bridges program we always begin with “Little Red Riding Hood,” because I claim it is probably the most popular and well-known fairy tale in the world and because I am in some strange way obsessed with this tale. In 1982 I published a book titled The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood to counter the misleading and formulaic interpretations of fairy tales in Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. I endeavored to demonstrate that an oral tale that dealt with the initiation of a clever and brave young girl in an agrarian, sewing society was transformed into a tale about violence, if not rape, by Perrault and the Grimms in which the girl called Little Red Cap was held responsible for her violation by a wolf/man. There are, of course, many ways to interpret and illustrate “Little Red Riding Hood,” but I want at the very least to show that if we look at the tale in a historical sociocultural context, we can see that the conflict centers on the desire of a predatory male, who wants to eat a gullible cute female, and she, in turn, is blamed for her tragic end, especially in the first literary version by Perrault in 1697. Perrault made it seem either that the girl wanted to be eaten or that she somehow contributed to her violation. Soon after my book appeared I was flooded with all sorts of new literary and oral versions, and the scholarly debate about the meaning of this tale continued in full force as well. By 1993 I published a second edition of The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood with more tales and critical commentary to document once again how relevant this tale had become with regard to questions of rape and violence throughout the world. There is no end to the spread of this tale in manifold versions. In some ways the best contemporary critical comment on the plot is the superb film Freeway (1998), directed by Matt Bright, which is a fascinating study of a rebellious teenager who refuses to assume the role of the gullible Red Riding Hood. But I should also mention three books—Recycling Red Riding Hood by Sandra Beckett, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale by Catherine Orenstein, and Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition: A Linguistic Analysis of Old and New Story Telling by Alessandra Levorato—because they bring the developments concerning the “fate” of Little Red Riding Hood up to date.

In short, each canonical fairy tale is invested with deep historical and cultural meaning that we want to mine and undermine in our sessions. We always tell a canonical version first, discuss it with the students without imposing an interpretation. Then we tell a countertale, such as “Polly and the Stupid Wolf,” followed by questions and answers. Finally we set up a third tale with our “Chair Game,” which will produce a third version of the tale.

Finding Canonical and Noncanonical Tales

Because it is important to have a large repertoire of canonical and noncanonical tales, I want to introduce a short list of the books we use. There are many other useful anthologies to be found in my general bibliography.

Canonical Tales

Andersen, Hans Christian. 1974. The Complete Firy Tales and Stories . Translated by Erik Christian Haugaard. New York: Doubleday.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. 2003. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm .

Edited and translated by Jack Zipes. 3rd expanded ed. New York: Bantam.

Tatar, Maria, ed. 1999. The Classic Fairy Tales . New York: W.W. Norton. (Also contains countertales.)

Zipes, Jack, ed. 1989. Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantment: French Classical Fairy Tales . New York: New American Library. (Contains the complete tales by Charles Perrault.)

Noncanonical Tales

Attic Press. 1985. Rapunzel’s Revenge . Dublin: Author.

Attic Press. 1989. Sweeping Beauties . Dublin: Author.

Carter, Angela, ed. 1990. The Virago Book of Fairy Tales . Illustrated by Corinna Sargood.

London: Virago.

Carter, Angela, ed. 1993. Strange Things Sometimes Still Happen: Fairy Tales from around the World . London: Faber and Faber.

Hearne, Betsy, ed. 1993. Beauties and Beasts . Illustrated by Joanne Caroselli. Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx Press.

Lurie, Alison, ed. 1980. Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales . New York: Corwell.

MacDonald, Margaret Read, ed. 1993. Tom Thumb . Illustrated by Joanne Caroselli. Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx Press.

Minard, Rosemary, ed. 1975. Womenfolk and Fairy Tales . Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Phelps, Ethel Johnston, ed. 1978. Tatterhood and Other Tales . Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press.

Phelps, Ethel Johnston, ed. 1981. The Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from around the World . New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin, ed. 1982. Stories for Free Children . New York: McGraw-Hill.

Ragan, Kathleen, ed. 1998. Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from around the World . New York: Norton.

Sierra, Judy, ed. 1992. Cinderella . Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx Press.

Web Sites

Ashliman, D.L. “Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts,”

http://%20www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html.

“The Cinderella Project,” http://www.usm.edu/english/fairytales/%20cinderella/cinderella.html.

“Marvels & Tales,” http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/MarvelsHome/%20Marvels_Tales.html.

Peck, Russell, “The Cinderella Bibliography,”

http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cindere/cinitr.html.

“SurLaLune Fairy Tale Pages,” http://surlalunefairytales.com/.

Vandergrift, Kay. “Kay Vandergrift’s Snow White Page,”

http://%20www/scils.rutgers.edu/~kvander/snow%20white.html.

Windling, Terri, “The Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts,” http://%20www.endicott-studio.com/.

Fairy Tales

We begin each fairy-tale session by asking the students if any of them know the tale, and the teaching artist goes around the circle asking the students to retell the tale. Inevitably there are gaps and disputes among the students who retell the tale. All the better, because we want to show that there is no such thing as a definitive version. The introduction of the canonical version is intended to make students aware that there is a literary tradition in which particular versions become canonized because they are regarded as most representative of particular aesthetic and ideological standards.

Little Red Riding Hood

Instructions to teaching artists: Bear in mind the social and political ramifications of this particular tale that deals with violence and rape. These issues should rise to the fore in the telling and games. The purpose of this session is to encourage children to seek nonviolent solutions to predicaments confronted by the characters. The emphasis in the improvisational skits is on character: Who is your character? Why does your character act and behave a certain way?

Basic Structure of the Session

Fantastic binominal: Try to link the fantastic binominal to the theme of the day. For instance, ask for specific nouns such as clothes (relating to Red Riding Hood’s hood and cloak) and the names of animals that are predators. W...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Prologue
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• The Necessity of Storytelling In Education
• Neighborhood Bridges
• Spreading Tales, Opening Minds—Sample Sessions
• The Importance of Children’s Theater
• Bibliography
• Notes