Interview with:Dave Tonge, Storyteller [theyarnsmith]
CREATIVITY
 | How and why did you begin to be creative? I suppose its always been in me, it just took storytelling to bring it out. This was in terms of adapting stories to tell and developing my own style of telling.
For that reason I must be honest and say that finding my creative voice was part of a happy accident involving a return to education and working in museums. A more detailed account of my introduction to storytelling can be found on my website at: www.theyarnsmithofnorwich.com |
| Your mind is your work tool. How do you take care of it? Work keeps my mind healthy! I am telling throughout the year and when telling I'm sourcing and adapting new stories. And when not working at stories I'm usually blogging about my experiences of storytelling, the places I've told and the stories I tell. To access all of these go to: www.theyarnsmith.blogspot.com/ |
| How do you avoid repeating yourself, or falling into formula? How do you stay fresh? This is difficult as many of the venues I tell at are not that demanding. Its easy to slip into telling the same tried and tested stories. For that reason I do offer adult orientated evening performances that include many rarely told tales. |
| What cultural sources do you draw from the most? Like many storytellers I do pick up some stories from listening to other tellers, but most of my stories come from folklore collections and of course the likes of Chaucer. |
| Who have your teachers been? |
| When you accept a job, how much value do you place on each of the following? Money, creative liberty, visibility, and to work with the best. If I'm honest money does figure largely in what I do, simply because I am a professional. That said, charging good money also allows me to be selective in the jobs I accept especially when it comes to developing adult/evening performances |
| Have you ever had a job that was so stimulating that you could not get your mind off of it? As a storyteller its always satisfying when you draw people into a session who you would not expect to sit and listen for very long. Especially older kids and adults. When this happens it gives you a real sense of achievement. And a teller like an actor is only as good as their audience. The sessions when you really connect are great; when you just know, "I've got them"! |
| It is possible to fall in love with a bad idea simply because it is yours. How do you avoid this? Its possible to fall in love with a bad story or more correctly a bad intro to a story. I'm always thinking of new ways to introduce stories to an audience especially with regard to drawing new potential listeners in, but am sometimes to clever for my own good. Avoiding it is hard and I tend to put it down to trial and error. |
| Declaration: With what person or business would you like to work? Like many storytellers I'm always seeking to make my sessions attractive to a wider audience, which usually means working with folk/early music musicians. |
| What criteria do you use when selecting someone to be a part of your creative team? I usually only work with people I've seen working elsewhere. My main concern is how well the work with their audience, for I've no time for aloof primadonnas'! |
| Do you work well under pressure? Certainly when it comes to developing new stories, because I'm not the best regulated person in the world. Therefore I do leave the adapting and learning of new stories till the last minute. |
| What city in the world currently attracts you due to its creative environment? From the point of view of storytelling any city or town in Ireland, where cracking a tale has never gone away. |
| What do you feel when, after two or three years, you see an idea of yours again? My stories evolve and change with every telling so its its difficult to remember exactly what they were like in the past! |
| Ideas can come simultaneously to different people in different places with no connection to one another. How do you explain this phenomenon? We are all human and one thing I like about storytelling is that we share the same stories with different cultures and religions and also over time. Stories are adapted to suit different peoples needs, but the basic narrative remains the same. All over the world we laugh and cry at much the same things. |
| You are as good as your last idea. Wouldn't you like to have a more secure type of work? Sometimes I long to be back in a nine to five job, especially at the end of my summer sessions when I want for my own bed and a few days off. But I used to be a welder, long, long ago, working long hours for very little reward and with people who had absolutely no ambition and very limited horizons in life. My biggest fear is that I would end up like them, but there is no chance of that as an Itinerant teller of tales! |
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693 visits Whohub
Dave Tonge, Storyteller
Norwich UK
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