Miscommunication

I’ve gotten some good comments about storytellers misreading audience reactions, like Randy’s description:

But I would be telling the story

and she was usually

sort of in the midrange of the audience

and I would look out into the audience

because I'm trying to find friendly faces that I can

at least touch base with

as I'm going around.

I know you have to look around the room

but I don't wanna look at the ones who are

scowling or

like this [gesture - crossed arms?] too much.

The first couple of times

my eyes would land on her

and I gotta take my glasses off to do this

and this was the expression [mouth open, confused looking]

Like she was seeing a trainwreck.

Like the worst disaster she ever witnessed.

And the first time I saw it I kinda froze like

what?

It seemed to be going well.

So in the end I just looked away.

But then I started watching her

and that's just how she listens

to every teller.

That was the expression.

But miscommunication happens in both directions. At the August Carapace I witnessed this:

He (Cris) talked about hidden “ribbons” of committing forgery and using drug money to pay for college. The audience laughed at these comments. The forgery seemed like it could be funny, because he said he was 9. But I got from his attitude where this was going. Cris is normally a funny guy and it seemed like the audience didn’t want to let go of that and let him be serious. He had to be joking when he was talking about these crimes.

The audience misread what was happening and reacted inappropriately. It was so interesting to see this happen because it is a phenomenon I’ve recently become aware of in the past few years. I heard a story on a The Risk! podcast in which I thought the audience laughed at an inappropriate time and was later fortunate enough to get to ask the storyteller (Ray Christian) about it. I wondered if I had missed something because I was just listening and the audience had seen it live. He said, no. Sometimes people laugh when they’re uncomfortable. Then it happened to me. I told a story for The Monti, a local Chapel Hill/Durham show. It was a curated show and I was coached by the producer. During my performance, people laughed at something that really wasn’t meant to be funny. It actually upset me, but since I already knew that that was a thing that sometimes happens, I was able to move on and finish the story. If you want to listen for yourself, my story is at The Monti (http://www.themonti.org/podcast/) episode #160. And you can hear to Ray’s story here: http://risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-chapel-hill-2/ Below is the performance I gave in an ethnography class based on this experience.

Background:

Performance theorist Erving Goffman (1959) places every day performances in a “front region” (p. 111), a kind of stage. Of course, this means that there is also a backstage. “A back region or backstage may be defined as a place relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course” (p. 112). It is not so much that people are being overly dishonest in the front region. It is just that they are performing there, and backstage, they are not.

The convention is, though, that the audience does not go backstage. “Since the vital secrets of a show are visible backstage and since performers behave out of character while there, it is natural to expect that the passage from the front region to the back region will be kept closed to members of the audience or that the entire back region will be kept hidden from them” (Goffman, 1959, p. 113).

Reality storytelling is a performance that is meant to reveal the backstage, but this is a tricky thing. How can you really perform backstage behavior? And what is the cost to the performer of relinquishing the privacy of the backstage?

Performance:

“I found this white balloon lying in the road. The mouth of the balloon was larger and rounder than the balloons that I was used to. But I could tell somebody had been using it before because it had spit in it. I started looking for ‘em after that and I started finding ‘em. In fact I had a little sandwich bag where I was starting to collect ‘em. There was this guy in the neighborhood I was walking with. He didn’t normally play with us a lot. And we were walking together and I saw one of them on the ground and I bent down to pick it up and he said, ‘Stop! Don’t touch that! It’s nasty! Don’t you know what that is?’ I said, ‘’Course I know what it is. All you have to do is clean it off and it’s good.’ He said, ‘Oh, well okay then.’”

Ray Christian was in my ears. I was jogging down Franklin Street listening to the Risk podcast, Live from Chapel Hill 2, but in my mind I was in the alleys with a group of unsupervised children whose toys were car parts and medical waste.  

“One of the kids said to me, ‘Ray, you ever heard the sound of a spark plug when it hit the ground?’ I said, ‘Nah.’ He said, ‘Take it and throw it on the ground.’ So I picked up the spark plug and I threw it down on the ground and it made this funny, strange, reverberating, echo-y kind of sound that was like boing. So I surmised that it would bounce no matter what it came into contact with. And I tested this hypothesis by throwing it straight at my friend’s head. The spark plug didn’t bounce. It didn’t make a cool noise. It made a thud and hit the ground. And then my friend hit the ground. And he went to sleep. And he woke up. And he forgot what happened. So we kept playing.”

The audience laughed. I felt uncomfortable. It felt wrong. This wasn’t funny. The condom balloons were funny. This wasn’t funny.

My first night at The Monti StorySlam, I put my name in the cup. The theme was Mishaps and Blunders and I had prepared a cute story about my son trying to eat cat poop and having to call poison control.

I didn’t get chosen, but Ray did. He told a story about an old girlfriend, a good Christian girl, who suggested they wait to get physical. She arrived at a party before he did and gave his friend a blow job. When Ray got there she gave him a big kiss and he found out later from his friend what had happened. “I thought about that wet, sloppy, salty, coppery kiss, and I thought, ‘that’s fucked up.’”

I wondered if all Ray’s stories involved him tasting semen. But that’s not what I asked him. When we talked I asked him why the audience at Risk laughed.

Ray says sometimes they laugh when they’re uncomfortable.

I pitched a story for the first curated Monti show of the season. The theme was Danger. I wanted to suggest a sure thing. So I pitched a story I call Malibu, about how I hired my sister a private stripper for her 19th birthday and she and I and all of our friends who gathered to watch him, really had no idea what to do with a private male stripper. I pride myself on telling stories about things that people don’t usually talk about. Pulling the curtain aside so they can see a little of the backstage of real life.

I got an email from someone called Wilson.

“Have you performed this story before?”

“I have. But not locally.”

“Hmmm. Do you have any other ideas then?”

“Uhhh. Oh! I was going to tell a story at the slam a few months ago about my son eating cat poop. That’s dangerous.”

“You’ll have 12 minutes in the curated show instead of 6, so the story will need to be longer. But that’s okay. Jeff will work with you.”

Jeff will work with me. This isn’t really just my story. I’ll be creating it with another person.

Ray says, next time I shouldn’t tell them I’ve performed the story before.

I met with Jeff.

“Tell me what you’re thinking about.”

“I had this idea that I could make the story longer by talking about all the stresses of when to feed and what to feed your baby. Like, I used to read this blogger who made breast milk cheese.”

“That’s hilarious. How did all this change your life? What did you learn?”

“Uh, to relax? You can get all worked up about baby food and the kid is going to put shit in his mouth anyway?”

“Tell me about yourself as a mother.”

He was pulling back the curtain on my life and rummaging around inside. And by the end of the meeting I had agreed to tell a totally different story about home birthing and placenta eating and falling into the trap of believing I wasn’t a good enough mother because all the bloggers I read were crunchier than I was.

Ray says all the producers like the stories to be life changing

I thought the story change was a secret victory. I’ve told the placenta story before. Yeah I was changing it and adding on to it so it would be a Monti story. But I knew it was a good story. And I got to add in the bit about the breast milk cheese. And that was funny too.

I met with Jeff again. I told him the story I had told myself over and over the last few days, in the shower, while I brushed my teeth, while I walked to school.

“You list off these things that happened, family not agreeing with the homebirth, advice from the blogs. But how did it make you feel?”

“Feel?”

And I had this horrible moment where I realized that I only thought I told stories that show people the backstage. I was showing them this polished version of things that had happened backstage. I brought the backstage out and dressed it up, but I wasn’t letting them in. How did I feel?

I stood in my living room tears running down my face as I remembered, as I said what I really wanted to say. “People would tell me, ‘It doesn’t matter what kind of birth experience you have, as long as you end up with a healthy baby.’ If I am tethered to a bed and and pumped full of drugs and my requests are treated like the rantings of a mad woman and all my power is taken away from me and then someone else hands me my baby like it was their accomplishment, how is it possible that that doesn’t matter?”

Ray says they really try to pull that emotion out of you.

When I performed in the show, I threw the curtain wide. I didn’t just tell about what happened. I spoke my truth. How I felt. How it changed my life.

Some parts were funny. “I can’t poop if I think there may be someone in the next room listening to me or paying attention to how long I’ve been in there. So I knew there was no way I could squeeze out a baby with doctors and nurses peering into my vagina and maybe telling me I was taking too long.”

Other parts weren’t funny. “I was afraid to have my daughter away from me at night. I wanted to be able to touch her and hear her breathing. But a friend knew someone who had rolled onto her baby and suffocated her...”

And the audience laughed. I was screaming at them in my head. “It’s not funny. That’s not funny!”

Ray says sometimes they laugh when they’re uncomfortable.

References

Christian, R. (Performer), & Allison, K. (Producer). (2015, February 16). Child’s Play. on Live from Chapel Hill 2! [podcast]. The Risk!

Christian, R. (Performer), & Polish, J. (Producer). (2015, June 24). Mishaps and Blunders. Live performance in MotorCo Music Hall, Durham, NC.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Harvey, H. B. (2008). On the edge of the storytelling world: The festival circuit and the fringe. Storytelling, Self, Society, 4(2), 134-151. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949007

Linett, P. (2013). Interview: Ben Lillie on science and the storytelling revival. Curator: The Museum Journal, 56(1), 15-19.

Nelson, S. B. (Performer), & Polish, J. (Producer). (2015, September 12). Danger. Live performance in ArtsCenter, Chapel Hill, NC.

Sobol, J. D. (1999). The storyteller’s journey: An American revival. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.