Faeries, woodcutters, rabbis, novelists, pigs in dresses and LSD were among the subjects of tales shared last Wednesday at the Piccadilly Pow-Wow, the first performance by the new storytelling group of the same name. A large, enthusiastic crowd of people came to the event at the WestCo Café, some clad in pajamas and hugging pillows, and for an hour and a half were entertained by their fellow students’ tall tales.
The group, created and run by Abe Lateiner ’04, has the goal of bringing the art of storytelling to the Wesleyan community. The set-up was equally simple: emcee Bess Thaler ’04 introduced the twelve performers, who each stood or sat on a small platform and told a brief story.
Lateiner began with a short focusing exercise, having the audience repeat a series of nonsense words, which helped draw the group together. He then told his own story, a spooky, humorous tale of a man stumbling upon a house full of supernatural cats.
Rachel Lindsay ’04 told a Jewish parable in which a wise rabbi cleverly defended poor children against a greedy baker who demanded they pay for the bread they had smelt, but not eaten. The rabbi takes the coins from the children, shakes it and gives it back.
“The price for the smell of bread will be the sound of money,” said the rabbi in the last line of the story.
Molly Dengler ’06 introduced the character Juan Bobo, a South American boy who has many misadventures, including cleaning his pig and feeding his house instead of the other way around. Graduate student Deborah Justice told the story of an Irish girl who escaped an arranged marriage by saving an enchanted prince from the Queen of the Faeries and Dana Taussig ’06 used classic fairy tales to give the audience a prequel to Red Riding Hood, explaining how the woodcutter first came to be.
Ben Morse ’04, another of the storytellers, said he was impressed by the universal nature of storytelling.
“[Storytelling] has a lot of history in a lot of cultures I don’t know about,” Morse said. “I don’t think that’s bad, I think it’s interesting that our stories came from all our different cultural contexts. It pointed out how useful the form is.”
Morse’s story used a classic fairy tale tone applied to the very modern theme: a young woman wanted to have a baby without the help of a man and ended up creating a daughter out of vegetables. This sort of twist on the storytelling archetype resurfaced in the personal stories, such as the account another student gave of tripping acid for the first time in Paris.
Dylan Meconis ’05 also told a personal story about a chance – and embarrassing – encounter with her idolized writer, Neal Stevenson.
Meconis is an improv comic at Wes but said she felt no pressure to be funny. “Abe specifically told people that sad stories were great, weird stories were great,” Meconis said. “He really wanted a variety—you don’t just have to make the audience laugh.”
Kate MacCluggage ’04 has been going to storytelling festivals with her mother, a professional storyteller, since she was a childhood. MacCluggage told a story by professional storyteller Jay O’Callahan. “Storytelling was the first sort of performing art I ever got into,” she said.
MacCluggage is very active in theatre at Wesleyan, particularly as an actress, but she said that storytelling has a different kind of audience appeal than theatre.
“I think that Wesleyan is very high-stress,” MacCluggage said. “Allowing yourself to remember that good art and entertaining art and entertaining stories and ideas can be as simple as ‘the price for the smell of bread will be the sound of money.’ The morals from fables are still very true, and I think we forget that a lot. That’s okay to realize.”
MacCluggage and Lateiner both said that storytelling differs from acting due to the role of the narrator.
“The teller must fundamentally remain the narrator while juggling the characters,” Lateiner said. “Or else the audience is separated and the story loses its aspect of interaction with the listener.”
Lateiner first became interested in storytelling when, as a North End Mentor, he saw professional storyteller Eshu Bumpus perform for the Middletown Green Street Arts Program. He later brought Bumpus to Wesleyan and students interested in storytelling spoke with him about the art form. Lateiner said that he was surprised how few of them had ever seen a professional storytelling but not by the appeal of the idea.
“You hear people telling stories wherever there’s a group of people,” Lateiner said. “But with something like this you have a chance to really develop it and you’re telling it to people who are really listening to that.”
The demand has proven even greater than Lateiner expected, and many students have asked for more of these events during the semester. While he said that adding more Pow-Wows would require shortening them, he encouraged anyone interested to contact him at alateiner@wesleyan.edu or at extension 6470.
“You don’t need anything,” Lateiner said. “You need your voice and creativity.”
PICCADILLY POW-WOW conceived by Abe Lateiner ’04; performed by Molly Dengler ’06, Nina Eichacker ’06, Lena Eson ’04, Deborah Justice GRAD, Abe Lateiner ’04, Rachel Lindsay ’04, Kate MacCluggage ’04, Dylan Meconis ’05, Ben Morse ’04, Dana Taussig ’06, and David Vitale-Wolff ’06; master of ceremonies Bess Thaler; planning support by David Martin ’04.
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