Practice English Listening B2 Exercises – Storyteller

a   a mirror held up

b   asides

d   being human

g   fascinating

h   fundamental

i   aren’t we great?

m   no judgement

q   something universal

r   stupid

s   the whole gamut

t   visualising

v   your own subconscious

PRESENTER:   Jan Blake is a storyteller. Not just the kind of person who comes into work or school and tells you what happened to them the night before, but a professional storyteller who stands up in front of large audiences of children and adults and tells traditional stories, some from her own Jamaican background, some from Britain where she was born and brought up, and others from around the world. She performs stories, and gets audiences to participate by shouting out, clapping and responding.

JAN:   What are stories for? I think, I think stories … this is my personal opinion, this isn’t … er … a kind of tried and tested theory, but my personal opinion is that when someone tells a story in that arena, at the moment that the story is being told everything about being human is accepted, yeah? The good, the bad. Every single experience of being human is in that room with everybody and it’s almost, there’s no judgement of what it means to be a human being in that moment. Does that make sense? So, what the audience gets from it I think is tha-a mirror is held up and I say to the audience this is us, aren’t we great? Or aren’t we stupid, or aren’t we fascinating or aren’t we vengeful or aren’t we wonderful lovers or aren’t we … this is the whole gamut of human experience can be found in a story I think, and I think that there’s something very fundamental that I can’t put my finger on and say what it is.

But it happens when stories are told, the visualising of the story, the sound of the storyteller’s voice, the contact with the audience, the er asides if you like, the recognition of the human condition – all of those things are in the room with you when you tell a story, when you hear a story. and I think that’s what the audience gets out of it umm, the opportunity to delve deep into your own consciousness, your own subconscious, your own imagination and experience something universal. I think that’s what happens when you hear a story, that’s what happens when I tell a story.

a   She joined a travelling theatre group.

b   To audition as a storyteller.

c   Bring a story, a game and a song from her own tradition.

d   Why Cat and Dog are no longer friends.

e   From her mother.

f   By reading and reading and reading and reading it so she could tell it her own way.

g   It ‘worked’; both she and the people listening liked it a lot.

PRESENTER:   Jan, who was born and brought up in Manchester in the United Kingdom, didn’t start as a storyteller. At the age of 19, she joined a travelling theatre group. And it was when she was working in a show in London some years later that she met the Ghanaian actress Eno Sourcey who suggested that she should audition for a storytelling group called ‘Common Law’.

JAN:   And I said oh where where can you earn some decent money then, and she said oh as a storyteller so I said what’s that? And she said oh I’m a storyteller, I think you’d be really good, I think you should come along to ‘Common Law’ and you should audition. You have to bring a story from your own tradition, a game from your own tradition and a song from your own tradition. So my mum had sung me songs and taught me games when I was a child so I had that. I had to go and find a story. I didn’t have any stories that … on hand, so I went and bought a book by Philip Sherlock, West Indian Folk Tales, and I, I found a story called Why Car and Dog are no longer friends and I read that and read it and read it and read it and read it and I haven’t told that story since, I have to s- I haven’t told that story for 20 years. It would be interesting to tell it again now after all this time but I read it and read it and read it and I knew that I couldn’t learn the whole story word for word, there was no way it was going to be possible, so I just had to simply tell it. So I went along to this space in Brixton umm and met the rest of ‘Common Law’ and they said, OK, can you tell us your story? And I sat there and I opened my mouth and out came this story and I was really surprised because I’d I’d never told it to anybody. It just came out and it worked and I could see on their faces that it was working for them as well as was working for me and from that moment I haven’t looked back. I have not wanted to do any, anything else but tell stories since that moment.

a   the Spitalfields Theatre

b   Crispin Robinson

c   Crispin

d   Crispin

e   Jan

f   Jan and Crispin

g   the audience

h   Jan

i    Jan, Crispin and the audience

PRESENTER:   Jan Blake’s storytelling performances are electrifying, The Swedish story expert Eulf Ardstrom calls her the ‘British-Jamaican storytelling volcano’. Sometimes, though, she finds herself in awkward situations, like the time a couple of years ago, when she was booked to appear at the Spitalfields Theatre in London – often called ‘The Spitz’.

JAN:   Ah … I work sometimes with a percussionist called Crispin Robinson and he’s notoriously late and the person who had booked the session was late and I was at the at the Spitz on my own and Crispin turned up five minutes before we were supposed to go on and two of the stories he’d never heard me tell before, so he had to play to these two stories, and one of the stories had a song in that needed harmonics and he had to sing them because the story had to work with these, and I, I’m very demanding like that I think. Umm, the fact is that when I work with Crispin I can do that, So five minutes before, he turned up and he was like ‘Oh God my brain and the traffic’s awful and just let me lie here for five minutes,’ and I said ‘we’re on in five minutes’ and he said ‘er yeah just give me five minutes,’ so as he lay on the ground I just said ‘OK, if you … there’s two of the stories you haven’t heard. This is one of them, it’s about a hunter, this happens,’ and and I kind of went through the sequence of events, and I said, ‘we’re gonna need dramatic drumming here, we’re gonna need running drumming here, we’re gonna need, you know, a kind of a lyrical moving here, that’s that’s what we’re gonna need. And then the other story is a Jamaican story umm this this is the song.’ I sang it to him and I said, ‘give me some harmonies’, he gave me the harmonics straight away and then boom we had to go on and do the story and it was the best storytelling exp – cos we were on the edge of our creativity, risk, yeah, we couldn’t fail. It was one of those situations where we, I was not going to let us fail regardless of the circumstances around it, that was all these people, the place was humming with people, it was packed and that also, all these people in the audience all came to hear Jan Blake and Crispin Robinson so they were willing it to be a fantastic experience and then there’s a song that I always start with and I asked the audience to join in and sing it and they weren’t giving us themselves and I said to them ‘Look you know, he was late, he was late you know, I’m slightly, you know, off kilter and we are here together and this has to work for all of us… and so we worked, sang the song, all, the harmonics were fantastic, the storytelling was great and it’s the first time I’ve experienced storytelling where it’s as though we’re not actually in the room, you know, we left the room and we were in a different space altogether, all of us were in a completely different space together and umm it was a fantastic experience, fantastic.