STORY WEEK 2024: 3–18 October
CREATIVE DIRECTOr MESSAGE

Story Week is Common-Unity

1. Food

Story Week innovates the ways we tell stories finding a common unity.

People are sharing: some slam in big rooms, some yarn in dining rooms. Not celebrities. We close the distance between artist and audience, exchange stories in new intimate ways.

Story Week 2024 offers a new ancient form of connection. We share stories at dinner tables. Art passed around in small circles.

Call this family style spoken word. Or talking circles, yarning or storytelling clubs. Instead of talking in circles or talking-about-reading-other-people’s-stories clubs.

When strangers come together in the shape of a family around a table to tell stories: a storytelling event becomes a 12-person metaphor buffet.

The quality of experience is amplified by the reduction in audience numbers. It’s not just conversation monopolised by the white dude speaking 89% of the time.

2. Mic

The relationship between Audience and Artistic is a status game.

“Me up here in light”

“You down there in dark”

In pandemic, the tiny handheld net screened our attention tension

and burned down stages.

Trevor Noah was doing shows from his bed!

What about the kid running around in the background of the international news report?

In three years, we made a world of story sharers.

You – street poets dropping shit on – tubers.

3. Fire

When we meet face to face,

We don’t always want the hierarchy of theatre

Based on a coliseum plus the fourth wall.

Artists are not slave gladiatoring

like minstrels for applause

Community or Common-Unity created by sharing with each other.

Speaking directly with each other.

The light was always supposed be in the centre. A fire place we all shine in.

4. Flight

Our stories are ephemera. They soar into listeners hearts and heads. Stories create empathy and cross experience understanding.

Pick a moment when everything changed and describe it through your senses.

By focusing on the visceral and tangible, rather than the conceptual and abstract, you take us through an experience that changed you; gave you at least one of your core beliefs about the world.

In this walk-in-my-shoes game,

Concrete Language only. Listen, listen...

Now I understand why you believe as you do.

– Miles Merrill, Word Travels Creative Director