3 part project: Preparing and Telling a Folk/Fairy Tale

Storytelling Performance and Paper Instructions

Storytelling Assignment:

Tell us a story. Prepare a 7-8 minute telling of  a folk tale or fairy tale that is related to your own culture of origin ( like the Creation Story in “The Truth About Stories.”)  You should learn a story by heart, and tell it to the class.

Your performance should last no more than EIGHT minutes. It can be less. You will perform this story on either Oct 31 or Nov 2, in class.

Your performance will be graded that day, using a rubric, and it is worth 10 points.

As part of preparing your story, you will do some research and writing. The goals of this set of assignments are:

1. use writing as a way to understand a story and to prepare to tell the story to an audience.
2. practice good information literacy skills in order to obtain useful resources for choosing and understanding your story
3. analyze pieces of the story in order to arrive at a conception of the whole

First, you will do some “reading around” and research to find a story that you want to work on.  You can find resources to help with this on our library guide, prepared by Lucretia McCulley: http://libguides.richmond.edu/FYS_storytelling

Second, you will prepare an Annotated Bibliography of the sources you find useful to the  history and background of the story, as well as other interesting sources that will help you tell the story.  Due Dates are on the Weekly Schedule (Oct 24) and RUBRIC is here.

Third, you will prepare a Story History and Performance Plan of about 3 pages which tells about your story, your personal connection to it, and analysis of the story connected to your plan for performance. Due: Oct 26 (see Weekly Schedule to be sure) Instructions  and rubric are here.  Be sure to read Denise Bennett’s tips and Lipman’s Instructions as part of your preparation.

Finally, you will perform your story on either Oct. 31 or Nov 2.  Tell the story to ENGAGE your audience and in a way that  conveys meaning. Use your voice, tone, expressions, gestures, etc.

RUBRIC for performance

Resources:

http://www.thestorytelling-resource-centre.com/Folktales.html

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html

In Our Library:

Folk and Fairy Tales: A Handbook (Greenwood Folklore Handbooks) by D. L. Ashliman

TIPS for how to learn your story: Denise Bennett

Tips from Doug Lipman part 1  and part 2