The Theater! The Theater! How I love the Theater!
Story comes alive on the stage. In its own way, story comes to life on the silver screen. Both stage and screen are art forms. But one relies on the audience participation and the other is impervious to it.
Zachary Woolfe writing for the NYTimes, "The Screen Can't Hear You Yell 'Bravo'," laments a recent trend whereby folks attend a televised broadcast of a live opera while seated in a movie theater. Excerpt.
"In last week’s Arts & Leisure section I wrote about how watching opera in cinematic close-up, with Dolby surround sound, changes the performance in ways large and small. But the most distorted and distorting part of the HD experience comes at the times when a live audience repays a brave performance with enthusiastic applause.
Without fail, some watching the broadcasts shout “bravo” with gusto. But most of the audience doesn’t quite know what to do, caught between the intensity opera elicits and the sobering realization that, well, they are in a movie theater, perhaps thousands of miles from what they want to cheer and even farther from the relationship live performance engenders.
For all the praise HD deserves, and it deserves a great deal, this disconnect is damning. What the audience in a movie theater experiences is not just the opposite of opera. It is the undoing of opera, an art form in which a present, active audience is fundamental.
“Operas in general,” the critic Marcel Prawy wrote, “can only be properly enjoyed when audience, orchestra and stage form a compact community.” Its history is a history of being there: of applause and booing and rapt silence, the symbiosis between performers and audience. An image, in high definition, 3-D or any other permutation, creates only the illusion of intimacy. It is a cooler, more detached art form."
So, too this "compact community" of teller, story, and story listener is what creates the storytelling experience. Think of a story like a living organism - like wine, perhaps. As I have taught for years, the teller brings the listener along in a virtual journey so the listener is actually participating in the life of the story.
The same is true when you are arguing your case, giving a presentation or lecture. You are collaborating with the listener or decision-maker. The outcome is determined by members of that "compact community."
TIP: To better assure your chances of getting the outcome, verdict or decision you desire, know your "compact community," address your story to their concerns, and invite them on the virtual journey to collaborate and resolve problems along with you.
