Imagine thousands of mostly white folks quite nicely dressed and seated expectantly in the plushness of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, previously called the Orange County Arts Center. I was up in the first tier with a bird's-eye view of the bare stage and one great drum.
Orange County is a world unto itself: pretty white, pretty wealthy - but not all of it. It's just not a place given to primal feelings, or expressions of them in public.
Until Kodo begins drumming. Kodo (which translates to "heartbeat") cannot be explained; it must be felt.
Click here for a selection of YouTube clips of the Kodo performers. Irodori is one of my favorites.
So many lawyers claim to use storytelling but I often find that they lose the beating heart of the Human Narrative in legalese, in stiff presentations, in hollow shells of cases that are at odds with their own moral cores.
Like these drums appealing to our primal instincts, the Human Narrative must also have the power to penetrate our resistance and engage us at a place of action that we cannot always intellectually articulate.
Each and every client who comes to your office carries in his or her hands the beating heart of the Human Narrative they are entrusting to you. What do we do with it? How do we convey loss, injustice, abuse, fear, damage, treachery, betrayal, or avarice? We have to feel it. And that's scary because our lives are already full of things that go bump in the night.
Yet, when we agree to experience the beating heart of each Human Narrative we absorb that client's story much like we absorb the thunderous reverberations of the Kodo drums. Storytellers like to say that the bones of a story have found their way into the teller's body. And it's true. Stories are not a recitation of events; stories are words that come to life.
"They can come alive; they can follow you home; they can sit at your table; they can sleep in your bed." [Excerpt from Magic Words (after the Nalungiaq) Shaking the Pumpkin (Traditional poetry of the North American Indian) Jerone Rothenberg (editor)]
Maybe the message of the trial story is best expressed with music, a tune, a line of poetry, an instrument, an article of clothing or a toy. Give yourself permission to invite the jurors out of their torpor, build the anticipation, engage their primal hearts, claim your space on the courtroom floor and pound the drums of the Human Narrative.
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