Finding Storytelling Through Community And Voice

Walk out on stage, take a deep breath and start telling a story. When standing exposed beneath the spotlight, even though the house lights are dim, it’s still possible to make out faces in the audience. The seats are filled with both friends and strangers; they’re a community, whom by the end of the evening will have become confidants, secret-keepers, all possessing the joint knowledge of recollections shared. The people on both sides of the stage within the walls of the theater are participating in a storytelling series. Like open-mike nights and other types of performance-based, community-building events, storytelling seems to be building in popularity, even in a city that can seem as disparate and scattered as Los Angeles.


On the night that I claimed the role of storyteller and personally stepped out on stage, took a deep breath and started speaking, I was one of seven people who had each crafted a narrative based on a true story culled from personal life experience. SPARK Off Rose™ is the venue for this particular event; its home is the Powerhouse Theatre in Venice. Powerhouse is an unassuming building on quiet Second Street, merely only one block off Main. It’s only a few sun salutations distance away from the Exhale studio near the beach. While the Powerhouse hosts a variety of events, on the first Monday of every month since 2001, the group of producers (currently Jessica Tuck, Karin Gutman, Dave Connaughton, Alicia Sedwick, Margie Carter and Mark Betancourt) ignites an evening of storytelling for SPARK Off Rose™.

The night is reminiscent of the practice of trading narratives around the campfire, or passing around a diary or pulling someone aside, saying “Wait, did you hear,” or “I have to tell you…”Yet in our era of reality shows, 160-character Twitter updates, YouTube clips and Facebook postings, there is something about just standing up and reading that seems both anachronistic and necessary. SPARK Off Rose™ has no video cameras, no website, and when onstage, everyone just stands up and reads. And when they do, their voice projects and fills the space. There’s a human element to simply telling a story, live and in person, which is part of our experience in the world, part of the necessity of how we connect to each other.

On stage, the seven voices carry the weight of more than merely idle chatter; this isn’t an open mike night or improvisational theater. For each evening, the producers select an overarching theme, decided and announced months in advance. They collect the seven storytellers; they critique and help shape the stories. Everyone rehearses. Some people pitch a story that falls under the umbrella of the theme read after being captivated by the experience in the audience. Some people find their way on stage because they’re bursting with a story just waiting to be told. Others are recruited, invited or cajoled by the producers. Before reading onstage, though, everyone needs to spend some time in the SPARK Off Rose™ audience.

This is where the community develops, inside the theater. There’s a bond and an intimacy that is forged when someone reveals a truth. This is the case whether it’s a story dug up, dusted off and carefully restored that was never before seen. And it’s also the case for well-polished, often-told tales which enjoy the soft comfort of shirts frequently washed. In the shared moments of personal secrets passing from mouth to ear, we know something of each other. We trust by necessity.

To preserve and enhance this connection, the experience includes a most ingenious component of SPARK Off Rose™: the outdoor post-performance reception. People sip on Groundwork coffee donated from the roasting company down the street (yes I bring my own mug), wine, soda or hot chocolate while nibbling on the highly anticipated peanut butter and jelly sandwich squares, chocolate chip cookies, vegetables, crackers, cheese and dips. And then people talk, gathering in pairs, in groups, striking up conversations with complete strangers who are no longer strangers after sharing time in the theater. The ice has already been broken, top buttons undone, hair shaken down.

Whether the stories are heartbreaking (some are), sad to the point of initiating tears (some are), laugh-out-loud hilarious (some are), poignant (some are) or thought-provoking (all are), there’s something each of us can relate to in every one. And when we’re all mingling in the same courtyard, those who spoke and those who listened, there’s an excuse for all us to break through the invisible barriers between individuals and share something of our own life, to connect, relate, re-tell, whisper.

In these conversations, we can confirm the fact that any feeling we have, someone else knows the taste of it. The first time I ever attended one of these evenings, more than a year ago now, I loved the reception as much as the stories.

As a writer, especially, I understand the desire to connect, to know somehow that the words make a difference. For that reason, I enjoy walking up to someone who has just poured their heart out through a story that they’ve pored over. I savor the details that provide texture to the backstory, or the part edited out or left behind. Even with my own predilection for this, I was still caught by surprise when people came up to me after I told my story to share the way they related to a word, a phrase, the whole thing. I was caught off guard as well, because the first few times I attended the evening, I didn’t dream that I would someday get up on stage. I was content to sit, to listen, to converse and to partake of the Monday night PB&Js.

I acquiesced, though, due to the encouragement of producer, writer extraordinaire and skilled writing coach Karin Gutman, and the urgings of the other people I met over themes and drinks. I mulled over for the theme and the story for months, stumbled through the writing, cried and lost sleep and wrote and rewrote and rehearsed to capture an inflection and a pause. And then there was the night when I walked out on stage, took a deep breath and told a story.


 

 


 

Storytelling: Space 

The first of the evenings’ stars were just emerging as I walked down the sidewalk with anticipation, mixed with dread, curiosity, longing and the alchemy of hope and fear that sends us hurtling through our lives.

A few steps fast, a few steps slow, a pause to take a deep breath. I was on my way to see the person with whom I had laughed and cried both with and over more than anyone else, for whom and with whom I had moved across states and continents. It had been five years since the two of us had divided up the kitchen utensils and eleven years since our first chance meeting at a mutual friend’s backyard barbecue.

I was terrified to meet him again because our relationship that ended in heartbreak was—during its run—as exhilarating as it was exhausting. I was terrified by this meeting because I knew that some part of me would always love him with the burning intensity of a comet. For that reason, I never wanted to see him again. Since he lived a thousand miles away spending his time designing satellites and calculating orbits, I thought I was safe. Safe until his cell phone number showed up on my caller ID. He was coming to town for a business trip, and “Could I meet for dinner?” I surprised myself with “Yes.”

While waiting in his hotel lobby, I replayed a mental slideshow: the moment he invited himself on my trip sea kayaking in Baja and a friendship became something else; the crowded bar amidst all our friends for his first confession of, “I love you;” rearranging my closet to make room for his clothes; rearranging my bed so my space became his and ours and no longer mine.

As he walked across the tile floor, his familiarity was almost shocking even after not seeing him for nearly five years, not quite enough time to erase the mental photographs even though I had long ago put away the framed images. I had not forgotten the penetrating but distant gaze of his always calculating sharp blue eyes, eyes that did in fact brighten when he smiled. But I thought his face was softer; I had forgotten the way his upper lip disappeared evoking a slight disapproving frown if he was the least bit displeased.

His hair, still the same: cut so short it stood on end, style defying gravity; sideburns just beyond regulation length, even though the Air Force signed his checks, he retained a sense of rebellion, a need for individuality.

In between computing space-bound trajectories, he planned the orbit of his own personal satellite: me. I was always surprised by the fact that someone whose every living moment related to various aspects of space couldn’t seem to have the capacity to give another person some semblance of personal space.

He applied the same level of scrutiny to the pages of intricate calculations necessary to send a satellite into orbit as he did to me, my schedule, my eccentricities, the arrangement of my socks in the drawer, the space for my yoga practice, and even what he deemed the lack of any real direction in my life. How could being a writer be a real job?

The searing necessity of his star being the center of everyone’s orbit dimmed everything else. Even his sister told me she felt she was walking on glass in his presence. And every few weeks, I think on the third quarter waxing moon, I would enter the house to meet a frozen gaze, icy eyes. “What’s wrong?” I would ask. “If you really loved me, I wouldn’t need to explain,” his answer would greet me every time. My mind-reading abilities were not quite honed enough to please.

Sliding into the restaurant booth, the space across the table was a chasm we traversed with one, two, three, four glasses of wine, then a bottle, then another. The alcohol fueled the journey across the distance. It allowed me to look into the dark night of his eyes and confess, “Your leaving was the best thing that could have happened to me.” I continued on, obeying the law that an object set in motion remains in motion. “I was a better person without you,” I said. “As much as you may have loved me, you never really accepted me for who I was—who I am.”

His need to control, to know, to micromanage left me stifled, small, confined. Yet it initiated the countdown propeling my ability to find my own space. And when he ended it, ostensibly because I didn’t do enough, try hard enough, pay attention enough or love him enough; the freedom culminated in a triumphant claim of my own space, the ability to stake the flag of my own private country in the newly-discovered soil of my own planet.

The extrication of our relationship was marked by packing boxes, dividing up the jars of cumin, turmeric, paprika, black pepper, rosemary. “Is it okay if I keep the bed,” he asked. Okay? Like I wanted the nightly reminder of heartbreak.  I said good-bye to Olive, our golden retriever who slept on that bed and went running with the two of us morning and night beneath the stars and satellites making their trek across the sky. Our final separation was followed by months of me turning down well-meaning friends’ attempts at set-ups, avoiding any encounter that hinted of the possibility of shared closet space.<

I’m neither fearful or cautious, but I now treasure the ability to move through space with a cloak of anonymity, without the need to rattle off itineraries and the deliberations of a daily routine. I revel in the ability to escape into the mundane details of life unannounced.

I revel in the freedom to travel with a passport filled with the entry and exit stamps of internal destinations, where space is limitless. They were countries visited amidst the crowded homes of our cohabitation, setting my alarm to get up an hour before he did , to find silence and space in the moments before he would wake up full of love and demands, passion and disapproval.

Yet even for all of my careful orbits and accommodations rearranging the order of my life to anticipate his needs, all the attention I could give, all the attention in the world wasn’t enough. Sometimes no matter what we do, no matter how vulnerable we make ourselves, no matter how much we reach out to another person, whatever we do to bridge the empty space between bodies, we never can get close enough.

As the two of us drained our final glasses of wine, he looked at me and, to my surprise, asked for forgiveness. “I have already forgiven you for everything that needed forgiving.” I really had, because sometime in the years between our parting and our meeting, he gave me something he may not have intended: he pointed me in the direction of freedom. And even though this night was the last time our skin may ever touch again, we held hands as I walked him back to his hotel, the night sky fully bright with stars millions of miles away, further away than any of us could travel in this lifetime. For all the space that we give up and all the rockets, satellites and the metal detritus we throw out into space, it never really gets us any closer to the stars.

 

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