Collective Storytelling Quotes

Theatre, when it is at its best, takes a lot of beating - the live experience and the shared collective experience of live storytelling is really special when it is good. Particularly here in New York because the audiences are amazing, very vocal and very engaged, and that makes theatre very exciting.

Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths.

The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.

I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. It is an act that can be met with hostility, exclusion, and violence. It can also lead to love, understanding, transcendence, and community. I hope that my being real with you will help empower you to step into who you are and encourage you to share yourself with those around you.

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.

Theater is a lot more interactive, more of a cohesive unit. With television, it can be a different director every episode.

The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.

I think the experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of the film, and it's equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people.

Whoever is playing with me, they participate in the arrangement; I learned from Craig Street to really pool the stories and the skill and the voices of everybody around you on the bandstand to build an arrangement in the moment.

I always wanted to create this community that would come and tell their own story, shoot it - and watch them. The idea is to not have one entity who creates the work, the project, and another entity who consumes it; the idea is people create their own work, like somebody cultivating his garden.

It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.

Story, finally, is humanity's autobiography.

I suppose the other thing too many forget is that we were all stories once, each and every one of us. And we remain stories. But too often we allow those stories to grow banal, or cruel or unconnected to each other.We allow the stories to continue, but they no longer have a heart. They no longer sustain us.

Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story ... your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we're less alone.

The Internet is allowing us to get back to what's really more natural, which is that storytelling is a shared thing. It's our natural way to be communal.

The desire for story is very, very deep in human beings. We are the only creature in the world that does this; we are the only creature that tells stories, and sometimes those are true stories and sometimes those are made up stories. Then there are the larger stories, the grand narratives that we live in, which are things like nation and family and clan and so on. Those stories are considered to be treated reverentially. They need to be part of the way in which we conduct the discourse of our lives and to prevent people from doing something very damaging to human nature.

Everyone underestimates their own life. Funny thing is, in the end, all our stories...they're the same. In fact, no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, loss and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Only the details are different.

Objects let you tell a narrative that encompasses everybody. Texts don't.

When we made 'Life in a Day,' we asked people around the globe to record their lives on a single ordinary day. When we were cutting that film, we talked about what it might be like if we chose a day that already had significance to people. The result is 'Christmas in a Day.'

I couldn't be a one-woman show, since I wouldn't have anybody to bounce off from. Once you're out there, dribbling on, you have nobody to interrupt you. I love being part of a company, and telling a story.

I love the fact that you collaborate with your readers when you write a book.