During my storytelling tour of Brazil I was lucky enough to work with many thousands of students and many fabulous schools. School of Nations were kind enough to video me and make up this little video. For the last 30 years I have been telling stories in over 50 different countries, visiting many countries multiple times. Never have I felt that stories are so important as they are at the moment. I hope that this video gives some people hope as to the value of our common humanity. I look forward to taking my stories on a major European tour in 2025. #Brazil #LATAM #storytelling
storytelling with Andy Wright
The Sport of Storytelling
The Sport of Storytelling. (Visiting Victoria Australia in April and August 2018 www.storyteller.net.au)
Can a love of sport, lead to a love of storytelling? The answer is a definitive yes.
Sport and storytelling share a great deal of common elements. They both connect us to human experience. The joys and tribulations of sport are a distillation of human suffering and happiness, we can all feel the joy of scoring the winning goal, or the frustration of being run-out. For those of us who played sport as children or still play sport as adults, we can re-live our glory-days, twinge as we feel old injuries, and celebrate the technique and quality of a play.
Storytelling offers the same distillation of human experience. A reviewer once said of my storytelling; “His stories are simple that so many people can relate to - the glory of scoring the winning try, the horror of having a tooth knocked out, the ignominy of having to wear glasses that looked like they had been cut from the bottom of milk bottles. ..." (NZ Press Association). Whether they are personal narratives, or folktales all stories are attempts to understand human nature and experience.
Familiar patterns and repetition connect us to sport as we recognise kindred spirits performing familiar activities. So too in storytelling the underlying patterns and repetition of emotions and experiences connect us to the characters of our stories. We have all felt - love and hatred, jealousy and forgiveness, or anger and compassion. We have all - climbed tall structures, ran downhill, been blown by a gale, got soaked in the rain, or been scared in the dark.
Today as a storyteller I work with many teenage boys around the world, telling stories often about sport. Helping young men tell their own stories, where sport often becomes a pressure-valve to tell of emotions and experience. Telling stories about the physical experience can often lead to an exploration of the emotive resonance.
Storytelling is about a journey, an
