Grettir’s Saga: A Sorcery Sampler
Mary Hays and I had a great rehearsal today to prepare for our performance at The Edmonton Storytelling Festival and in turn for the ProArts at Noon Series on March 13, 2013. This will be a performance in celebration of World Storytelling Days.
Preparing stories for performance is wrought with some joy and some difficulty. There is the company and comfort that a story gives me. I make my way through mundane daily tasks with a saga playing through my head and i am transported. It takes discipline to dedicate myself to this journey though. No one is asking me to do it. The deadline of performance is a great motivator. This is difficult but gratifying work.
Outside of my own inner journey, how do I find a way to improve my performance? Who can I find to be a generous listener? My family often complies and then puts up the too tired or too busy signal. Who will give me the honest pans and perks that I need? Mary Hays is a generous supporter of many a budding storyteller through her teaching at SAIT in the library program. I was clever enough to choose her as my partner. Mary listens with integrity, with a supportive face, with awe.
Today we spent some time reconnecting after a summer away. So many family and personal events to share…Then we got down to the task at hand, looked back over the rough outline plan we had made 2 months earlier and dove deeply into saying the Saga, telling the stories. We have to compress long descriptions, we are presenting a small but pithy sample of the saga that we know takes a good long day to tell. (We performed the whole piece shared with 14 storytellers in May of this year – see Post Saga Musings)
What details should we include? What should we leave out so that we can fit the 5o minute time slot and give a sense of this powerful tale. We know that the listener needs to know the answers to all the five questions: who, what , where, when and why. We need to help them to see why they need to hear this story, how they might find something of themselves in its unfolding…
Come to the Cathedral of the Redeemer on 7th Ave. and 1st St. S.E. Calgary AB at noon on Wednesday March 13th to hear of Grettir the Strong. He was a man who lived in the 900s and whose tale was shared orally in the smoky front rooms of small turf cottages all across Iceland until it was finally written down on calfskin sheets in the 1400s. You will hear accounts of this man in his most courageous and most vulnerable days, dealing with She – Trolls. with sorceresses, loyal family members and ne’er do wells. Come under the spell of this ancient saga that dwells today in the hearts and minds of most Icelanders and especially that of Mary Hays and Karen Gummo.
