Stretching stories!!

How can you stretch a story to suit an audience? Interesting! I had an invite to the Merry Go Round Toy Library's 10th Birthday party. No idea about the age of audience apart from that they would probably be somewhere between 1 and 70 and that the space would be shared with a great array of toys! In that environment the storyteller can't say "Time for a story let's all listen" as that would be stretching the audience too far so the story has to stretch around the space and audience. The process is like fishing, catching attention through using physical story telling, using the engaged audience to become dragons, earth-holding giants and an orchard of golden apples and using interruptions such as the wailing child and the newspaper photographer as parts of the story. The thread of the story has to weave in and out of all of this and that is what makes story telling so very interesting. The story? Well a Greek Myth of course! Heracles and the Golden Apples of the Hesperides! It turned out to be a most enjoyable session. Before that it was Viking tales at Sunbeams after school club! Adventures indeed!