info_outline
Searching For Story
03/15/2023
Searching For Story
The quest is an essential element of storytelling. Joseph Campbell frames the entire concept around ‘the heroes journey’, or the idea that every character has to travel a great distance, whether literally, like Odysseus’ adventure to return home, or figuratively, as Nora, the protagonist in Henrick Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, who by the end of the play has journeyed so far inside her own mind that she is no longer the same person. But what happens when the search is for the story itself? That is what we wanted to explore today. First, a choreographer determined to put the Arts back into Athletics, as she looks for the story only a body can tell. Vianna Isbister is a graduate student in the ETSU Communication and Storytelling Studies Master’s Program. Vianna specializes in personal stories and aerial dance. Later in the episode, a sister sets out to find the real story of her family hidden underneath the one she’s been told. “Are we running our lives off of a story that isn’t true?” Three sisters have a long overdue conversation where they confront what it means to begin to question the narratives in their family they have heretofore accepted as fact. Wendy Folsom is a writer and performer living in Montana. She received her master’s in Communication and Storytelling Studies from ETSU in 2021. Wendy recently helped launch the Ignite Story Lab, a writer coaching organization. In a Doll’s House, Ibsen spoke to us through Nora when she said, “I believe that I am first and foremost a human being, like you – or anyway, that I must try to become one. I know most people think as you do, Torvald, and I know there’s something of the sort to be found in books. But I’m no longer prepared to accept what people say and what’s written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.” She had to find her own story. Through the discovery of Story the hero finds herself, we uncover our hidden pasts, and find ourselves in unexplored territories of the heart and mind.
/episode/index/show/e585eb49-cbe2-40c1-8fbc-b12b5e7aa71b/id/26371608
