Last week, we held the first storytelling event, followed by an open space workshop to discuss responses to these tales. The storytelling was with Ben Haggerty and Tuup, who told some old tales with some trickster twists. Of course, some of these tales were of the most obvious deceptions – tenants tricking landlords with donkeys who excreted money and Ananse tricking his animal friends into feasting on each other – but the most interesting part, for me at least, was the larger question posed by Ben – ‘when did your sympathies shift?’ Indeed, during several of the stories I felt in a quandary about who was my protagonist and who was my hero, and who I felt sorry for the most. As a writer, a lot of my time is spent thinking about my audience, and how they might react to what I am telling them, and why I am telling them that. So this idea is, to me, absolutely central, and becomes crucial when telling a trickster tale. After all, do we like to be tricked? Is it fair? And what about when we are doing the tricking? And what about the role of the author, or the storyteller, in this?
This led to some fascinating discussion at the open space workshop. Split into groups (‘Translating and Transforming’, ‘Frothing and Cooling’ and ‘Challenging and Subverting’), we each focused our discussions on the role of the trickster in literature, culture and contemporary deception. We also discussed possible creative and critical responses to the stories we’d digested, rather like Anase and his animal feast, from the night before. We will be presenting this selection of artwork, creative writing, critical musings and photographs in the ‘responses’ section of this site very shortly, but we also scribbled ideas onto post it notes, and I took a couple of pictures of the range of ideas presented – see below.
After this, there was a change in tactics as we discussed the idea of trickery with master magician Stuart Nolan. As a practising magician but also an academic, Stuart posed the question so many of us had considered in the storytelling event and in the open discussion, but with particular pertinence to the role of the magician: who wants to feel like they’ve been tricked? A magician, Stuart said, would rather the audience feel somehow complicit than tricked – which led me to the idea that one of the main roles of the trickster (in stories, in contemporary real life, in magic) is to have power. A fitting end to a fascinating day.
Please feel free to start contributing to the responses section, and many thanks to all who attended what was a terrific initial investigation into the trickster tropes.
Holly.
