Chorus – inviting audience participation

“And they all lived…”  “…happily ever after!”  

So you find yourself telling a story to a group of listeners. Whether it’s your first time or you’re long-experienced at it, whether in a speech, a sermon, a class or a storytelling performance, there’s a little something that can be a useful and fun technique to include: guiding the others to join their voices in a chorus!

Depending, of course, on the particulars of the occasion

– the nature of the group, of the event, of the story you’ve chosen – it can be a fun and effective tool for connecting everyone to the story and to each other, with their breath and voices.

It can happen a variety of ways. Two of the easiest are:

• You can teach a recurring phrase or rhyme or sound effect, and with a hand gesture invite them to join in with it each appropriate time in the story. (“I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll BLOW your house down!” – as one example most of us might remember from childhood.  Or in biblical storytelling: “And God saw that it was good,” from Genesis 1; or “Immediately,” from the Gospel of Mark.)
• You can start a familiar saying and then pause, inviting them with a raised hand or eyebrow to finish it together. (“An apple a day…” “…keeps the doctor away.” This technique is pretty effective with adult audiences, and they often will chime in – even in relatively “staid” contexts.)

Finding a way to guide the group in front of you to join their voices together, even just a bit (leaving aside for now any strongly-resisting introverts or intransigent contrarians that may be present), automatically provides another level of both physical and metaphorical connection. Your voices and breaths act in concert, plus the group experiences “we’re all in this together.”

Give it a try!

You may say on your own, “And they all lived…” But you may end up with a lively group chorus of “happily ever after!”

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There are many good and detailed resources for learning to use audience participation – “chorus!” – stories.  Here are a couple:

• Joining In: An Anthology of Audience Participation Stories and How to Tell Them by Teresa Miller, Anne Pellowski and Norma J. Livo
• Many of Margaret Read MacDonald’s books.  A favorite example of mine is Earth Care: World Folktales to Talk About

If you’d like, you can read about some of the stories I tell, here – some of which invite audience choruses!

Thanks for reading – Pam