STORYTELLING

  The Story So Far
SoulCircle offers a narrative and storytelling intervention that use words, pictures, sounds and music in the shape of stories to promote understanding, change and growth. When SoulCircle is not recording or telling stories in communities, companies or in groups of people, we are collecting stories about the African experience.

Stories for South Africa
Storytelling is a superb medium for South Africans to re-engage, in an authentic manner, with their ancestry, their common traumatic past, and their future. Understanding the political and social motives behind historical stories allows people to gain a better understanding of the modern socio-political paradigm, and its fundamental interaction with stories and the people who tell them.

What is Story?
In a world of complex cultures and diverse beings there is a connection that contains and brings us all together. That connection is contained in communication which creates understanding through the expression of stories.

By sharing stories we preserve memory, we explain the contexts we live in, we share who we are and we imagine where we are going. Storytelling involves words, sometimes music, action and pictures, captures the imagination and involves participants in the narration in imparting wisdom, learning or in helping facilitate change and understanding.

Storytelling, as used today, often refers to an interactive experience between a teller and a listener. In its purest sense, many mediums such as novels and television, while they contain stories, are not seen in the same light as "storytelling" which permits live storytellers the opportunity to morph and change their stories based on the reactions of story listeners.

Most of us recognise story in every facet of life. Stories, whether written or heard, are an encounter with metaphors that bear on everyday life. Those of us who are careful listeners come to see peoples’ lives as stories — that in speaking to one another we tell our stories, and that the stories we reach out and identify with can help us make choices, find direction, identify moral hazards, and understand our personal lives with more clarity.

Above all there is no one definition of SoulCircle’s narrative interventions. What is agreed upon, however, is that story is all around us, and it is simply our choice whom we choose as our storytellers.

For more about SoulCircle’s storytelling interventions and services email mandy@soulcircle.co.za