Storytelling and Theatre Contemporary Professional Storytellers and Their Art

This book will be of particular interest to undergraduates of performing arts and the substantial community of those engaged in storytelling, and fills a noticeable void in an emerging field of scholarship. It addresses the recent rise of storytelling as a professional performance art by providing a critical survey of current practice and a critical framework for those debates currently taking place and those yet to emerge. It includes critical analysis of a range of practices alongside interviews with key contemporary practitioners about their work.

Michael Wilson is Principal Lecturer in Drama at the University of Glamorgan, Wales. His book Performance and Practice: Oral Narrative Traditions among Teenagers in Britain and Ireland (Ashgate, 1997) was shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Memorial Award, 1998. For many years he also worked as a professional storyteller and was a key player in developing the artform in the 80s and 90s. He is series editor for Papyrus, an occasional series of research papers published by the Society for Storytelling and is currently working on a book on the Theatre of the Grand-Guignol (with Richard Hand) for University of Exeter press.