Capturing the dynamics of narrative development in an oral storytelling performance: A multimodal perspective

Abstract

This article investigates how the dynamics of narrative development in an oral storytelling performance can be captured so as to explain its aesthetic and communicative effectiveness. In the light of the narratological distinctions between story and discourse, an oral storytelling performance conducted by a professional storyteller in an institution in contemporary society is treated as constituting the story (i.e. content elements such as events, characters, time and location) and the storytelling discourse (i.e. expressive features employed by a storyteller during a storytelling process). It is then examined as an artistic process that ‘exploits’ more than one semiotic channel to evoke a storyworld. The performance-focused multimodal analysis shows how the interplay between verbal, vocal and visual features of the storytelling discourse produces certain interpretations and meanings of the events and characters in the story and how, through such interplay, the audience is encouraged to have relatively uniform cognitive, emotive and evaluative responses which are in line with the values and messages of the institution in/for which a particular storytelling performance is conducted. A performance-focused multimodal analysis is, therefore, suggested for capturing the dynamics of narrative development in an oral storytelling performance and for uncovering its aesthetic and communicative effectiveness.