A Storied Affair : By Tapping Into ‘the Place Where We Dream,’ Storytellers Weave Special Magic

It seems these pigeons were preparing to fly from Haiti to New York City, and a turtle wanted to go with them. Now, everyone knows turtles can’t fly, but one pigeon offered to carry a stick that the turtle could hold onto with its mouth.

“ ‘And if you can keep your mouth shut. . .’

“ ‘I can, I can, I can!’

” ’. . .then you can fly with me from Haiti to New York City.’

“ ‘Let’s do, let’s do, let’s do!’ ”

A hundred or so South Pasadena schoolchildren are in gales of laughter as storyteller Milbre Burch gives life to the characters whose plan ultimately fails. The turtle, it turns out, can’t resist calling out:

“Bye-byyyyyyyyyyyyye. . . .”

And down he goes.

Burch’s recent show at Monterey Hills School was but one small piece in the many-hued mosaic of storytelling performances around Los Angeles, where the stories and the tellers are as diverse as the population.

The agenda will be the same this summer as Southland children listen to African, American Indian, Jewish and American pioneer stories; tales about women; stories in Spanish and English, and signed stories for the hearing-impaired.

How do storytellers create something that the MTV generation can relate to?

“It’s hard to explain,” says storyteller Kathleen Zundell. “Storytelling goes in deeply to the place where we dream, a place between reality and the world of the spell. Children from age 4 to 7 live there all the time, so when you tell a story, it’s easy for them to go there.”

Burch says when she sees children sitting still and slack-jawed in the “story-listening trance,” she knows “the story has plugged into them.”

“I think human beings have loved story since the beginning of language,” she says. “There’s some part of it that’s in our genes, because even a child who has never seen a live performer will go into the listening trance. Part of the chemistry of it is being given a gift by someone who thinks it’s special.

“A child who is in a group of 500 will say, ‘Did you see me?’ It’s that kind of personal reaction. Like, ‘You did this for me .’ ”

Students at Monterey Hills School said they had indeed felt as if they each had been alone in the room with Burch.

“She looks at you. TV doesn’t do that,” said Ben Larsen, 9. Live storytelling “is three-dimensional, it’s real, it’s not in a box.”

James Cho, 8, said the performance had taken him back to a simpler time, before the complications of the third grade. He said it made him feel like a carefree kindergartner again.

Longtime storytellers agree that the oral tradition has seen a revival in the United States over the past two decades. In the Los Angeles area, storytellers have found their audience in a rainbow of listeners, says storyteller Leslie Perry.

Perry, who organized the recent “Back Yard Griots Festival of Black Storytelling” with partial sponsorship from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, specializes in stories about American slaves. His story “Shine and the Tar Man” speaks of a slave and a master--but the race of neither is mentioned.

“In some stories, of course,” he says, “you know the characters are black, even though we don’t say so.”

Storyteller-musician Karen Golden specializes in stories from the Jewish culture and biographies. To her, the appeal of the oral tradition is that “it is so pure and honest that people can relate to it. It helps people see the beauty in themselves.”

Amateur and professional storytellers meet in such groups as the Westside-based Community Storytellers and the San Gabriel Valley Storytellers in Pasadena. Golden organizes a quarterly Story Swap, in which anyone who cares to get up and tell a tale is given eight minutes to do so. And Burch, who is nationally recognized in her field, presents a storytelling series for adults, called “By Word of Mouth,” from October through May.

The biggest promoters of storytelling are libraries, which go into high gear with children’s programs for the summer. Children’s bookstores also hold regular storytelling hours.

Why is telling a simple story so popular?

“It is one of the responses to our highly technical, highly fragmented, highly sophisticated experience,” says Burch. “There are things missing, and storytelling is one of the things we’ve gone back to get.”