Story slams are designed to be in-person events, a performance of sorts where storytellers unveil their tales and feed off an audience’s response — and maybe do a bit of physical acting to punctuate key moments.
So how do you deal with the pandemic?
At Northampton’s Academy of Music, the Valley Voices Story Slam, a regular and popular event for the last several years, has moved online, like so much of life. But it’s also taken up a kind of hybrid format, in which the storytellers still do their thing from the stage, up in front of a microphone by themselves. The audience, though, is watching the livestreamed show via Zoom.
The format, unveiled early last month, includes four large monitors set up on the lip of the stage, enabling performers to see friends, family and others watching from their homes. Some 250 households bought tickets for the show, according to Academy Executive Director Debra J’Anthony, and storytellers say the virtual slam worked surprisingly well.
“I had thought it might be strange, facing an empty audience,” said Bryn Nowell, who was taking part in her first story slam. “But it actually felt pretty good … I could see people’s faces (on the monitors) well enough, I could see their reactions, whether they thought something was funny or sad. It was all less awkward than I had thought it might be.”
Nowell, an admissions counselor at Holyoke Community College who lives in South Hadley, says there were other people at the Academy, such as fellow storytellers and a crew from Laudable Productions of Easthampton, which engineered the digital show.
“That’s obviously not the same as having a full audience, and you don’t hear responses like people laughing, but it feels a lot different than doing it from your living room,” she noted.
The Academy will host another Story Slam this Thursday from its stage at 7:30 p.m. The show, built around the theme of “Around the Block,” was supposed to take place in May. All tickets from that event will be honored, and tickets for the performance — it costs $10 — are available at aomtheatre.com.
J’Anthony says the Valley Voices Story Slam, which started almost six years ago, is a co-production with New England Public Media (NEPM). There have typically been four staged each year — many are held in area clubs and pubs — followed by a “Best of” contest each January at the Academy featuring audience-chosen winners from the four previous slams.
For each slam, Academy and NEPM staff come up with a prompt, a phrase such as “Sweet and Salty” or “Around the Block,” and would-be contestants then submit a single sentence on that theme for consideration. Winners — about a dozen storytellers are chosen for each slam — are then invited to attend workshops hosted by event producers to develop their stories in full and make sure they match the theme. Contestants have five minutes to tell their tales, a limit that’s strictly enforced.
“I was surprised at first at how popular this turned out to be,” said J’Anthony, who noted that 160 people applied to be in the first show. “And I’ve consistently been impressed with the diversity of stories we get and the different ways they’re delivered.”
She also noted that Laudable Productions had live-streamed a number of concerts from the Academy over the summer, prompting her and the other Story Slam producers to consider using the format for storytellers at the theater. Some performers, such as first-time storytellers with no experience being in front of a live audience, could benefit from the virtual format, she said: “It might take some of the pressure off.”
Kerrita Mayfield, who’s been participating in story slams around the Valley for several years, wasn’t so sure the virtual version could work for her before she took part in last month’s slam at the Academy. Online storytelling can “be super awkward,” she said in an email. “A performer coasts off the responses from the audience.”
But Mayfield, who teaches science at the Amherst-Pelham Middle School, also noted that when she did one storytelling session from her home back in spring, she “could see flashes of my friends’ faces on the monitors, and that was so reassuring when I started to falter.”
And given that “nothing is normal now,” she said, she’s using the restrictions of COVID-19 to take a new approach to her performances; for some of her more recent story creations, she’s been reflecting on the pandemic and ongoing issues such as police violence against Blacks.
“I tend to be goal oriented for my storytelling,” said Mayfield. “I want to try X, or want to explore the themes of Z. That night (at the Academy), in front of the computer bank, as a Black woman I wanted to take up space in a very specific way.”
The Academy, Mayfield added, “had such a great plan for safety that I felt great participating on stage, with others.”
Another storyteller from last month, Lila West of South Hadley, said she’d been inspired to try her hand after she attended the “Best of” story slam at the Academy in January. “I loved it!” she wrote in an email. Since she’d always enjoyed telling funny stories at home, West added, “I decided to try it, mostly out of curiosity to see if I could pull it off in front of people who aren’t just my family and friends.”
Since she’d also never done a “normal” slam in front of an audience, West noted, she wasn’t sure what to expect by speaking to a virtual audience. “I preferred to look up and out at the room, rather than at the screens. I thought I might get distracted, looking for people I know, or by all the movement, which isn’t hidden as well as it is in a darkened theater.”
Overall, West says she had a great experience — she offered a humorous story called “The Stinky Kid” from her days in college — and she likes the idea that Zoom lets people outside a geographic area enjoy an event. And given how much she’s on Zoom for other parts of the day, she noted, the experience didn’t feel odd.
West had also worried a bit that a live audience wouldn’t laugh at the funny parts of her tale, “so in a way, having a very small live audience alleviated those fears. That being said, I would love to try it again in the future in a more ‘normal’ format.”
J’Anthony said the Academy has no immediate plans to reintroduce live events. But the theater will be hosting its next “Best of” Story Slam on Jan. 16, 2021, in a livestreamed show featuring 15 selected performers from 2020, all competing for the grand prize of “Best of Valley Voices.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.