Among the many delegates at this month’s Museums Association annual conference in Edinburgh will be Donald Smith, although his role will be very different from most attendees: he will be the event’s first ever storyteller in residence.
Smith will not have to travel far, as he is the director of Edinburgh’s Scottish Storytelling Centre, which is located in The Netherbow, the halfway point on the city’s Royal Mile. His job will be to gather ideas, thoughts and opinions from delegates for a storytelling finale to the conference.
Smith first heard traditional tales as a child but has been actively studying Scots and Irish storytelling from more than 20 years.
Some of his interest in the subject stemmed from a general upsurge in the profile of Scottish culture that begun when he was a teenager in the 1970s. This coincided with the first big postwar surge in nationalism and the shifting cultural context that came with this.
“There was a sense of people beginning to feel that we’d neglected what was rather distinctive in our cultural and social traditions,” says Smith. “One of the seeds that was sown out of that was the importance in Scotland of oral history, storytelling and song.”
At this stage, Smith’s interest was more broadly in Scottish culture, not specifically storytelling. But this changed when, as a university student in Edinburgh, he met members of Scotland’s travelling community, who see improvised oral performance as an important part of their culture.
“It was love at first sight – I had never quite experienced anything quite like that,” says Smith. “I thought, wow, this is really interesting. What these people are doing seems simple, but it is really quite complex. There is a great artistry in what they are doing and its power of communication is huge.”
This community of storytellers became important later on in his career when Smith was working in the arts and was looking for ways to broaden the appeal of the theatre he was involved in.
“It was not until I had been five or six years desperately trying to make small-scale theatre work and pay that I thought: ‘Where is the storytelling?’ I invited some of those travellers to be part of our events and that sparked off a response, both in terms of the stories, but also in the method and the process.”
Storytelling in Scotland
Smith says the storytelling tradition is important in Scotland for a number of reasons. A major one is that it has always been present in society.
“The tradition is continuous here, it has never been entirely interrupted. It has been pushed to the margins but one of the fantastic things when we were starting to develop all this activity is that I had great resources of people in urban working-class communities who were wonderful performers and had this repository of stories and music.
“It was the same in the highland and lowland areas. So I felt I was tapping into something that had been shoved to the background but was absolutely still alive.”
There was also a radical edge to people’s interest in storytelling, precisely because it had been deliberately excluded or marginalised. The same could be said of other important Scottish traditions.
“People were belted at school for speaking Scots, so there has been a huge turnaround in attitudes during my lifetime,” says Smith.
This growing public interest in Scottish culture continued into the 1980s and 1990s and Smith puts the increasing cohesiveness of the people of Scotland down to one person.
“Mrs Thatcher was a great help to us,” says Smith, who argues that the former Conservative prime minister was a big factor in convincing people that Scotland needed its own parliament. “She wrecked our manufacturing industry but, by God, she pulled Scottish society together.”
And he sees parallels with the moves to full independence today. “Mrs Thatcher gave us the Scottish parliament and you could see circumstances where David Cameron becomes the person to hand us independence, without intending it,” Smith says.
“If people feel that autonomy can’t develop or is blocked off, then people might vote for independence rather than see the autonomy thing stop.”
Having said all that, Smith is keen not to over-emphasise the political dimension of storytelling or even its specific Scottishness. He says there has also been a very strong global growth in oral traditions and some of the reasons for this lay beyond particular social and political contexts.
“It’s interesting that as technology has developed, awareness in live storytelling has grown as well. I think that is probably quite logical and appropriate. People need to own things for themselves and not be beholden to Google all the time, useful as all those [online] systems can be.”
There is also the simple appeal of people getting together to participate in something. A Hungarian visitor to one of the Scottish Storytelling Centre’s storytelling clubs, evenings of collaborative storytelling that are held in a pub, described the event as “being human together” and Smith thinks this sums the concept up nicely.
And the participatory element of storytelling is something that some people don’t realise is important until they attend an event. One of the slogans at the storytelling centre is that tales should be told mind-to-mind, eye-to-eye, and heart-to-heart.
“It is sometimes hard for people to get the idea that storytelling is essentially participative,” Smith says.
“There are all these complex factors, such as memory and emotion, but essentially, for it to be storytelling, everyone has to be part of it. And in different ways and different areas of life it is sort of a gale of fresh air if this kind of participative sharing of experience can be allowed to happen.”
Links to other artforms
Smith says that storytelling has lots of connections to other artforms, such as film, literature and the visual arts. He also points to its relevance to the work of museums.
The collaborative nature of storytelling, the exchanging of tales and the importance of people’s personal views and ideas are of particular interest to museums that are trying to find ways to engage audiences in a less passive way, Smith believes.
“Museums have their own kinds of storytelling and it is really complementary to what live storytelling is about and how it works,” he says.
A sense of place is also something that is important to many museums and this was vital in the development of the Scottish Storytelling Centre as Smith was keen for the venue to connect to its environment, both physically and historically. The venue is at the heart of one of the oldest parts of the city.
Smith says he is often asked by museums and other cultural organisations how to develop a storytelling centre, but he wants each place to be unique.
“The one thing I keep saying to people is this is how we did it here but that does not mean that is how you should do it. You have to find a way that is right for your place, your culture, your situation, because that is the art of the storyteller,” he says.
“A storyteller never goes to two different places and tells the same story in the same way – they have to adapt it to the audience and the place that they are in.”
It will be interesting to see what stories Smith finds at the Museums Association conference. Hopefully it will be an unusual but enjoyable end to the event.
“Storytelling can only happen if everyone’s imagination is engaged,” says Smith. “And the key thing about storytelling is that it has to entertain.”
This year’s Museums Association conference takes place from 8-9 November in Edinburgh.
Donald Smith, the director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh, started his career working in the theatre. He has been an active student of Scots and Irish storytelling for more than 20 years and more recently started telling stories himself.
He tells mainly Scots and Irish folk tales but is also interested in recovering oral stories from the literary manuscripts of a variety of cultures.
Smith is a founding member of the Scottish Storytelling Forum and of Edinburgh’s Guid Crack Club. He has published two novels, The English Spy and Between Ourselves, as well as a variety of other books on history, poetry and storytelling.
The Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, opened in 2006 and was designed by Malcolm Fraser Architects. The centre includes the historic John Knox House, the 99-seat Netherbow Theatre and the George Mackay Brown Library.
It is the headquarters of the Scottish Storytelling Network. There is a storytelling court, permanent exhibition and a programme of temporary displays. The centre holds and organises a wide range of public events.
Smith will not have to travel far, as he is the director of Edinburgh’s Scottish Storytelling Centre, which is located in The Netherbow, the halfway point on the city’s Royal Mile. His job will be to gather ideas, thoughts and opinions from delegates for a storytelling finale to the conference.
Smith first heard traditional tales as a child but has been actively studying Scots and Irish storytelling from more than 20 years.
Some of his interest in the subject stemmed from a general upsurge in the profile of Scottish culture that begun when he was a teenager in the 1970s. This coincided with the first big postwar surge in nationalism and the shifting cultural context that came with this.
“There was a sense of people beginning to feel that we’d neglected what was rather distinctive in our cultural and social traditions,” says Smith. “One of the seeds that was sown out of that was the importance in Scotland of oral history, storytelling and song.”
At this stage, Smith’s interest was more broadly in Scottish culture, not specifically storytelling. But this changed when, as a university student in Edinburgh, he met members of Scotland’s travelling community, who see improvised oral performance as an important part of their culture.
“It was love at first sight – I had never quite experienced anything quite like that,” says Smith. “I thought, wow, this is really interesting. What these people are doing seems simple, but it is really quite complex. There is a great artistry in what they are doing and its power of communication is huge.”
This community of storytellers became important later on in his career when Smith was working in the arts and was looking for ways to broaden the appeal of the theatre he was involved in.
“It was not until I had been five or six years desperately trying to make small-scale theatre work and pay that I thought: ‘Where is the storytelling?’ I invited some of those travellers to be part of our events and that sparked off a response, both in terms of the stories, but also in the method and the process.”
Storytelling in Scotland
Smith says the storytelling tradition is important in Scotland for a number of reasons. A major one is that it has always been present in society.
“The tradition is continuous here, it has never been entirely interrupted. It has been pushed to the margins but one of the fantastic things when we were starting to develop all this activity is that I had great resources of people in urban working-class communities who were wonderful performers and had this repository of stories and music.
“It was the same in the highland and lowland areas. So I felt I was tapping into something that had been shoved to the background but was absolutely still alive.”
There was also a radical edge to people’s interest in storytelling, precisely because it had been deliberately excluded or marginalised. The same could be said of other important Scottish traditions.
“People were belted at school for speaking Scots, so there has been a huge turnaround in attitudes during my lifetime,” says Smith.
This growing public interest in Scottish culture continued into the 1980s and 1990s and Smith puts the increasing cohesiveness of the people of Scotland down to one person.
“Mrs Thatcher was a great help to us,” says Smith, who argues that the former Conservative prime minister was a big factor in convincing people that Scotland needed its own parliament. “She wrecked our manufacturing industry but, by God, she pulled Scottish society together.”
And he sees parallels with the moves to full independence today. “Mrs Thatcher gave us the Scottish parliament and you could see circumstances where David Cameron becomes the person to hand us independence, without intending it,” Smith says.
“If people feel that autonomy can’t develop or is blocked off, then people might vote for independence rather than see the autonomy thing stop.”
Having said all that, Smith is keen not to over-emphasise the political dimension of storytelling or even its specific Scottishness. He says there has also been a very strong global growth in oral traditions and some of the reasons for this lay beyond particular social and political contexts.
“It’s interesting that as technology has developed, awareness in live storytelling has grown as well. I think that is probably quite logical and appropriate. People need to own things for themselves and not be beholden to Google all the time, useful as all those [online] systems can be.”
There is also the simple appeal of people getting together to participate in something. A Hungarian visitor to one of the Scottish Storytelling Centre’s storytelling clubs, evenings of collaborative storytelling that are held in a pub, described the event as “being human together” and Smith thinks this sums the concept up nicely.
And the participatory element of storytelling is something that some people don’t realise is important until they attend an event. One of the slogans at the storytelling centre is that tales should be told mind-to-mind, eye-to-eye, and heart-to-heart.
“It is sometimes hard for people to get the idea that storytelling is essentially participative,” Smith says.
“There are all these complex factors, such as memory and emotion, but essentially, for it to be storytelling, everyone has to be part of it. And in different ways and different areas of life it is sort of a gale of fresh air if this kind of participative sharing of experience can be allowed to happen.”
Links to other artforms
Smith says that storytelling has lots of connections to other artforms, such as film, literature and the visual arts. He also points to its relevance to the work of museums.
The collaborative nature of storytelling, the exchanging of tales and the importance of people’s personal views and ideas are of particular interest to museums that are trying to find ways to engage audiences in a less passive way, Smith believes.
“Museums have their own kinds of storytelling and it is really complementary to what live storytelling is about and how it works,” he says.
A sense of place is also something that is important to many museums and this was vital in the development of the Scottish Storytelling Centre as Smith was keen for the venue to connect to its environment, both physically and historically. The venue is at the heart of one of the oldest parts of the city.
Smith says he is often asked by museums and other cultural organisations how to develop a storytelling centre, but he wants each place to be unique.
“The one thing I keep saying to people is this is how we did it here but that does not mean that is how you should do it. You have to find a way that is right for your place, your culture, your situation, because that is the art of the storyteller,” he says.
“A storyteller never goes to two different places and tells the same story in the same way – they have to adapt it to the audience and the place that they are in.”
It will be interesting to see what stories Smith finds at the Museums Association conference. Hopefully it will be an unusual but enjoyable end to the event.
“Storytelling can only happen if everyone’s imagination is engaged,” says Smith. “And the key thing about storytelling is that it has to entertain.”
This year’s Museums Association conference takes place from 8-9 November in Edinburgh.
Donald Smith at a glance
Donald Smith, the director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh, started his career working in the theatre. He has been an active student of Scots and Irish storytelling for more than 20 years and more recently started telling stories himself.
He tells mainly Scots and Irish folk tales but is also interested in recovering oral stories from the literary manuscripts of a variety of cultures.
Smith is a founding member of the Scottish Storytelling Forum and of Edinburgh’s Guid Crack Club. He has published two novels, The English Spy and Between Ourselves, as well as a variety of other books on history, poetry and storytelling.
The Scottish Storytelling Centre at a glance
The Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, opened in 2006 and was designed by Malcolm Fraser Architects. The centre includes the historic John Knox House, the 99-seat Netherbow Theatre and the George Mackay Brown Library.
It is the headquarters of the Scottish Storytelling Network. There is a storytelling court, permanent exhibition and a programme of temporary displays. The centre holds and organises a wide range of public events.
