Why Storytelling Is A Beautiful And Strong Art Form

The Moth currently hold events in close to 40 cities, produce a podcast and American radio show, and run storytelling workshops for communities and businesses. In Australia, The Moth are setting up monthly open-mic StorySLAMs in Sydney and Melbourne, as well as bringing their curated Mainstage program to the Festival Of Dangerous Ideas and Melbourne Writers' Festival.

"What we are really at heart is about the room; it's about people in a room coming together."

"How the SLAMs work is that they take place once a month, and they're very much about building the community in the place," explains Cino. "What happens a lot of the time is that people will come out and then they'll come out again and they'll bring their friends, and then a really warm community crops up, and people help each other workshop their stories, and it really becomes its own world. Once we've done 12 SLAMs, the winners of each of those events come together and they have a Grand SLAM which is a very big splashy event often in a bigger venue.

"[The curated Mainstage series is] where we select storytellers in advance and work with them on their stories and the stories are a little longer. All of our series happen live — what we are really at heart is about the room; it's about people in a room coming together, and we record all of the nights, we record the curated series, we record every single SLAM, and we have a team in New York that listens to each of the stories, and then as each story is listened to, they're pulled out for the radio and for the podcast. All of the Australian series will be incorporated into that, we're definitely going to be looking for some great voices to represent it, and we're really excited about what we're going to find and what we're going to be able to give to the world."

It's rare for stories that work in the moment to not quite translate to audio.

"It's really astounding how powerfully the stories do translate. I think that the audience is so warm that a lot of the time you can hear their reaction and you can kind of feel their feeling in the room. And it's also the beauty of somebody just speaking really simply about something that happened to them: you can hear the passion and the conviction in each individual storyteller and it does come across really beautifully in audio."

The Moth will be entering two cities with already established storytelling communities, including Story Club and Confession Booth in Sydney, and Women Of Letters in Melbourne. "We really hope to become part of the dialogue in the cities going on and be able to share resources and ideas," says Cino.

There's a certain appeal to live storytelling that The Moth and the above organisations tap into.

"There is something so incredibly intimate and, while sometimes very emotionally raw, also very centring, about being able to sit down and just listen to one person talk from the heart about something that's important to them. It just provides a sense of connection in a public forum that is very rare, and it's so simple, and it's so straightforward. In most of our forums it's very acceptable to be able to go up and have a moment and talk to the person afterwards if their story affected them, and that sense of intimacy and community is just not something you can experience in most other art forms.

"There's also this beautiful thing where we live now in this global world and everybody is really trying to make sense of it, and I think part of the beauty and the strength of this art form, especially at this point in time, is that all we have to learn from is each other. So having a forum where people are able to speak to what matters to them and talk about what happened to them and how they got to the other side — whether it was a big epic terrifying thing or whether it was a very short funny thing — we're just all listening to each other and tapping in and trying to figure out how the world works, and it's one of the things that I love about this."