RAV - Regional Arts Victoria - The peak body for regional arts activity in Victoria

An Audience with Andrew McKenna

An audience with Andrew McKenna

arts2GO's Program Officer Emily Atkins catches up with Andrew McKenna, award winning journalist, and one of Australia's most prolific storytellers.

A founding member of innovative theatre company Whistling in the Theatre, Andrew has toured Australia and Ireland, delighting both young and old with his unique approach to the age-old art of storytelling.

He has been touring both Metropolitan Melbourne and Regional Victorian schools as part of the arts2GO program for the past two years and has been an outstanding success, with rave reviews from teachers statewide.

During Andrew McKenna: Master Storyteller, he mines his vast repertoire of stories to suit his audience, using movement, music and mask to illuminate his tales. Primary students from a variety of backgrounds have been delighted by the raucous hilarity mixed with eerie quiet that characterizes a typical McKenna performance (if such a thing exists!).

For secondary students his emphasis is slightly different, tapping into the adolescent love of the bizarre and gritty with A Cry in the Wilderness, a show based on the life of cannibal convict Alexander Pearce. 2009 is the first year that he is touring this particular show with arts2GO, but interest is building in what is sure to be a thought provoking piece of work.

In keen anticipation of his Term 2 tour of both shows with arts2GO, we spoke to Andrew about all things storytelling!

How did you get started as a storyteller?
I worked and still work as a journalist, and years ago I interviewed a storyteller, thinking all the time, why don't I do this? I stuck the idea away until I finally decided to give it a go. I already had books full of stories on my bookshelves.

I did a lot of theatre at University and founded a theatre company with some friends, but somehow working with a lot of other actors seemed too cumbersome and too political. I rarely agreed with what they were on about.

I started out at a local kindergarten, and I still go there weekly to try out new material and polish up old stories. The little guys love it, and they're very forgiving if I stuff up lines.

How do you decide which stories to tell?
They have to leap off the page and offer performance possibilities. I probably choose less than five per cent of all the material I read, because I can envisage some much more readily in performance than others.

Not that every story has me jumping around in animal masks. I do perform some stories in a more traditional manner ‘sitting and speaking' but some material offers more evident possibilities. On the other hand if I want something on a theme I'll go looking.

I've read some African, Aboriginal and particularly North and South American Indian stories that are fantastic, but I just don't ‘get' them. They've either lost something in language translation, or the culture doesn't translate.

What do you like best about storytelling?
There's the buzz of performing, and I do shows for adults as well as kids. There's performing my own material and seeing it work. I also appreciate the fantastic well of material out there, the great oral traditions of humanity (that someone somewhere wrote down). Breathing life into old material is part of it.

Sometimes I'm attracted to a story for no apparent reason, start performing it, and months or years later I'll go, ‘oh, so that's what this story is about, and that's why I like it'. The material can be dense and need to be ‘unpacked', but it's open to many different interpretations.

I also love getting people up to play some of the roles and seeing them break up with laughter, especially adults. We're a bit too uptight for our own good these days.

Do you have a favourite story? If so, what is it and why?
I'm very fickle. I have favourite stories for a while and then I move on to new material and come under its influence.

At the moment I'm in a Russian phase. The Russian tales are zany, with devils, witches and trips to weird places, like the bottom of the sea. They're bizarre and quite dark, with deaths and skewerings and awful revenge. What were they on? I inserted a George Bush accent behind a devil mask recently, which added a whole new perspective. Great for adults, but change the emphasis slightly and they work wonderfully for kids.

Do you have any other projects on the go?
I do. I write my own one-man shows, like Cry in the Wilderness, about the cannibal convict of Van Diemen's Land.

I'm working on Harry Lasseter's Dream, a play about Harry Lasseter and his gold reef in central Australia. It's a grand story that touches on archetypal themes - lust for gold, greed/following your dreams, madness, and the quest for the holy grail at the centre of the new continent. Big themes for kids, but I'm telling it through the eyes of an Afghan cameleer, Abdul, and his camel Jemal, and they have a fun relationship.

There'll be puppets and some ‘traditional storytelling', as Abdul tells a few Pashtun tales that reflect the main story. I've worked with dramaturg Peter Matheson on the script and am going into rehearsals shortly.

I'm also doing Feldenkrais lessons to get me out of my head and into my body.

Andrew McKenna is touring with the arts2GO program from 9-19 June. For more information contact arts2GO@rav.net.au.

www.andrewmckenna.net.au.