January 25, 2007

Jonatha and Harold Wright will tell classic French, Spanish, Dutch and Russian tales as the Springfield Symphony Orchestra plays the music they inspired at “Magical Tales” on Saturday, Feb. 3, 8 p.m. at the Kuss Auditorium.

By Lauren Heaton

There are no props and no stage lights when Jonatha and Harold Wright tell stories. The professional storytellers capture audiences with their whole bodies, using every facial muscle and vocal inflection to make people believe the scary in their monsters, the elation in their newlyweds, the creak in their granny’s rocking chair and the delicious in their sweet, homemade apple butter. Telling stories runs deep in their Appalachian blood, and they naturally see it as their job to preserve not only the stories and histories according to each generation, but to preserve storytelling itself as a respected and irreplaceable artform.

The couple will be doing their part next weekend when they join forces with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra in a performance of classical music and classical myths and legends in an evening of “Magical Tales” on Saturday, Feb. 3, at 8 p.m. at the Clark State Performing Arts Center Kuss Auditorium. The event is the second in the symphony’s NightLights series and will include four European poems or tales adapted for the telling by the Wrights and paired with music from the late Romantic period.

The concert will open with the Wrights telling the Norwegian fantasy poem “Peer Gynt” by Henrik Ibsen, whose garrulous hero embarks on many wild adventures, followed by the orchestra’s performance of Edvard Grieg’s “Suite from Peer Gynt.” Next will be the Wrights telling the Spanish folktale “Love, the Magician,” about a gypsy who is haunted by the ghost of her faithless lover until another suitor chases it away. The orchestra will follow with Manuel de Falla’s composition of the Spanish opera El Amor Brujo based on that story.

The second part of the evening will begin with the Wright’s adaptation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “L’après-midi d’un faun,” about the desires of a fawn dreaming in the afternoon sun, followed by the orchestra playing Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.” In the last performance of the evening, storytellers and musicians come together to weave the Russian folktale “The Firebird” into the music of Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite,” written in 1919 and based on the story of a magical firebird which grants a hunter his wishes in exchange for its freedom.

In adapting their stories for next week’s event, the Wrights included as much as possible of the original poetry (translated into English) and drew on the experience of Harold Wright, professor emeritus of Japanese at Antioch College, as a published translator of Japanese poetry. The Wrights have been telling as well as collecting mostly Appalachian and Japanese oral history for over 15 years, and when the Springfield orchestra conductor Peter Stafford Wilson approached them about a collaborative performance, they saw it as an opportunity to broaden their story repertoire and to elevate storytelling into the realm of the classical arts, where it should be, they said.

“We want people to accept storytelling as a performance art, not just a thing for kids,” Jonatha Wright said last week.

The Wrights have conducted many school programs around the state and performed at local family events, such as a Halloween scary stories evening at the Clifton Opera House last fall. But they would also like to breed an audience of adults who recognize the importance of keeping an oral history alive, much as the Native Americans and Appalachians have done.

Since the Wrights met in 1990 in a poetry group at the Antioch Writer’s Workshop, they have been traveling to Japan and collecting, adapting and translating folktales and oral histories from elders and war veterans. They have tried to do the same in the 29 official Appalachian counties in Ohio, whose residents don’t all necessarily want to emphasize their ties to the “hillbilly” tradition, they said.

But Harold Wright, whose ancestors come from the Kentucky hills, is down right proud of the stories of his family members, who were all gifted with tale-telling prowess. And he now tells stories from his own life, such as the time he was driving with his little brother Jack, who had to pee so badly he used Wright’s brand new ukulele as a receptacle and then threw it out the window, henceforth ending his potential for musical genius; or the time he thought his daddy getting canned at work meant they were going to chop him up and seal him in a sterile glass jar.

And Jonatha Wright too, whose mother’s people migrated from the Alabama hills to Missouri, where she was raised, keeps the traditions from her family’s front porch alive through stories, such as the one about how the townsfolk of Mounds, Okla., tried to get rich by digging for oil and instead ran into a geyser and flooded the people out.

The Wrights see storytelling as a way of teaching values, of transfering language, of passing down personal history and relating to others in the community, they said. Though they do write down many of the stories they collect, they feel it’s the telling that really captures people, starts conversation and prompts people to share their perspectives with each other.

“The Native Americans are concerned with writing stories down because it stops it in time, it kills the process and prevents new input into the stories from the next generation,” Jonatha Wright said.

There are many levels of the oral tradition starting with an historic event that takes on legendary proportions, moves into folktale and then becomes an artistic interpretation of that age-old story, Harold Wright said. On one of their voyages to Japan, the Wrights were trying to track the origin of a local folktale based on the historic event of a Japanese emperor who beheaded his brother, and ended up listening to a villager from the emperor’s hometown who swore the hero had gone underground for a period and then resurfaced in China as the famous warlord Ghengis Khan.

“Our job isn’t to ensure historical accuracy; our job is to convince the elders that they have stories to tell and that people are interested in listening to those stories,” Harold Wright said. “My gut level feeling is that if someone who is 80 or 90 years old passes on without telling their stories, it’s not their stories that are lost, but the stories of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.”

The Wrights are members of the Miami Valley Storytellers and have been working with the Alliance for American Quilts on the Save Our Stories project to help preserve the oral tradition in Noble and Monroe counties.

A sampling of the Wright’s Japanese, Appalachian, historic and personal storytelling can be seen on Pieces from Our Story Quilt, a DVD produced locally by Ego Machine founders Matthew Morgan and Sean Divine. They have also produced several CDs of their stories told individually and in tandem.

Collaborating with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra is a new direction for the Wrights, and Harold Wright, who was raised on country western music, said he was apprehensive about someone standing on a podium and waving a stick at him. But after meeting Stafford Wilson and embarking on the adaptations of the tales they will tell, they are excited to be able to add a new genre of storytelling to their repertoire.

Ticket information for the “Magical Tales” concert can be found by calling the performing arts center at 328-3874 or going to the symphony’s Web site, www.springfieldsym.org/c4.html

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com