Adventures in Storyhacking: Facilitating Indirect Intercommunity Dialogue Through Story

Figures on a Windswept Shore: The Interplay of Aloneness and Communitas in Oral Storytelling

“…Groups then posted their responses to each other, and if they wished, made a second creative response through visual art or creative writing. In so doing we were effectively doing what I have described, in relation to other projects, as 'communicating around corners' (Heinemeyer, 2018). It was only later that everyone involved met in one room to share what they had made.…”

“…In so doing, I aim to illustrate my slowly acquired understanding of the interdependence between the ability of storytelling to engender solitude, and its tendency to reach towards a kind of togetherness or connection. To amplify this discussion I will also draw on another project, The Tale Exchange (2017), which experimented more explicitly with this interplay, and specifically with the possibility of a meeting of minds 'around corners' (Heinemeyer, 2018). Storytelling is a practice riddled with metaphors of 'communitas', a term coined by the anthropologist Victor Turner to describe the way in which rituals or performances may bring a society together, usually temporarily, without hierarchy or social divisions: … as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even 'communion' of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders.…”