Arts

Willy Claflin Residency 2007

Willy Claflin—storyteller, puppeteer, recording artist, balladeer, and teacher—recently visited the Pike School for the eleventh straight year. Kicking off a week in residence at Pike, Claflin performed for the gathered grades, regaling them with folktales from around the world and with antics by his sidekicks Maynard Moose, the mispronouncing teller of fractured fairytales; Gorf, the rhyming flyswatter-percussionist frog; and Rocky, the inappropriate raccoon, who touts the eating of sugar and is obsessed with alien zombies.

With the aid of those puppet characters—in addition to Dr. Al, the pedantic and sesquipedalian alligator; Boring Beaver, whose intentionally droning and unadorned narratives can put insomniacs to sleep; and Story Lady, whose saccharine and condescending tone is amusing even to kindergarteners—Claflin spent the rest of the week in classrooms throughout the school, teaching the elements of stories, story writing, and storytelling.

In First Grade, Claflin presented a five-step formula for creating a successful story and led students in several instances of doing just that. Through a cooperative process, students created an animal character, gave it a problem, suggested a solution, explained why the solution doesn’t work, and then came up with a solution that finally does work. The exercise was not only fun for the First Graders, but it also proved, at least to the satisfaction and surprise of this writer, that even the most outrageous, cornball, unlikely choices for all of those five stages can produce a reasonably acceptable story.

Claflin enlightened Third Graders to the power of “voice” in storytelling. This does not refer to the vocal sounds with which his puppets speak, but, rather, to the style of their speech—the way they use words, the types of words they use, their affectations and syntax. By relating the same, basic sequence of events in his own speaking voice, but in the style of each of his puppets—mispronounced words and signature phrases for Maynard Moose; terse sentences devoid of adjectives for Boring Beaver; rhymed and rhythmic verse for Gorf; lots of big words for Dr. Al; etc.—Claflin demonstrated the power of voice to a delighted group of students, all of whom could readily identify each character’s version of the story.

With Sixth Graders, Claflin explored the archetypical elements of fairytales. Using the Norwegian tale of Soria Moria Castle as a model, Claflin showed how most fairytales worldwide share variations of the following elements: the main character is either a third son or daughter or a stepchild; the main character leaves home to seek his or her fortune; a promise is made; the promise is broken; all seems lost; magical help arrives; success. A variation of that formula, most often used when the main character is an animal, proves to be a slight embellishment of the formula Claflin showed the First Graders. Employing the Rule of Three to which most tales adhere, there is a main character who is some kind of animal; the character has a problem; three solutions are offered, of which the first two do not work; and the last solution makes things right.

Claflin, who has been the headliner at numerous national storytelling festivals throughout the United States, has also performed and taught internationally. He has released nine recordings, including original ballads and stories for children and adults, sometimes solo, and sometimes accompanied by his puppet characters. Several have won national awards. A native New Englander, Claflin now lives in San Francisco.

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