For a detailed discussion of our process, see Provoking the Gospel: Methods to Embody Biblical Stolrytelling Through Drama, Richard W. Swanson (Pilgrim Press, 2004).

For now, some basics:
1. Why Storytelling?
Because biblical texts are not books, and they are certainly not bulletin inserts. They are stories.
Because stories are for telling just like air is for breathing.

2. Why "embodying the story"?
Because ancient storytellers told these stories with vigor and energy. They took up space; they carved the air with their bodies and shook the room with their voices.
Because we aim to learn from the ancients.

3. Why "provoking the gospel"?
Because that's the way we work. In order to interpret a story, sometimes you have to poke it a little, provoke it some, challenge it to a fight, just to see what happens. Usually it's surprising.

Because that's the way biblical stories work in general. The best biblical stories expect you to laugh, to cry, to argue, to protest, to respond. The one thing they don't expect is that you should sit there like a lump of clay. When God breathed into the Mudman ("Adam" means "Mudman") God expected a lively response. We aim to take God up on that. The Bible provokes us, and we provoke the Bible.

More detail:

1. The Text:
All of our work starts with close attention to the text of the story. We begin with translation and aim to capture the storytelling rhythms of the original language and the original text.

This is not so easy. Often the first translation is bumpy and unmanageable. Often one person’s sense of what a proper "storytelling rhythm" might be is quite different from another person’s sense. We collaborate, we modify, we negotiate, we tinker. Always we are after a translation that captures the quirks and twists of the original story. We watch for the times that Greek or Hebrew (the main languages we work from) withholds a key element until later in the sentence so that it can emerge as a surprise for the audience. We try in our translations to spring these same surprises on English-speaking audiences.

These translations are not composed in paragraphs. They are arranged on the page in short bursts that amount to sense- and rhythm-units. This helps us as we look for the beats of the story, the places where the story rushes and the places where it dawdles.

2. The Read-Around:
Once we have a serviceable (though still eminently modifiable) translation in hand, we begin our group-work on the story.

We start with what we call a "read-around." We sit in a circle and each person reads a single line fragment (the sense- and rhythm-units mentioned above), and we "do laps." We read a story at least three times straight through. On the first lap, each person reads their line as quickly as possible, beginning if possible before the previous reader has finished her last word. On the first lap we want speed, not emoting.

On the second lap, we ask each person to read their line fragment with some large, and probably random, emotion. It does not matter if their emotion flow from what the previous reader attempted or not. It does not matter if their emotional reading makes any sense at all. It is often better and more productive if it does not. On this lap we want huge eruptions, motivated or not. We still want this reading to go quickly.

On the third lap, we ask each person to try to link their emotion (still huge and overblown) to something that the people before them in the circle seem to have been trying. Again, it doesn’t matter if the link is altogether successful or if the emotion theme people are trying makes very much sense. Again, sometimes strange attempts are better and more enlightening than normal ones.

3. Sparks and Tensions:
After three (usually chaotic) laps, we stop and ask what people have heard and noticed. Did any of the odd emoting make surprising sense? Did any of the line fragments that followed each other turn into arguments (whether or not the story was about an argument)? Did any of the racing line fragments turn into a love story? A detective story? A slumber party? In all of this we are after the rhythms and surprises of the language. We are looking to destabilize usual readings of the story. We do this because we often find fascinating tensions, fractures, and healings (not always in that order) hiding behind the curtains of "normal" readings of "normal" stories.

We are looking for exactly these sparks and tensions, not because we are sure that they mean anything. Often they do not. But sometimes they do, and then we have something exciting to explore.

Sometimes it takes a few more laps before anything suggests itself.

4. First Embodiments:
Once we have identified interesting (if odd) sparks and tensions, we make our first attempts at embodying them.

If a certain stretch of the story sounded like a love story (for whatever reason), we play that stretch (and sometimes the entire story) as a love story. Or a detective story, or whatever occurs to someone in the group.

We usually attempt these first experimental tellings in pairs. We ask two courageous members of the company to stand in front of the group and try something. The instructions are exactly that vague. We do not even usually divide up the lines between the two players on the first attempt. Rather, we let them fight it out as they attempt to play the love story (or whatever) for the group. When they finish, the group responds by reporting what they noticed. What worked? What could be sharper? And then the two play the scene again. And again. And again.

5. Necessary Multiplicity:
By the time we have worn out the first experimental scene, most everyone in the room has the short scene memorized, and this makes the next attempts at experimental scenes easier. So we move on to the next experiments. At this stage of our exploration we do not rule out any possibilities. No suggestion is too strange to try (though the time one of the players suddenly began playing his part as if he were a velociraptor came close). We have found through the years of doing this that the freedom to explore strange impossibilities often opens up surprisingly persuasive possible tellings of a too-familiar story.

Once again, it is important to note that the scenes at this stage of exploration are odd, often actively strange. We are just looking to discover what happens to the language of the story when it is played many different ways. Sometimes we find ways of telling the story that are remarkably useful. Sometimes we find ways that are simply bizarre.

We are trying to open up space around the text so that we can explore it more thoroughly.

6. The Pull and The Push:
Once we have established a good working space around the text, we make the scenes more physical. We look for what Jacques Lecoq (founder of the École Internationale de Théatre Jacques Lecoq and author of The Moving Body) calls the "pull and push" of the text.

We take this very literally. On the basis of what we have explored to this point, we isolate important tensions in the text and we make those tensions physical and visible. Sometimes the tensions are between two characters in the text. In that case we assign a player to each character and create some appropriate physical contest for them to engage in while speaking their lines. Sometimes the tension is between parts of a single character’s speech. In that case we do the same thing: two players engage in a physical contest while speaking the parts that stand in tension.

The real value of this is that it prevents us from simply talking about the tensions of the text. It is far too easy to make all the contests within biblical story into "spiritual" or intellectual contests. Once that happens the story begins to wither. But if we can make the basic tensions of the text physical and visible, we discover crucial things about the spirit and intellect of the text.

7. The Result:
When we have completed this exploration, we have a text, a translation (now surely revised many times), a set of scenes, and a set of physical contests. Very likely none of this is the sort of thing we can play for an audience. Not yet.

At this point we let the story rest a while, long enough to let the yeast we have kneaded in start to work.

Sometimes the yeast works before the next worksession, in which case one of the company will rush in at the beginning of the session and insist on trying something she thought up at 3:00 in the morning. Sometimes a story will rest for a long time. We knead it every now and again, just to see if anything has developed.

In our experience, something almost always develops. Something grows, some way of telling the story we are working on, some way of linking the physical contest with the words and with the relationships we have explored. And sometimes out of that comes a new workshop, or even a new performance.
Such moments are exciting.