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Valerie Tutson’s verbal alchemy
by Bill Rodriguez
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Storytellers may be made, not born. But you’d be forgiven for thinking that Valerie Tutson has the craft locked into her genes as she animatedly describes the simple childhood recollection of creeping into her Saturday morning sanctuary, a book-filled room. Her hands fly out like diligent messengers, and you can practically smell the musty volumes and fall out of time reading with her in what she imagined to be a former dungeon, a basement room beneath the castle-like stone turret of her the public library. It’s long overdue that Tutson is a co-headliner at the Jonnycake Storytelling Festival, the 15th annual gathering down in Peace Dale. She has been part of it from its second year, and the fresh spirit she has brought to hosting and introducing other tellers has been a big part of the event. This year Tutson is featured with Gcina Mhlophe, who is widely credited with reviving the art of storytelling in South Africa. Mhlophe is a friend she made on her many story-gathering trips to Africa, but we’re getting ahead of our story. First, you have to know that she came quite reluctantly to this work. There she was, a New Milford, Connecticut, teenager rolling her eyes at her mother’s suggestion that she catch this storyteller who was coming to her high school. But it was a chance to ditch band practice, so she stood way in the back of the auditorium so that she could split when she got bored. Then this balding guy named David Holt came out with a banjo, said he was from the mountains of Appalachia, and started talking about a hog caller. Tutson didn’t get bored. "I was there," she says, wearing a green and yellow dashiki on the balcony of her Elmwood house, gesticulating over an orange juice. "I went on such a journey with him. Whatever the audience was doing, I was doing it with them." After the performance, she marched right up to the man and learned all she could about this magic he could make happen. "I chatted with him for so long and was so captivated and amazed that one person could do that," she says. This was 1983 and she had already been accepted to Brown, with merry plans to become a schoolteacher and help kids put on school plays. With that Holt experience still echoing, it didn’t take much to nudge her little by little toward the center of the stage. She went to the Brown Bookstore with her reading list for first semester, and who should be there performing but Bill Harley, Len Cabral, and Marilyn Murphy Meardon, members of the Spellbinders (who would provide the core of the first Jonnycake festivals). Tutson made her new college friends sit down with her and listen up. Later that year, she came across Cabral storytelling outdoors at some event or other. Tutson is nothing if not confident, so when he asked for volunteers to tell a story they knew, she popped right up, totally unprepared. She struggled over a tale she vaguely remembered, about a lop-eared bunny. "Oh, I was a wreck and I sucked!" she confesses. "I was terrible!" She conveys this by panting with hands trembling in front of her for a beat. "It was embarrassing especially because after me this 10-year-old kid got up and slammed home! It definitely made me say, ‘OK, this is more serious than I thought. It’s not this thing that you can just get up there and do.’ " It was a challenge that would draw upon not only Ivy League academics but her entire life, past and future. By the end of that first school year, she decided that being a storyteller was for her — lock, stock, and stage fright. Since those halting first steps, Tutson has become widely known for her stories and songs from black history and traditions. She went on to get an MFA in theater arts at Brown. Gradually, after requests from listeners, she has come to include more about her personal experiences in traveling to find stories. In 1988, Tutson made the first of several weeks-long stays in South Africa, when Nelson Mandela was still in prison and there was a state of emergency. There have been trips to Egypt, Ghana, Tanzania, and several to Senegal. And she didn’t neglect roots trips to Scotland and Germany. Every year since 1998 she has performed at the International Theater Festival of Tolerance at Terezin, a former concentration camp near Prague. "It is deep work," Tutson says. "Those who come to it because they think it might be easy probably won’t stay very long. Because you come to a place where you go, ‘Uh-uh, this isn’t just about entertainment.’ " See "Events" listings for complete details on the 15th Annual Jonnycake Storytelling Festival.
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