Stephanie Murg went to the Moth Ball, an annual fundraising banquet for the New York-based storytelling/performance program, and filed a report for UnBeige, mediabistro.com’s design blog, on the award presented to Sir Salman Rushdie that evening for his raconteurship, focusing on the fact that the statuette was designed by Jonathan Adler. Time Out New York had a reporter in the crowd, too, and got some of the celeb guests to talk about the power of oral storytelling. As Rushdie himself puts it:
“I love reading. But you sit by yourself to read. [The oral tradition] is a way of making stories and literature into a collective act, a community act. And it lends itself more to the first person; it’s difficult to tell a third-person story onstage. So live storytelling is also personal and intimate. And there’s an edge of danger in it because there’s a chance of really dying. The teller is more vulnerable—and that is [what] makes it really exciting.”