Myth, memory, sound, and story resonate out of ancient oral traditions.
Exploring these incantations can transport listeners out of the everyday into another realm where truth is made strange and strong, where the past teaches the present how to make a better future.
That is why the Mythsinger Legacy Project is re-kindling storyteller Daniel Deardorff’s annual year-end community storytelling of creation myths on Thursday, Dec. 29.
Although he “flew out of this story into the next” in 2019, Deardorff’s music, his storytelling, and his voice via recording will give all who are present an opportunity to hear the man who the poet Robert Bly called “a true inheritor of Joseph Campbell” and of whom the mythologist Martin Shaw said “Deardorff was the greatest storyteller I ever saw.”
A NEW NARRATIVE
To blend this archival footage with live performance, the event will be hosted in a unique online format.
“It’s something that most people have not experienced on Zoom,” said Judith-Kate Friedman.
Friedman currently serves as steward of the Mythsinger Legacy Project, and she and Deardorff were partners in life, love, and creative collaboration for 14 years.
“Because Danny is no longer here in person, having passed away in 2019, we want to bring his archival work back into regular conversation and community in an activated way,” she said.
Friedman has hosted a handful of these Community Storynights throughout the year, in part celebrating the recent printing of a third edition of Deardorff’s book, “The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, and Psyche.”
“It’s quite uncanny how we’ve been able to create a genuine community feeling as we gather online to listen to Danny drumming and telling around the virtual hearth. When we started this experiment combining live interactive conversation and performance with archival footage of Daniel himself, we had no idea if the balance of past and present would be successful. Yet ancient myths transcend boundaries of place and time and Daniel Deardorff also does this as a mythteller,” Friedman writes in her description of the online “Virtual Hearth.”
From 2005 to 2015, Deardorff himself led local Storynights in Port Townsend.
For many of those years, he would end the cycle of seasons allowing it to begin again with a reading of three particular creation myths: one Norse, one Sumerian, and one from the Toba of South America.
CRAFTING CONTAINERS
The first year of Storynights were hosted by Deardorff in a yurt with no fire, but by the next year a new hut was built.
“If you sardined us in together in there, you could get about 30 people, really a puppy pile,” Friedman said.
There they would tightly gather around a distinctive fire pit.
“Because Danny was a wheelchair user, that was created out of rocks his father had collected as a rockhound and made into a fire pit at wheelchair-level height so that he could then call a fire in the same way that someone else could,” Friedman said.
Having survived disabling polio as an infant, Deardorff was well acquainted with the oppressions of exclusion, outsiderhood, and the betrayals endured by all who are othered.
“The dropping down is the absolute gift that Danny gives us, is that he was much more interested in the descent and the gifts in the going to the underworld,” Friedman said.
While Bly may compare him with Campbell, Deardorff breaks away from the places where Campbell is most criticized.
Instead of focusing so intently on the victory of the hero that Campbell is famous for, Deardorff aims at the struggle itself.
“You put these two things together and pull from either end and you make sure that not one of them is winning over the other one; well, now you have the third thing. That liminal place is very much at the center of what Daniel was giving us,” Friedman said.
FEEDING THE FLAMES
The online event will begin with a welcome from Friedman and music from Deardorff (recorded) and Friedman (live).
The virtual hearth will then be lit as Deardorff calls fire in the old manner with flint and steel, and sings about the relationship between myth and fire in recorded footage from the hut.
He’ll then tell three rarely heard creation myths, accompanying himself on drum in a separate recording woven in while Friedman layers in her own live drumming.
At the same time, Annie Clark, known internationally for her American Sign Language artistry, will provide interpretation for the stories.
Following the telling, the audience will be invited to “feed the story.”
As Deardorff taught: “The stories carry medicine and food for us. They are alive and feed us; we must feed the stories in return and reciprocity for the nourishment we receive.”
Here, Friedman will invite people to unpack the different ways the stories affected them.
“There’s a reciprocity in the oral tradition with these experiences that we have,” Friedman said.
Once the story is “well-fed,” Friedman will close the evening with one of her own songs inspired by the Mythsinger experience.
To learn more and to register for the event, go to mythsingerlegacy.org/events/myth-and-memory.