This paper is based on my own research into oral storytelling amongst teenagers and adolescents in Britain and Ireland. This research has been carried out (and continues to be carried out) both in my role as a professional storyteller working in secondary schools and youth clubs and, more recently, as a postgraduate research student at the Department of Drama at the University of Exeter.
In the course of the paper, I intend to do two things: firstly to look at teenage oral storytelling as a performance art, and secondly to establish such storytelling activity within a wide oral narrative tradition.
For the first part I shall make use of Richard Bauman's theory of storytelling as performance, as outlined in Verbal Art as Performance (1977), and produce models appropriate to my own research. Along with texts from my own archive of material collected from teenagers over the past three years, I will show how teenage storytelling operates within the range of "low-intensity" performance, and yet storytellers will still respond to variations of space, time, audience and event, and let these shape their variants of any particular story. To illustrate performance-oriented interpretation of narrative folklore, I will specifically use examples of contemporary legend variants collected by myself from teenage tellers.
For the second part, I will again use examples from my own archive to show how teenagers, contrary to popular belief, are in fact very active storytellers and their repertoires have a very broad base. However, it would be wrong to assume that teenage storytelling somehow exists in isolation, and I will show how many of the more popular teenage stories and their motifs draw their inspiration from a variety of media and sources, and key into a long tradition of oral narrative folklore which can be traced back to the work of the Victorian collectors and beyond.