A Story of Us: Community as Method in Live Storytelling Events

This article considers how live storytelling events in Toronto, Canada, use a community-oriented model of engagement as a way to model more equitable futures collectively. The genre examined here, called "confessional storytelling" by its practitioners, features firsthand accounts of lived experience that are told in front of a live audience. These events are conceptualized and enacted to center community engagement, allowing for the imagining of collective models of futurity. The events come into existence through cooperative and voluntary collaborations that both resist neoliberal logics of profit and individualism and provide a platform for community members to inspire a questioning of current lived experience by sharing their personal experiences on stage. Examining this model provides an example of how temporal explorations of subjective experience through storytelling, and performance more broadly, can be used to identify and/or challenge unequitable aspects of the present and to imagine better futures collectively. This article draws from research conducted in 2016 with storytelling communities that operated through the voluntary participation of both event organizers and storytellers.