 Hi, I'm David Gonzalez. In this short video series, I'm going to introduce you to the four main elements of storytelling. I think of them as four rivers, words or the text, movement, how the body shows the story, the voice that is the sound of the story, and the imagination. When these four rivers flow together, that's when a good story comes alive. In this episode, we're going to look at text. That is the words of the story. I'll tell part of a classic Greek myth in my style, and then we'll look at how I constructed the words to tell the story. And finally, I'll give you a couple of examples of how you can do the same thing. This is the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, done with a kind of jazz style. Ba-do-ba-do-de-boop-ba-doop-ba-doop-ba-doop-ba-doop-ba. Orpheus could play on his golden saxophone, make its bell ring out with tones you'd want to hear. They said it was like church for the ear when Orpheus was near. They say that the trees brought their branches close so that their leaves could shimmer and shake in his golden tone. They say that the lion and the lamb would lie down side by side when Orpheus would play, and the lion would say, R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r and the lamb would say, Orpheus, you are ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a. In that example, I took the classic Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and I mixed it in with some jazz, combined poetry, rhyming, and metaphor, to put it all together. artistic license, is that part of being an artist where you can play with things, bring new things in, leave things out, find your own way with the material. And in this version of the classic Greek myth, I brought jazz and rhyme and poetry into it. So a couple of things you might want to play with, finding words. Think of something, think of say, snow, and then think of all the things that it reminds you of, snow, snowballs, cold, skating, things like that. Just let your associations flow. And you can do that with almost anything. Another quick game you can try is sentence train, where one person says the first word of a sentence, the next person says the next word, and little by little you add one word at a time until you create a new, unthinkable sentence. That's really fun. Finally, you might want to take an ancient story that you know and interpret it in your own way, place it in modern times. What music would you add to it? And in this way, you can open up the story for yourself, find your own artistic license, and in that way, bring text alive in the story. This program has been brought to you by Kinex.