double (Joe)-Five Ways To Tell a Story and How Each Are Effective

Straight Acting

This is the generic, simple yet effective way to tell a story. It shows the audience who the characters are, what they do in the story and how they feel about it. It is basic but audiences somehow always love this type of performance otherwise we would have stopped doing them centuries ago.

Monologue

A monologue is a great way to tell a personal story as it can show the character's emotions during the telling of their story; it also creates a close relationship between the actor and the audience and is good for creating atmospheres. However, this can be less effective when their a multiple characters with their own viewpoint of the story and will get boring if the audience had five people giving long monologues on the same story with nothing to break it up.

Song

The songs tempo and tone can create moods and atmospheres so are really effective if incorporated with a piece of movement or as an underscore for a scene. However they can also tell stories on their own by using lyrics that contain rhyming metaphors and similes to express emotions the persona has towards a certain incident.

Dance

Dance can quickly show a story and portray an emotion through the movement of the performers and the song played with the dance. Dance is a great way to entertain an audience and keep them interested; however this doesn't really build an intimate relationship with the audience so won’t get a strong emotional response from them.

Flashbacks/Flash-forwards and Split Screen

These are brilliant ways to enhance story telling as they can reveal parts of the story when they will be most effective. They are usually used to create plot twists or to change the opinions that the audience hold of a specific character. However if the story being told is a generic ‘beginning, middle and end’ story then flashbacks/flash-forwards won’t really be necessary. Also split screen only works if the story follows at least a second character so if the story only follows one character split screen is pointless.