Meet a Medievalist Maker: Daisy Black
Daisy Black (photo by Aidan Byrne)
“Meet a Medievalist Maker” is an ongoing series of blog posts introducing our members and the work they are doing. Each post is organized around our Four P’s: a project they are working on (or have completed but want to highlight); their process: medium, etc; a peek at their work: images or excerpt; and a prompt: instructions for a brief exercise they share to allow readers to experience/explore their process. Would you like to write a post introducing yourself and your work? Send us an email!
Hello! As well as studying medieval drama, I also work as a performance storyteller. Storytelling is a traditional art form where one person tells an entire story using just the things available to them: body, voice and, sometimes, music. I started to learn how to do it around twelve years ago, after seeing storytellers at folk festivals and being amazed that they could create an entire performance without the things I usually associate with theatre: set, costume, lighting, props and other actors. It seemed a kind of wild magic. As I learnt to tell, I was lucky to have support and advice from kind teachers and mentors, including Shonaleigh Cumbers, Debs Newbold, Katy Cawkwell, Tim Ralphs, Tom Goodale, Carmel Page and many others.
I try to use storytelling to make medieval stories available to those who don’t have the access, language skills, or time to look for them. While I was finding all sorts of wonderful stories through my research, and at conferences like Gender and Medieval Studies, it seemed to me that only knight-led Arthurian stories and Chaucer regularly made it into storytelling repertoires. The six shows I developed either take feminist approaches to the better-known stories (such as my adaptation of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale or Unruly Woman: a collection of stories where women behave assertively), or share less well-known stories, such as the trans-lesbian romance Yde and Olive and Nine Days’ Wonder, which tells of Shakespeare’s clown Will Kempe dancing from London to Norwich. I base storytelling on medieval objects, too: my Mappa Mundi tours the 1300’s Hereford map through travel stories, and Bayeux Tapestry: the Full Yarn tells a hundred metres of embroidered history in a single hour. I interweave my stories with music, using songs, and the audience’s voices, to support the stories.
Project
At the moment, I am conducting my first UK tour with the thirteenth-century Old French chanson de geste, Yde and Olive. So far, I have performed it at 15 different venues, including at conferences, festivals, storytelling circles, history societies and in medieval buildings. I first became aware of this story through Mounawar Abbouchi’s excellent edition for Medieval Feminist Forum. I was excited to find an early story which seemed to contain trans and lesbian characters and affirmed their identities and relationships at the end of the story. Yde and Olive is particularly surprising because it is part of a family dynasty cycle of stories, beginning with the heteronormative, crusade-conventional Huon of Bordeaux.
Although there are several proto-trans romances and hagiographical texts, many of these stories seem to end with an outing which reveals what the narrative considers the ‘truth’ of their sex. This is not the case in Yde and Olive, which ends defending the protagonists’ love for one another and an angel confirming that Yde has ‘everything that makes a man’. The fact this medieval story affirms its protagonists feels important today, where queer and trans people are being legislated against, publicly challenged to prove their identities, and excluded from services, spaces and healthcare. I began my research and development work in 2024 and the tour in January 2025. Since the April Supreme Court judgement, Yde and Olive has become more political and depressingly relevant than I had ever imagined it would.
Yde and Olive is for two groups of people: those it is about, and those it is not about. First, it is there to provide a sense of history and connection for queer, trans, nonbinary and lesbian people, who are so often told their experiences are temporary: a ‘phase’, modern, and therefore less valid. Second, this story is for everyone, but especially cis, heterosexual people, who come for the medieval history, but find current debates and language around gender confusing or intimidating, and who don’t have a place they can safely ask questions without fear of getting things ‘wrong’. I knew Yde and Olive was doing the work I wanted it to when, after one performance, two people came up. One was a young trans person who was moved to see some of their experiences represented in a story from so long ago. The other was an older cis person, who told me the story had changed some of their opinions. I think there could be no greater statement of the importance medieval texts can still hold today.
This summer, I am spending some time looking at how I might turn some of my feminist and queer repertoire of medieval stories into a book (working title, Unruly Woman). We are currently seeing a spike in feminist retellings of stories from Classical mythology, and medieval texts benefit from this too. This is an intimidating process, as I currently have no idea how to approach agents and publishers, or if they will even be interested!
Process
First, I spend time thinking about what it is that makes me want to tell a story. Is it because I feel it has some connection with events today? Is there a connection with a community I am part of? Is it a story that has fascinated and entertained me? Is it wonderous and weird?
I then get to work on my medieval text, peering into its nooks and crannies. As an English literature scholar and someone who thinks through writing, I love nothing more than printing out a story and annotating it within an inch of its life. By the end of this, the story is covered with a web of ideas, and questions. It also contains a list of things I want to research when building my story – such as what a medieval letter looked like, how ships were rigged, and what was expected of a wife. I try to forget I’m a medievalist, thinking about the things non-specialist audiences will need to know to understand the story.
Then comes the fun part. I have a series of exercises I use to play with every aspect of the story, including its structure, characters, perspectives, imagery and tone. I use exercises I learnt from other storytellers, from theatre and creative writing workshops, as well as exercises I developed for my students. This is my play time/ I explore telling different moments and scenes from different perspectives and in different orders to see what happens.
Once this is done, I think about the cultural and material worlds of the story. Some of this comes from things I already know through my research or that of others. Other things require learning outside my area. For Yde and Olive, I researched medieval birthing chambers, read combat manuals, tried on replica armour, and befriended a horse and a hawk. This meant when these things appeared in the story, I knew exactly what they would feel, look, smell and sound like.
Some traditional storytellers can go from creating this knowledge and practice base straight into a more improvisational form of telling, secure in knowing the foundational work is there to support them. However, my brain best figures things out by writing, so I use this research to write a rough ‘script’. Seeing something physically on the page helps me experiment with changing elements and introducing new aspects before I hit rehearsals.
Once the story has settled into a structure, I start rehearsing. After the first few readings, I put the script away and don’t really look at it again unless a section isn’t working and needs more work. I am often asked how I learn stories – especially long ones. Unfortunately, like all acts of memorisation, it’s a lot of practice – going over the same bits again, and again, and again, walking around a room muttering madly to myself – until it has entered my memory. It takes a couple of weeks’ work to do this for a full show.
This is usually where I find gestures entering the story, and these help me with memory. A happy accident happened with Yde and Olive. While learning an early part where Yde grows from baby to adult, I spontaneously grabbed a chair that happened to be in the room and climbed onto it when little Yde clambers onto a library bench to access her father’s combat books. I started to play with other places I could use it. During rehearsals, the chair became a throne, a cradle, two horses, castle battlements and a campfire. I had done some object theatre work earlier in my career, but this was the first time I’d made use of any physical object in my storytelling. I’m now stuck lugging an IKEA chair as my wooden co-star around the country for performances. The happy accident of my ‘muttering-room’ having a chair in it shaped the story in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
Once the story has started to settle, I perform it in front of human beings for the first time. Sometimes I work with more experienced storyteller, Tim Ralphs. We have each acted as director/dramaturg for early versions of each other’s stories. It’s helpful having someone who knows the craft to see where it can be improved. I test-run shorter stories in my local story circle, Sheffield Story Forge, or in development workshops like those run by Carmel Page. Sometimes I invite non-medievalist friends to my house, give them wine and snacks, and perform the show for them. All of this helps me understand what is and is not working, see whether the humour lands, and offers opportunities for audience participation I don’t notice when rehearsing alone. All this feedback guides my last rehearsals before the first public performance.
This all sounds like a lot of work, and for long story shows, it really is! But if you are just starting out, you don’t need to do all this. Take a simple story you think you can tell in five minutes, and start there. A day, or a few evenings, of practice should be enough to get your telling confident enough to share it with friends. Once that first telling is done, and it is in your memory, you can embellish and play with it as much as you like.
Peek: https://youtu.be/LR5vPrxF2wc
This is a clip from an online Yde and Olive for Live to Your Living Room. This is from the middle of the story. Yde, who escaped her father and has now lived for a year as a soldier, comes to Rome to join King Oton’s court. This is the first time we meet Olive: a woman whose spirit is every bit as courageous as Yde’s own.
Prompt: playing with perspective
I aim to use the skills feminist and queer theory which informs my academic research in my storytelling, too. I particularly enjoy challenging myself to tell stories from perspectives not privileged by the original narrators.
You can use this exercise for storytelling, but it also works for developing creative writing, painting a picture or rehearsing a play. I use it to help me think about the different kinds of power operating in a story: including social hierarchies, the different authorities within the story, and who the story itself seems to ‘side’ with.
Look at your story and identify
1. Who has power at the start of your story?
2. Who has power at the end?
3. Does the power balance change? If so, when does this happen?
4. Does the story challenge, question or strip away existing power structures, or does it support the status quo?
For questions 1 to 3, write one sentence to show where the power lies at this moment in the story.
For question 3, write one sentence to show the moment the power balance changes.
For question 4, write one sentence to challenge, and one sentence to support the status quo.
Then consider: Do you want to keep these power structures the same in your version of the story?
Try telling a moment of the story from the perspective of a character that does not hold power at that moment. Does this change your understanding of this moment?
Thank you so much for this fantastic post, Daisy! Do keep an eye on Daisy’s website for news of her upcoming shows- we can guarantee that they are superb!
