Narrativity and creativity in oral storytelling: Co-constructing a story with the audience

Drawing on concepts from narratology and stylistics, this article examines narrativity and creativity in an interactive oral storytelling context where the teller engages the audience directly in the storytelling process by calling for their outward responses and then incorporating these responses into her representations of events and characters. I analyse one storytelling performance of a contemporary professional storyteller as an example of interactive storytelling and discuss how she established narrativity and displayed creativity in the process of co-constructing an oral story with an adult audience. Challenges an oral storyteller may face in this process are also discussed.