When I arrived in Prague, while looking
for work as an ESL teacher, I came across an ad for Mysterium Tour.
This company - a night tour company narrating tales and legends of
Old Prague - was looking for a narrator in English to guide tours
round Old Town.
Having learned already of the thriving
tourism business in Prague, and reading about the Gothic-themed
experience which Mysterium offered, I was very excited to apply.
I met with the owner, Andrea Arciacona,
one afternoon for a brief interview. Liking what he saw, he then
invited me to take part in a tour alongside him - a tour guided by a
Russian storyteller of his - and then invited me to take the next
step, which was to study and learn a script which I would later
narrate to him.
I studied the script intensely for a
few days, knowing how much my situation relied on this offer. I had
no acting training whatsoever even though in my head I fancied myself
capable of the craft were I to dedicate myself to it. And I was not
far wrong, though I had not counted on the difficulty of memorizing
as script word per word.
I met with Andrea in one of Prague’s
many twisting, cobblestone streets, and there I narrated for him the
tale of the headless horseman - a Bohemian legend. It was fun. And
Andrea was impressed. I then decided to show off (cocky man that I
am) and asked him if I he wanted to for me to narrate some of the
other stories which had been narrated during the tour which we had
followed a few nights before. I did and he was even more impressed.
So began my career at Mysterium Tour
Prague. It was slow at first, with many tours led for a mere romantic
couple or two, all in the cold of the winter in Prague. But with each
tour I better remembered the scripts and further improved my
delivery. Then came the point when I could recite the stories so well
that I could take a step back and analyse them as stories in
themselves.
Enter the author. With years of
research and practice under my belt, I took a good look at these
legends and realized that many of them were missing something... a
certain spark which might not have been necessary to folk sharing
these tales in the dark of a lantern lit tavern, but which was
necessary for the sophisticated audiences of today.
I returned to the source material to
ensure that I did not digress from the originals, and then began to
fill in the plot holes with character flaws, laws and beliefs of the
times, and vivid descriptions to bring the stories to life.
So the legends which were humble
paragraphs on the page became tales of riveting dynamic when told
during the tours. Our guests engaged in them much more and could
relate to them much better, identifying with the human element which
has been the common to every great tale since the beginning of time.
As an author, I could not be more
elated to enjoy this experience. Telling stories on paper - that is,
on word processors - and telling them live to an intimate audience
are two completely different experiences, and yet each of them
benefited from the other. As a story teller, I offer pauses and
decoys which keep the people in suspense, just like as a writer I
make us of the element of detail and improvisation to make my prose
all the more engaging.
-Georg Freese
Senior Storyteller
Enter this code for a discount when booking:
mt-Georg
.
