For starters, storytelling is not (just) for children... It's an entertaining way of passing the time. But it's also a lot more than that: a way of sharing epic tales and passing on common sense smarts, explaining the landscape, recounting local legends and keeping the memory of people and place alive.
Story circles and story clubs are often informal gatherings of tellers and listeners who meet up every so often, in a casual setting, to sit around a table and share tales that last 5 to 8 minutes. Stories are told rather than read, and often take the form of folk or traditional tales, as well as myths, legends, and lies, that have been "heard", or "found", rather than "authored", even though they may have been heavily worked on by the teller. By agreement, some story clubs or story circles may provide opportunities for longer stories to be told. Some story clubs may feature performance storytelling from local storytellers or guest storytellers, as well open performance storytelling floor spots.
Performance storytelling moves the teller or tellers rather more to centre stage, adopting a more formal setting than a sharing of stories in a story circle, and with the teller clearly taking on a performer role. Stories often take longer in the telling than tales told in story circles, 8 to 15 minutes or so, or even longer, up to an hour for many longer traditional tales.
A storytelling show is a performance event in which one or more storytellers tell one or more tales in a formal or semi-formal setting. A storytelling set, or show, show often shapes several stories to fit an overarching narrative or theme. Not comedy, not theatre, storytelling shows take the performer and audience alike into an eternal moment of remembered times and places that never existed. Which is to say, into a time of once...