How does Audience Affect Story?

Every now and then I receive email from students doing papers on storytelling. I recently received one with the following question. My reply is below.

I was wondering if I could ask you, as an award-winning storyteller, how different audiences affect and change your delivery of a story? Does it depend on who your audience is?

Live audience is everything. Try to imagine a written story without a live audience as existing on a single plane. Then take that same story and speak it out loud, still without an audience. It now has a second dimension but it lacks the luster that only a live audience can contribute. In going from print to spoken, the story has taken on some of the characteristics of the storyteller. There is no way to tell without those characteristics and they do change with each telling, just as the teller is not approaching the story from the same place each time. Both teller and story have a symbiotic relationship that morph with environmental, emotional, and experiential changes.

Now add the live audience to that same scenario. You have now added that third dimension that brings the story into full shape and off the page, just as seeing a movie in 3D. The story will take on the characteristics of the teller and both teller and story now use the audience. Likewise, the audience cannot help but be transformed by story and tellers so a new symbiotic relationship is formed. And, if I can add one more thing to think about, this power to transform story, teller, and listener is both creative and dangerous. It is why some people, Hitler for example, have been able to manipulate millions with a spoken word.