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Photo by Eric Engman

David Titus’ fingers crissed and crossed, twisting and twining a long loop of string. In a mere matter of seconds, Titus transformed the simple string into the complex figure of a porcupine, complete with a big bushy tail, climbing up the side of a tree. Through slight manipulations of his hands, the figure came to life and the string porcupine slowly moved up the trunk of the tree.

“How can you do that?” an enthralled Badger Road Elementary School kindergartner asked.

Titus, the porcupine still dancing between his hands, responded, “That’s the special thing about string figures.”

Titus, a storyteller from Oklahoma, was visiting Badger Road Elementary on Friday, sharing with the students the art of string figures. The author of several books on the art, Titus has studied string figures for more than a decade. String figures were an important part of traditional cultures across the world, he said, including in the Arctic.

“They were used for divining or for stories or to teach the kids,” Titus said. “The elders aren’t doing them anymore so I’m trying to teach the skills.”

The figures range from simple designs to complex sequences that tell stories. Titus showed one sequence Friday that illustrated an Alaska Native story about villages hunting a whale. They harpoon the whale in the ocean and drag it back up onto the beach. During the night, a wolf comes to the beach and begins to eat the whale’s carcass. One of the hunters awakes, sees the wolf and chases it off.

As Titus told the story his hands crafted intricate designs to illustrate the action, including an animated figure of the wolf scurrying away from the whale’s carcass.

Throughout the day on Friday, Titus met with students at the school. Not only did he tell them stories and show them his own skills, he gave each child a string and taught them how to make some string figures of their own.

Photo by Eric Engman

He taught the younger students how to make simple shapes: triangles, squares and diamonds. He taught the older children how to make a broom, a setting sun, a bunch of bananas and a drum. Titus was only able to spend less than an hour with each group of children, so the important thing, he said, wasn’t to have them get the figures perfect but to get inspired by the art and see how much fun it can be.

Titus showed the youngest kids that you don’t need any skills at all to have fun with a length of string. He had the students drop their strings on the floor into a jumbled mass and then see if the string looked like anything. Some children said their strings looked like cats or hats. One student said his looked liked a ghost while another saw a spider web hidden in the random pile of string.

The children were all eager to learn the figures. During lunch several children could be seen in the school’s halls practicing with their strings. It’s great, Titus said, to see the children using their hands and their imaginations.

“The elders are surprised that the kids will put the Game Boys down and play with string,” Titus said. “But they’ll do it. There will be kids who will be obsessed with this.”