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This study uses a multimodal interactional conversation analytic approach to explore a two-and-a-half-year-old child’s spontaneous participation in the activity of telling personal experiences in the context of everyday bilingual mother–child interactions. The selected data draw from a video-ethnographic study of children in Swedish families with Russian-speaking mothers. The analysis focuses on a young child’s storytelling activities as co-constructed interactional practices, calling attention to the role of embodied performances, affective alignments and footings as central for the tellability of a story. It is found that the child’s spontaneous tellings were orchestrated through shifts in footings involving embodied animations, reenactments and affect displays, including prosodic actions and exaggerations, dramatizations, laughter, sound effects, exploitations of language form and code-switching (Russian–Swedish). Various keying resources (for affective embodied stances) were collaboratively produced to strengthen affective alignments and to heighten the emotional significance of the narrated event, framing it as a playful and imagined joint activity. The findings demonstrate how a reflexive kind of agency emerges whereby the child’s playful embodied performances and reenactments of past, present and imagined events provide a common ground for a jointly performed open-ended bilingual storytelling performance.

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