Invited Storytellers for 2010
Jan Andrews (Ottawa)
A storytelling performance by Jan Andrews leaves listeners spell bound. Audience members know they have been touched in heart, soul and mind; offered a gift to carry forth with them -- to hold in the memory to use for the rest of their lives.
Jan has traveled widely. In her twenty years of performance, she has told at festivals and in concerts across Canada, in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Her repertoire of traditional folk material is extensive. She is always ready to pull "just the right story" out of her story bag. She is a lover of epic and has produced complete tellings of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Mahabharata with her partner, Jennifer Cayley, at their lakeside home.
Recently she and Jennifer have been touring a show in which literary and personal stories are interwoven in exploration of the trials and tribulations of their relationship. The show is called The Book of Spells and has left audiences asking for more.
Ever adventurous, the two have formed a non-profit company named Two Women Productions. 2WP aims to ensure that more storytelling shows get out into the world. 2WP will feature the work both of Jan and Jennifer and others in a new and exciting approach.
What else has Jan done? Well, she was the first president of Storytellers of Canada/Conteurs du Canada and directed the organization’s StorySave project for a number of years. She has also served as Artistic Director for two long-running storytelling series (one at the Fourth Stage of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.)
Jan is also the author of books for young people. Her work has been short-listed for a number of major Canadian awards. Readers may know Very Last First Time, The Auction, Out of the Everywhere and (most recently) Stories At the Door. For more information on Jan visit www.janandrews.ca
Performance Schedule:
Friday Concert 7:30-9:30pm
Saturday 11:00-12:00: Author visit at the St. Marys Public Library
Saturday 4:00-5:00pm in the Adult Tent: The Stone Book "If ever there was a sense of homecoming, The Stone Book captures it to the full. Set in England early in the Industrial Revolution, it's the story of a young girl's journey from the heights of a church tower to the depths of a pre-historic cave and back. A journey rooted in history, a journey rooted in the earth. Taken from Alan Garner's The Stone Book Quartet, the events "put a quietness" on our heroine. That's a good feeling -- one you may experience yourself."
Jennifer Cayley (Ottawa)
 Jennifer's passion for storytelling is based in her belief that narrative is hard wired into the human animal and that all of us need the accumulated wisdom that has been stored up in oral literature over countless generations. In her telling and workshops she aims for a simple human connection; one that is immediate, unplugged, filled with possibility and in its simplicity challenges and supports, the listener/learner, to build a very particular, individual creative response to the storytelling experience.
Jennifer has been a storyteller for nearly 2 decades. Performance highlights include:
• 13 years telling at Stories From the Ages, Ottawa’s weekly winter series devoted to epic telling. Material included selections from; The Odyssey, The Iliad, The King James Bible, Irish Wonder Tales, The Mabinogian, Orlando Furioso, The Kalevala, Morte d'Arthur and The Mahabharata.
• Co –hosting and telling at week-end gatherings of tellers from across Canada,
• Seven years at The Fourth Stage of Canada’s National Arts Centre as part of the Ottawa Storytellers monthly concert.
• Festivals across Canada.
• Talk Story Festival, Honolulu
• A Book of Spells, a literary/autobiographical piece performed with Jan Andrews at the National Storytelling Network’s Fringe in St.Louis, Missouri, toured in Ontario and Britain and Alberta.
Jennifer's most recent initiative is 2WP (2 Women Productions), a non-profit company created in partnership with Jan Andrews that is dedicated to growing storytelling as an performance art through touring fine adult storytelling shows in Eastern Ontario and beyond.
Her repertoire includes epic material, traditional folk and fairy tales, literary material and autobiographical material.
www.2wp.ca
Performance Schedule:
Saturday 1:00-1:45pm in the Adult tent:
Homer’s Odyssey: The Ultimate Homeward Journey "Join wily Odysseus in his epic struggle to bring himself and his comrades home to Ithaca after the Trojan war. The ferocious one-eyed Cyclops and the enchantress Circe are the focus of this set but these stories will be told within a framework that gives an overall sense of the grandeur of this ancient story."
Saturday Concert 8:00-10:00pm
Paul Conway & Leslie Robbins-Conway
 Leslie Robbins-Conway, formerly a life-long Torontonian, has been telling stories professionally for twenty-five years. Her interests and repertoire are wide, with particular attention to children's stories (her graduate degrees are in child development), Jewish stories (she is the founder and former artistic director of Jewish Storytelling Arts), personal stories, and literary first-person narrative. She has told all over Canada and in the U.S., at festivals and events of all different kinds, and on radio and television. She now lives on the Bruce Peninsula and partners with Paul Conway in Voyageur Storytelling.
Paul Conway discovered ten years ago his interest in the storytelling concert, the work of art that is greater than the sum of its parts. Before that he was a singer (with the Edmonton Opera Chorus), and a producer of opera and musical theatre, along with other business interests (his graduate degrees are in business administration and statistical model-building). His own storytelling focuses often on Canadian history and myth, which he renders into various forms, including operatic arias. He now lives on the Bruce Peninsula and partners with Leslie Robbins-Conway in Voyageur Storytelling.
www.voyageurstorytelling.ca
Performance Schedule:
Friday Schools Visit:" Animal Fair" Stories and songs of encounters with wildlife, from many traditions & Voyageurs! O Voyageurs! Tales of rivers, canoes, voyageurs, and the fur trade.
Friday Concert (Leslie):
Go Out of Your Mind! "The restless rural Canadian search for oral-aural out-of-mind experiences probes in unusual ways into unusual corners of the national inscape, begging, borrowing or stealing from other traditions, or conjuring up new ones, as occasion dictates, until at last we arrive at and can plant our feet firmly in the place where we are not."
Saturday 4:00-4:45 Family Tent (Paul and Leslie)
Pioneers, Oh Pioneers! "The pioneer experience in Canadian telling-lore is a varied one, but with certain common themes such as hard weather, hard living, hard work, and relentless optimism. These find their way into even the most eccentric of pioneer stories, including those with connections however remote to the familiar bank bite, frost bite, black-fly bite and renewable field stone motifs."
Saturday Concert (Paul):
Enoch Lightning and the Alvar"Farming the glaciated horizontal limestone-dolomite pavements of the Bruce Peninsula requires fortitude, special skills, teamwork, and a firm grasp of the straight and narrow. Fortunately, in the Canadian mythic pantheon there are such people, and supreme ploughman Enoch Lightning, his oxen and his plough are among them."
 Rachel Ellison
(visual and performance artist/facilitator of mini-adventures/Pocketologist)
Rachel is an American artist creating work in Canada. Rachel studied a diverse array of topics in university ranging from Permaculture Design to Lithography and Psychology. She graduated from Indiana University with a degree in Studio Art in 2007. She then moved to Tel Aviv, Israel where she worked as an art teacher, photographer, and facilitator of social art events. Rachel recently completed residencies in Toronto School of Art's Independent Studio Program (2008-2009) and Independent Studio Residency (Summer 2009).
As an artist, Rachel was trained in photography and printmaking technique. Her fascination with human interaction and social structures has influenced her practice dramatically. Rachel’s projects attempt to challenge traditional notions of authorship in art and encourage the audience to engage in acts of personal expression and form unexpected experiences.
Most recent works explore the concepts of making the ordinary extraordinary and recognizing the impact that individual people can make when living in a larger community setting. For instance The Portrait Gallery of Pocketology (pocketstories.wordpress.com) is devoted to revealing the histories of seemingly mundane objects we hold in our pockets or handbags as we go about our daily lives.
Rachel is intrigued by the creativity of individuals and the healing power of one-on-one human interaction.
http://pocketstories.wordpress.com
Mike Ford (Toronto)
Mike Ford is a Juno-nominated artist whose concerts and recordings are garnering critical and popular acclaim coast-to-coast. Known to many as 1/4 of the eccentrically successful folk-pop-vaudeville band Moxy Früvous (with whom Mike has entertained countless festivals, theatres, clubs across North America and Europe and recorded 7 acclaimed albums), Mike is immersed in a whole new career phase with his rollicking Canada In Song project. In June of ’08, he released his most accomplished album to date, the sonically vibrant and thematically charged Canada Needs You, volume two - a 12-song musical journey through 20th Century Canada. His three solo albums, stars shone on toronto (featuring musical homages to Jane Jacobs, The Oak Ridges Moraine & Tooker Gomberg among others), Satellite Hotstove, and the MapleMusic Recording Canada Needs You, volume one (a Juno-nominated romp through pre-1905 Canadian History) are filled with provocative original compositions delivered in a multitude of styles. He performs to sell-out club crowds and festival mainstages across Canada. He has also recently graced festival stages as a ‘swing’ member of The Arrogant Worms, and has teamed up of late with multiple Juno-award-winning singer David Francey, writing and performing new ‘Great Lakes’ songs for their Laker Music Project.
Canada Needs You, volume two is available through www.maplemusic.com, and will soon be found on iTunes and in stores across Canada via Fontana North distribution. Mike lives in east Toronto with his wife Therese and step-daughter Jacqueline. He has worked in or visited every region of this incredible country and is dedicated to sharing his enthusiasm for Canada’s land and history with people of all ages. For further info, visit www.mikeford.ca
Performance Schedule:
Friday Schools Visit:
Friday Concert 7:30-9:30pm
Saturday 3:00-3:45 in the Family Tent
Jim May (Illinois)
 Jim is a storyteller who speaks in the natural, matter-of-fact style of the fathers, horse traders, and small-town raconteurs who populated rural McHenry County, Illinois where his family has lived since the 1840's.
For adult audiences, he tells original stories of growing up in the tiny Catholic farming community of Spring Grove. These stories that are at once hilarious and touching range from, "How to Become 'Most Valuable Altar Boy' (MVAB)", to horse trading tales and heart-warming memories of family life.
For children he offers stories from traditional sources. These folk tales, myths, legends and ghost stories from various cultures worldwide have the humor and wisdom of the great tales that have been preserved in every culture and handed down orally from one generation to the next.
Jim May's stories have taken him across the United States and Europe. He has told at schools, corporations, professional groups, and festivals across the land. Chicagoans know him from his appearances on WGN's Roy Leonard Show and from the Studs Terkel radio show on WFMT-FM. He received a 1989 Chicago Emmy award for a WTTW-Channel 11 production of his original story, "A Bell For Shorty."
In addition to telling stories he offers workshops for professional groups and people of all ages on how to tell stories as well as how to create original stories from family heritage and personal experience.
Performance Schedule:
Friday afternoon: Concert held by St. Marys Community Living
Friday Concert 7:30-9:30pm
Saturday 3:00-3:45pm in the Adult Tent
Saturday Concert 8:00-10:00pm
 Coleen MacPherson (actor, writer, community arts facilitator, pocketologist)
Coleen holds an Honours BA from the University of Toronto in Drama (UCDP) and English Literature. She has also studied Theatre and Development and Playwriting at Concordia University and acting at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Acting credits include: The Season of Immigration to the West (MT Space, 2005), The Raven (Why Not Theatre/TheatreRUN at Luminato’s New Waves Festival, 2009), Gladstone Hotel Poetry Readings (Patricia Suarez, 2006) & several collective creations with The Children’s Peace Theatre (2007-2009). She has directed community plays including Teardrops and Closed Caskets with The Bereaved Families of Ontario & written several plays including First Draft (2007), No End to the Journey (2008), and The Lovers (tba). First Draft was awarded Best Production and Best Performance at the U of T Drama Festival 2007. In 2009 she completed an internship with Jumblies Studio and worked as an Associate Artist with Arts4All's community play, We Live Here. Coleen has also organized poetry nights at the Winchester Intentional Community and contributed to magazines such as FWORD & numb. Currently she is co-producing The Pasolini Project with TheatreRUN and developing a Pocketology performance installation with Rachel Ellison and Camille Turner.
Coleen is interested in work that disrupts the everyday, making art in unexpected places and finding a new theatrical expression for big emotions.
evalyn parry (Toronto)
evalyn parry is an award-winning spoken word artist, songwriter, theatre creator and educator. Funny, provocative, challenging and accessible, evalyn’s performances have taken her to music, storytelling, poetry and theatre festivals from coast to coast of North America (some recent highlights include The Yukon International Storytelling festival, Calgary International Spokenword Festival, Hillside Festival, The Lincoln Centre Out of Doors Roots of American Music Festival in New York City, the Ottawa Folk Festival, Home County Festival, and many more). She has released three critically-acclaimed CDs of music and spoken word (most recently "Small Theatres", on Borealis Records), as well as a live concert DVD and several video poems, and her work has been widely broadcast, commissioned and anthologized; she was the recipient of the Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award (Ontario Arts Council), nominee for the KM Hunter Award (music), and winner of the recipient of the 2009 Ken MacDougall Award for Upcoming Director.
Known for the outspoken social commentary that runs through her work, evalyn has created work on a wide variety of topical issues for CBC radio and television as well as numerous social justice organizations; she has toured universities, union halls, environmental events and pride festivals. Her spoken word piece "Bottle This!", which tackles the issue of bottled water with her signature wit, insight and outrage, has enjoyed extensive radio play, and been used by many educators and environmental groups. Her latest work is a music and spoken-word “cycle” called SPIN, which explores the connections between bicycles, women and advertising; it will premiere at the Sound Symposium in St John's Newfoundland in July 2010, and produced at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto in March 2011.
evalynparry.com
Performance Schedule:
Saturday 2:00-2:45pm in the Adult Tent
Saturday Concert 8:00-10:00pm: Featured musical guest and spoken word set
LaRon Williams (Michigan)
 Over the past few years, La'Ron Williams has been steadily earning a reputation as one of the finest storytellers in the state of Michigan. His salient gift is his remarkable rapport with audiences of all kinds. Children and adults respond with equal enthusiasm to his warmth and vigor as he uses dialect, facial expressions and movement to breathe life into tales which transcend the boundaries of class and age.
La'Ron is motivated in part by the belief that the power and beauty of African culture should be shared, and that the lessons of struggle, perseverance, and survival of Africans in the Western Hemisphere are part of a legacy we all should recognize and own.
Performance Schedule:
Saturday 1:00-1:45pm in the Family Tent
Saturday Concert 8:00-10:00pm
Brad Woods (Guelph)
Brad Woods is a storyteller because he can't think of why not to be one!
He is a former board member of the Storytellers School of Toronto, the recipient of the 2002 Anne Smythe Travel Grant for Storytelling and the 2004 Storyteller in Residence at the Guelph Civic Museum. In 2005 Brad was featured at the Yukon International Storytelling Festival and in 2006 was the first Canadian featured at the Los Angeles Storytelling Festival. In 2007 he released his first full length CD of original material and in 2008 took his tales coast to coast, from Vancouver to New York City. In 2009 Brad kicked off the legendary Mariposa Folk Festival with a story on the main stage and later that year released his follow up CD with launch dates all over southern Ontario. In July of 2010 Brad will be doing his first Storytelling Tour of the UK!
He is thrilled to be a part of this years St. Mary's event!
www.myspace.com/storytellerbradwoods
Performance Schedule:
Friday Concert 7:30-9:30pm
Saturday 9:00-11:00: Paper Trails Storytelling at the Horticultural Society Plant Sale site on the Flats
Dan Yashinsky (Toronto)
 Dan Yashinsky is a storyteller, writer, and storytelling activist. He is the author of Suddenly They Heard Footsteps - Storytelling for the Twenty-first Century, and the founder of the Toronto Festival of Storytelling. In 2009 he co-founded FOOL - festival of oral literatures. He has performed and taught at festivals in Singapore, Sao Paulo, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, Wales, England, Ireland, Holland, the US, and throughout Canada. In l999 he received the Jane Jacobs Prize for his work with storytelling in the community. He is currently working with Storytelling Toronto as the Storyteller in Residence at the Artscape Wychwood Barns.
www.thetellery.com
Performance Schedule:
Saturday 2:00-2:45pm in the Family tent
Saturday Concert 8:00-10:00pm |
