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Upping Your Game: A chance to work with some of the world’s great tellers!

2021-05-07

Storytellers of Canada - Conteurs du Canada is proud to present a new professional development series featuring international tellers: 

Upping Your Game: A chance to work with some of the world’s great tellers! 


In Summer/Fall 2021 and the Winter/Spring 2022, SC-CC will offer a series of four intensive workshops for members. Taking advantage of the current situation, when we are all connecting across the globe without leaving our homes, workshops will be led by world-renowned storytellers from four continents. Workshops are aimed at emerging to established professional storytellers. 


There will be three workshops in English, and one in French:


June 2021- Mosaic Work: Crafting True Stories with Jo Radner (US) This workshop is now SOLD OUT. A waitlist is available on Eventbrite
Fall 2021 – Two Boats, One River: Music and Storytelling (EN) with Nick Hennessey (UK)
Winter 2021 – Storytelling in Museums (EN)  with Kamini Ramachandran (Singapore)
Spring 2022 – Theme will be decided based on participants' interest (FR) avec Jihad Darwiche (France/Lebanon)


All workshops will all be limited to 8 participants, first-come-first-serve. Participants must be members of Storytellers of Canada - Conteurs du Canada. Access to this program is a benefit of SC-CC membership and is being subsidized by the organization.
 
Registration for Jo’s workshop is now open! Visit Eventbrite for tickets.
More information and dates for the following workshops will be announced soon.


L to R/ G à D: Jo Radner, Nick Hennessey, Kamini Ramachandran, Jihad Darwiche

About the artists
Jo Radner is a storyteller for all moods. She delights in eccentrics, believes that humor and gravity are good bedfellows, and favors characters who shape admirable lives around unavoidable misfortunes.  Jo has performed and taught from Maine to Hawaii to Finland.  Although she tends to make stories about the people and history of northern New England, she also performs traditional folktales and her own modern tales and riffs on well-known classics.  Jo’s major stories include “Burnt into Memory,” a performance created from oral histories she gathered from survivors of the 1947 wildfire that destroyed the town of Brownfield, Maine, and “Braving the Middle Ground,” which juxtaposes Native American oral traditions and stories told by her own New England settler ancestors.
 
Jo teaches storytelling to teachers in Lesley University's Creative Arts in Learning M.A. Program.  She also conducts workshops for adults on creative storytelling, finding and telling personal and family stories, creating stories from history, and (especially for caregivers) on helping others tell and value their own stories. For children, she offers storytelling performances (which can be linked to school curricula) as well as workshops and residencies on storytelling as a dynamic literacy tool.
 
Nick Hennessey is an internationally acclaimed storyteller, playwright, folk singer, song writer and musician. He has told stories for more than 20 years, performing at venues such as the Southbank Centre and the Royal Albert Hall. He is particularly drawn to North European cultural traditions and has been awarded high honours in Finland for his work on their National Epic, Kalevala. He is a sought after artistic collaborator, working with top of the field musicians and storytellers. With a deep appreciation for the key role that stories play in how we learn about and express ourselves and the world, whether in communities, businesses or schools, he works extensively in helping draw out our natural storytelling skills.
 
He came to storytelling whilst undertaking field research for a PhD in Cultural Geography. At this time he became a professional singer, songwriter and storyteller with a particular interest in the relationship between landscape, communities and stories and the re-invention of tradition. As an artist he has continued to do research and perform internationally. In 2000 he won the World Championship in epic-singing performing the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic in Espoo, near Helsinki. He regularly returns to perform Kalevala in English for Finnish audiences. In 2009 he presented a program on BBC Radio 4 about the relationship between Kalevala and modern Finnish national identity.
 
Kamini Ramachandran is a pioneer in the field of storytelling in Asia. She is the creative force behind MoonShadow Stories which spearheaded performance storytelling for adult audiences in Singapore. She teaches her course The Storytelling Intensive at LASALLE College of the Arts and directs the annual student showcase Stories Through The Mind’s Eye. Storytelling has always been vital for Kamini, from her earliest memories of her grandparents telling her stories to her efforts in continuing this storytelling tradition with her two sons every day since they were six months old.
 
Fluent in both English and Malay, Kamini studied English Literature & Language at the University of Reading (UK). Kamini is especially interested in Malaysian stories (legends from Borneo, stories from Langkawi, animal tales of Sang Kancil and Buaya, and lesser known Orang Asli folklore) as she still feels the pull of jungle spirits, having grown up in the peninsula’s plantations. While she is comfortable telling stories to children, she is also adept at regaling adults, drawing on her preference for darker, ambiguous, other-realm supernatural tales. Her adult storytelling repertoire includes original stories based on personal experience (‘The Dato Tree’), universal urban legends (‘The Karak Highway Incident’), regional folklore (‘Umpong Umpong & Babakud’), classic epics (‘The Ramayana’) as well as re-telling South Indian stories collected by the eminent Indian folklorist A.K.Ramanujan.
 
Jihad Darwiche (France/Lebanon)
Jihad Darwiche est né à Marwaniyé, un petit village du Sud-Liban. Son enfance a été bercée par les contes, les joutes poétiques qui sont encore très populaires de nos jours et les récits traditionnels de l’Orient que racontaient sa mère et les femmes du quartier. Il habite ensuite la vieille ville de Saïda, où la tradition du conte est encore vivace. Dans les ruelles étroites, les voisins passent leurs matinées à discuter d’une fenêtre à l’autre et à se raconter les rêves de la nuit (de vrais contes de fées) en buvant le café à la cardamome...
 
Dès ses débuts, il participe activement au renouveau du conte dans les pays francophones et arabophones.  Il est intervenu lors de nombreux colloques sur l'art et le travail du conteur, et a publié plusieurs articles dans des revues spécialisés en France, Pologne, Québec, ... Auteur d'une trentaine de livres de contes et d'une douzaine de cd-audio, il est, et a été, conseiller, directeur et co-directeur artistique de plusieurs festivals : Festival des Alpes-Maritimes, Festival Yeleen au Burkina Faso, Festival de Saint-Denis à la Réunion avec Hassane Kouyaté, Festival de contes de Djibouti, Festival du conte et du monodrame au Liban.

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