Thursday July 29th, 2010
Louise Moyes' - Florence
7:30pm - 9:30pm
The Reid Theatre, Memorial University
Florence recreates the life of lively and heartbreakingly funny storyteller, musician and dancer Florence Leprieur, aged 93, from Black Duck Brook (l'Anse à Canard), Newfoundland. Through Florence's stories in both French and English we see the Port-au-Port peninsula, on the west coast of the province. It is a place that is not well known by Newfoundlanders, let alone Canadians and beyond.
Florence is an incredible teller of stories of her own life. Her tales of raising eleven children, practically on her own, in the isolated L'Anse à Canard are chilling and beautiful.
She is also a musician. Florence sings 'Chin' music - she sings the tunes of the jigs and reels. This was a fully respected musical form, like playing a fiddle. Florence was world-renowned fiddler Emile Benoit's girlfriend when they were teenagers, and sang chin music with him for many years. She was so good some people preferred her to the instrumental musicians! She'd sing for dances and weddings until she lost her voice for 2 weeks at a time. People would stop her on the road and they'd say 'Come on now, sing us a jig!" And she would. And they would dance right there on the road.
Research, choreography and performance by Louise Moyes.
Louise Moyes performs one-woman 'docu-dances': humourous, multi-disciplinary, bilingual shows created from documentary-style interviews.
Growing up a Newfoundlander of Cockney parentage who later lived in Quebec, Louise developed a fascination for accents, gestures, and other distinguishing cultural features. While travelling she records conversations with ordinary people and edits a script from the recordings, playing up to 20 different characters in a performance. Her quirky vignettes are both funny and biting. Louise studied at studio 303 in Montreal and has performed throughout Canada and in Europe, Iceland and Brazil. http://www.docudance.com/
Saturday July 31st, 2010
The Cupids 400 Storytelling Concert
6:00pm - 7:00pm
St. George's Church, Brigus
1610. It was called Cupers Cove. The first planned settlement in this New Founde Land. It was a rugged vista, wild and ferocious in its beauty, cruel and unforgiving to those who took it for granted. And yet John Guy and his brave pioneers thrived, prospered, explored and conquered. Through tenacity and daring, and no small measure of sweat and toil, they wove the fabric of a culture that has resonated across the ebb and flow of centuries.
Over the next 400 years, English settlement in Newfoundland and Labrador and the rest of British North America grew to become what is now English Canada. And 400 years after that first settlement, we celebrate that heritage with stories from English voices from Newfoundland, the Mainland, and "Across the Pond." Conception Bay's own Kathi Stacey hosts an evening of talented guests, including:
Graham Langley
Graham Langley started storytelling at the Grey Cock Folk Club in Birmingham, England, back in the early 1970's. He spent 20 years as a performance arts teacher and has been a full-time storyteller for 20 years. He produces a wide range of storytelling events including the English Storytelling Network, Young Storyteller of the Year and runs Peak Performance, a monthly storytelling school.
Christine McMahon
Christine is a vibrant storyteller with a growing international reputation. Her ready wit and love of traditional folktales combine with her background in drama and psychology to create wonderful worlds of stories. Not only a performer, Christine has a unique talent for improvisational Storymaking, guiding audiences of any age to have the confidence to create stories from their own imaginations. Christine is a member of Shaggy Dog Storytellers, recognised as one of the most successful and long running clubs in England.
Margaret Hitchens
A regular teller of the St John's Storytellers Circle at the Crow's Nest since a guest appearance in 2004. Margaret concentrates on the British Music Hall genre. 1930's monologues/songs performed by Stanley Holloway and Gracie Fields are favourites, recently songs by Flanders and Swann are additions. Margaret comes to this scene, like many other people, from Church concerts and choirs via local CBC broadcasts and theatre productions. She enjoys the intimacy of storytelling.
Jan Andrews
Jan has told at festivals and in concerts across Canada, in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, and is always trying to push at the boundaries in the development of her art. She has been the artistic director of two performance series, mounted complete tellings of The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Mahabharata and was the initiator of SC-CC's StorySave project to record elders from the Canadian storytelling community.
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Graham Langley
Christine McMahon
