Suited Storytellers

Funding Success!

It’s not enough to know a good story – you’ve got to be able to tell it. And it’s not enough to have a good idea about putting on a one day storytelling festival – you’ve got to get out there and make it happen.

And we have been beavering away doing just that. We are delighted to say that we have secured funding nationally from Arts Council England and locally from Flourish Barnstaple. We are working side by side with our venue, the wonderful St Anne’s Chapel in Barnstaple, and with the Plough Storytelling Circle, who always have our backs!

With support like this, how can SUITCASE be anything other than a success? Although I suspect there’ll still be a few sleepless nights before 15th November.

For more information about SUITCASE events click on the drop-down SUITCASE menu at the top (and bottom!) of the page.

‘Herd’ – bringing a new show together…

We started with one story. Discussed it, tried it out, went round the houses, came back. It just didn’t quite work. So one day we set off in a different direction. We came across a story which spoke to us, which led to another, reminded us of a third, and suddenly we were using all three of them. ‘Ah yes,’ we said to ourselves, ‘We know what this is about.’ But the more we worked on the stories and the show took shape, the more we realised the stories were telling us something quite different.

Weaving together these three tales from the oral tradition, we found ourselves contemplating what it takes to find your voice. And your people. And how to hold on to them for dear life – or let them go gracefully – as the years pass.

We began with the idea that whatever story we worked with would involve horses. In fact, all three do. And those horses have led us to also consider how we find our ‘wild within’. It is so easy in the maelstrom of modern life to lose touch with our own wildness, but when our youth-obsessed world is no longer so interested in us, that is when we can find it and revel in it again.

We have the added thrill this time of working with a musician. Paschale Straiton is a master of weird and wonderful instruments and the haunting sound of the saw is often to be heard behind the doors of the rehearsal room. As our stories originated and spread out from Georgia, Serbia and the areas inhabited by the Celtic tribes who the Romans called ‘Gauls’, Paschale has been researching the music of those places so sound and words meld together in a very satisfying way!

We have been able to experiment, make mistakes, and come back stronger with a show we are proud of. And we could not have done that without Arts Council England funding, giving us the time and space to devise and rehearse.

We are so excited for you to see ‘Herd’.

With new suits?

Of course! The suits are an important part of what we are about and not just because of our name. Wearing suits challenges pre-conceptions about storytelling and storytellers, and about us as women – and older women at that. We don’t want to conform to anyone’s expectations and the suits make it clear we mean business. It is just one of the elements in creating exciting, thought-provoking, contemporary storytelling.

And this time the suits will be ……….. YELLOW! And Paschale’s will be blue. (Because horses only see in shades of yellow and blue.)