Telling Tales in Circus--A Storytelling Workshop That Kept Performers Connected

Circus News

Telling Tales in Circus–A Storytelling Workshop That Kept Performers Connected

I wish I could say we gathered in a dusky church basement or on a sprung floor of a circus studio. But we met where most people meet these days, on contactless Zoom. The Storytelling for Circus workshop organizer, Charlotte Mooney, co-artistic director of Ockham’s Razor, made the distance feel less vast by being warm and inviting. She had the perfect background to lead the group, having trained at the International School of Storytelling. Besides her circus performing and directing career, she still performs regularly as a storyteller and teaches storytelling in various settings from primary schools to universities. Charlotte also teaches devising and lectures on directing circus at Circomedia
el="noopener noreferrer">Circomedia.  The thing that I love about circus is how broad a church it is – how endlessly inventive and strange. Charlotte was running five concurrent sessions of the workshop for free, some perhaps more diverse than our group, which was 11 white people. Mostly of us were women from circus, most from the UK, all from the arts, and we were meeting up for camaraderie and to alleviate the loneliness of quarantine while expanding our toolkit. Over the next five weeks, we would not just simply hone our professional and artistic selves by exploring the elements of narrative, but also find some connection and deeper understanding of the power of storytelling in our work. Week 1: It’s Not Awkward At All Ok, there was some awkwardness, but it was mainly in my mind....
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Kim Campbell

Kim Campbell has written about circus for CircusTalk.News, Spectacle magazine, Circus Now, Circus Promoters and was a resident for Circus Stories, Le Cirque Vu Par with En Piste in 2015 at the Montreal Completement Cirque Festival. They are the former editor of CircusTalk.News, American Circus Educators magazine, as well as a staff writer for the web publication Third Coast Review, where they write about circus, theatre, arts and culture. Kim is a member of the American Theater Critics Association.