Our monthly storytelling event has been going strong for nearly a year and in that time, we have learned a lot. We have heard many inspiring stories and met many wonderful people from all over the world. We have also seen what seems to be working and what needs to be tweaked. As such, we are making some minor changes to the event to enhance the experience for everyone!
One of our principal goals (besides keeping alive this timeless practice) has been to build a bilingual community of storytellers with the dream of it becoming multi-lingual. This is an obvious challenge because not everyone is bilingual. So, we have a fun new plan to help facilitate bilingual storytelling and get to know new people!
Starting this month, we will begin the event one hour later to help facilitate the participation of our Spanish-speaking community. We will also have the event be equally split between English stories and Spanish stories. We realize that not everyone is bilingual, so we will take a brief moment between each story so folks can speak to a bilingual neighbor in the audience to get a summary of the story. Our hope is this will facilitate two things: getting to know someone new and understanding a story told in a language you aren’t fluent in!
To help get the ball moving in this direction, we will have invited storytellers in both languages with the goal of getting back to having the majority of the storytellers be spontaneous the night of. In the meantime, we will leave some slots open for folks to sign up during the event until we have a consistent amount of stories in English and Spanish, so we aren’t completely changing the dynamic.
We will continue to have an introductory hour before the actual storytelling event where Karla will provide storytelling tips to help people stay on track, stay within the timeframe, and keep the story interesting for the listeners.
As we’ve said, this is a work in progress, so we do appreciate constructive feedback about these changes from folks who are attending and experiencing the event.
We’re really excited about how our storytelling community can continue to grow and become even more diverse. We look forward to seeing you later this month!
Wednesday, Sept. 27
Intro/Tips: 6 PM
Event: 7 PM
$5 at the door
No reservations needed
idiomART is located at: Mariscal Lamar 14-25 y Estevez de Toral Cuenca, Ecuador
Sarah HB
idiomartcuenca@gmail.com
