Kind Stories in Concert Feb 5th

Kindness is having the ability to speak with love, 

listen with patience, and act with compassion.”

-Random Acts of Kindness Foundation

Join the Healing Story Alliance for a special gathering to share and explore stories of kindness in its many faces and forms. Through folk tales, personal, and historic stories, we will dive deeply into multiple experiences of kindness. What is it? How does it impact us and our relationships to ourselves, to each other, to the world? Come and listen to “kind stories” shared by both professional tellers and community members and see what memories of kindness emerge for you. Featured tellers on Feb 5th, 2023 are Eth Noh Tec, Diane Edgecomb, and Doug Elliott. Our esteemed emcee is Milbre Burch.

Diane Edgecomb’s beautifully articulated pieces and “embodied telling” bring the listener straight into the heart of the story. A featured teller on NPR and winner of a Year’s Best Performance award for her theater work in Boston, Diane’s storytelling has been featured at prestigious venues throughout the country for over twenty-five years. She has been an invited teller to the National Storytelling Festival and the International Storytelling Center and is the author of A Fire in My Heart, the first book of Kurdish folktales ever to be published in English.

Founded in 1981, Eth-Noh-Tec Directors/Artists, Nancy Wang and Robert Kikuchi-Yngojo developed a unique style of storytelling that weaves music, dance, rhythmic dialogue, lively facial expressions and the spoken word to present both ancient and contemporary Asian stories to adults and children nationally and internationally. Their mission is to create art that heals the divides within us and between us. To carry out this mission, Eth-Noh-Tec builds cultural bridges that celebrate diversity and create compassionate communities through interdisciplinary narrative art forms focusing on themes of social justice.  

Doug Elliott is a naturalist, herbalist, storyteller, basket maker, back-country guide, philosopher, and harmonica wizard. For many years made his living as a traveling herbalist, gathering and selling herbs, teas, and remedies. He has spent a great deal of time with traditional country folk and indigenous people, learning their stories, folklore and traditional ways of relating to the natural world. In recent years he has performed and presented programs at festivals, museums, botanical gardens, nature centers and schools from Canada to the Caribbean. 

Emcee

Milbre Burch  is a GRAMMY-nominated spoken word recording artist, an internationally known Oracle-Award-winning storyteller, and a sought-after teaching artist. The preeminent interpreter of Jane Yolen stories, she has performed and taught across the US, Europe and Asia since 1978. She has created nationally recognized residencies, workshops and pre-conferences, as well as locally lauded community outreach events. A produced and published playwright, Milbre holds a PhD in theatre and performance studies from the University of Missouri. She is dedicated to addressing issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, to working for peace and justice and reconciliation, and to speaking the truth of women’s experiences

Raisa Jones, an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, has been a social justice advocate for the last several years. Working to raise awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, she seeks to learn from relatives all over how we are unique and also how similar we are. It is her belief that the path to social justice can be paved by mutual
respect and understanding how we are all interconnected. This belief in centering the voices of others is a guiding principle in her work as a crime victim advocate. It is her hope that by everyone reaching out to have a positive impact in the life of someone else, we can create the positive changes in society we wish to see.

Beatrice Birch, Inner Fire founder and Board President, has worked as a Hauschka Artistic therapist for more than 30 years in integrative clinics and inspiring initiatives in England, Holland and the USA where the whole human being of body, soul and spirit was recognized and embraced in the healing process. She has lectured and taught as far afield as Taiwan. Her passionate belief in both the creative spirit within everyone and the importance of choice, along with her love and interest in the human being has taken her also into prisons where she has volunteered for many years offering soul support through Alternatives to Violence work and watercolor painting.

For more information, contact:

Lani Peterson: Lani@LaniPeterson.com or Heather Forest Heather@storyarts.org