Three newcomers and a returning family of tellers will highlight the 10th anniversary of the Storytelling Festival at the H. Leslie Perry Memorial Library on Thursday night.
The family event is open to all ages, said Claire Basney, the head of youth services at the library and a storyteller herself.
“It’s a one-of-a-kind event for Henderson,” Basney said in an interview last week. “It’s a tremendous amount of fun.”
The night’s featured tellers are the Healing Force, a family group that has performed in Henderson before, and first-time festival participants Laine Cunningham, Auntie Rose Love and Rebecca Tighe.
The festivities will run from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the community room at the library and will conclude a day celebrating the art of storytelling. Fourth-graders from the county’s public schools, Kerr-Vance Academy and home schools will gather at the Aycock Recreation Complex in three groups for one-hour sessions between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. They’ll hear the festival’s featured tellers as well as regional storytellers Markey Duckworth of Oxford, Ron Jones of Durham, Sylvia Payne, Bob Raven of Kittrell, Charles Shelton and Patricia Washburn of Henderson.
By making stories so vivid, Basney said, the storytellers get children “terrifically excited about books and reading.”
“I’ve never seen the storytellers get a reaction that wasn’t great,” she said.
The Storytelling Festival started in 1995 with the help of a grass-roots grant through the Vance County Arts Council. It is one of many such festivals held across the state, including one in the fall in Oxford, Basney said.
She recruits tellers at storyteller conventions and through their state guild. Basney said she’s excited about all of this year’s featured tellers, who are always in high demand:
* Love, who’s from Hendersonville, is someone Basney has heard a couple of times and had hoped to bring to Henderson for years. “She does a highly educational program,” including puppets and multicultural sketches.
* Tighe, from Wilson, is an extremely physical storyteller, Basney said. “She gets in people’s faces. … She always moves around.”
* Cunningham is someone Basney hasn’t seen. She specializes in folk tales from Australian Aborigines and American Indians.
* Healing Force is a family of three or four storytellers who first came to the festival two years ago, Basney said. The group dances and sings and gets the audience to do the same. “They had people dancing who had not come planning to dance.”
Basney said she hopes for 50 to 75 people at the festival. Families can sign up at the library’s front desk, or they can just show up Thursday night.