Summer of Fun Festival 2021
11 oral storytellers over 5 magical days. Free to all!
Kingston upon Thames
KT1 2PS
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Timetable of Performances
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Date | 10:00 to 11:00 | 11:00 to 12:00 | 12:00 to 13:00 | 13:00 to 14:00 |
| Thursday 5 August | Animal Stories for Everyone For families and all ages | Scary Stories for Fearless Families with children aged 6+ | ||
| Friday 6 August | Tales of wonder and mystery | Who will get on the train next? | The boy who could speak the language of the birds For families with children 6+ | What’s in the Story Bag? |
| Saturday 7 August | What’s in the Story Bag? | Tales for the Plains of Africa | The Marvellous Menagerie | "Oh No Loki!" For families and all ages |
| Thursday 12 August | Nature Tales | Through the Fairy Tree Emily Hanna-Grazebrook For families and all ages | Strange Tales from Essex | Thinking Stories |
| Friday 13 August | “Is that you Jack?” Carl Merry For families and all ages | Happily Ever Afters | Wings and Wishes | Personal Resilience Stories |
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Meet the Storytellers
Belinda has been telling stories for longer than fluffy the cat has been living with a troll, but not as long as elephants have feared mice. She travels the land with her beautiful yurt, the Curious House of Stories sharing wisdom, wonder and whimsy wherever she goes.
When not performing Belinda creates digital patient stories for the NHS, runs storytelling workshops and is currently developing, ‘Personal Resilience Storytelling’ course for adults.
Date: Wednesday 5 August 2021
Time: 12:00 to 13:00
Title: Animal Stories for All
About the performance: Why does rat hate cat so much? Why won’t eagle listen to the little green parrot? And who will stop the mice from arguing? Come along and discover the answers to these questions and many more.
Date: Thursday 5 August 2021
Time: 13:00 to 14:00
Title: Scary Stories for Fearless Families
About the performance: Are you brave enough to test your courage, battle your imagination, and grow emotional resilience. In Belinda’s safe hands you will to go face to face with ghosts and other things that go bump, ouch, eek in the night.
Suitable for families with children aged 7+
Date: Friday 6 August 2021
Time: 13:00 to 14:00
Title: What’s in the Story Bag?
About the performance: Put your hand into the Story Bag, wriggle it about for a moment, then wrap your fingers around an object. Whatever you pull out Belinda will tell you the story that belongs to that object, so choose wisely.
Date: Saturday 7/August 2021
Time: 10:00 to 11:00
Title: What’s in the Story Bag?
About the performance: Put your hand into the Story Bag, wriggle it about for a moment, then wrap your fingers around an object. Whatever you pull out Belinda will tell you the story that belongs to that object, so choose wisely.
Date: Thursday 12August 2021
Time: 10:00 to 11:00
Title: Thinking Stories
About the performance: For generations stories have shape cultures, tribes, and individuals. This session of storytelling and discussion investigates the wisdom and wonders of gems hidden in the folds of stories.
Suitable for families with children 6+
Date: Friday 13 August 2021
Time: 13:00 to 14:00
Title: Personal Resilience Stories – taster session
About the taster session: Belinda is launching a Personal Resilience Storytelling course for adults in the autumn. This 6-week course will enable you to find, develop and tell your personal resilience story to an invited audience. This 45-minute taster session is an opportunity to trying out a couple of exercises and find out more about the course.
For adults
Sarah Deco is a storyteller based in London. She has had careers both as a singer songwriter and a dancer. She is the founder of the 
North London Traditional Storytelling Circle.
Sarah has been steeped in myth, fairytales and wonder-tales all her life and feels they are essential now to help us orientate ourselves in this time of change. She also explores traditional story in her other role as a psychotherapist facilitating workshops in personal development and climate psychology.
Date: Thursday 6 August 2021
Time: 10:00 to 11:00
Title: Tales of wonder and mystery
Performance: Why do the trees dance on midsummer’s eve? What is the staircase that has no steps? What is the secret of the transparent apple and the silver saucer?
Find the answers to these questions and more when Sarah tells tales of wonder and mystery.
For children aged 6 to 600
Social media:
Heleni is a professional bi-lingual Greek/English storyteller based in Northwest London. She studied the ‘The Craft of the Storyteller’ and Biographical storytelling at Emerson College, East Sussex and Clowning with Carol Thompson, Sacred clowning with Didier Danthois. She created a company called The Fabulist in 2005 and for four years received funding from The Children’s fund to work on a 6-week project called ‘The Outsider’ that was taken to 18 schools in Essex. She has performed in various festivals in Greece, Cyprus and Spain. Storytelling is at the heart of everything she does.
Date: Thursday 6 August 2021
Time: 11:00 to 12:00
Title: Who will get on the train next?
Performance: A little boy sets off on a round-the-world night train to dreamland with only his toy dog for company. But soon all sorts of endangered animals are asking if they can jump up and join them on their journey...... and what happens when the wind had blown all night in the great woods and there were leaves and broken branches everywhere. Was it just the wind or something else?
Anna is an artist, writer and researcher working in mixed media. Over the past couple of years, she has been incorporating storytelling and performance into her artistic practice, bridging technology with the spoken word. She is from a long line of storytellers, her Irish grandmother relied on the flames of the fire to reveal stories, while at 8-years old, she was using a deck of cards to uncover the secrets of the past. Storytelling spills into her artwork and research and into her role as a therapist.
Anna was awarded an MA in Fine Art from Southampton University in 1998, and a certificate in Psychotherapy from CBPC, Cambridge, in 2010. An interest in the effects of trauma on the body, developed during her work as a psychotherapist, led her to a PhD in Arts and Media at Plymouth University, which she completed in May 2017. Her artistic practice balances the auto-ethnographic with the critical, utilising personal experiences to facilitate a greater understanding of identity, memory, trauma, and its wider cultural implications.
Date: Friday 6 August 2021
Time: 12:00 to 12:45
Title: The boy who could speak the language of the birds.
About the performance:
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, Patrick chases a cuckoo and inadvertently saves the world. Come and hear about his courageous adventures as he zig-zags across the world, eavesdropping on the birds and discovering their deepest and darkest secrets.
Anna will regale you with magical wonder tales (6+). Never too old!
Social media:
Website: https://www.thecityartsdoctors.com/
https://www.anna-walker-research.com/
Instagram: @sanga32
FB: Anna Walker
Andy is a London based, professional storyteller working in educational and corporate settings and of course festivals and special events. He is a member of the Society for Storytelling and fantastically passionate about all things stories. Some funny, some gripping and some that are just so important that they need the power of storytelling to keep them alive.
Originally from South Africa, Andy loves to showcase the beautiful stories from Africa, alive with the sounds and voices that will transport his audience to the wide-open African plains. His stories are not just from Africa as he can easily able to draw you into any of the stories from a diverse repertoire that stretches in origination from all around the world.
Andy is a licensed storyteller by the Roald Dahl company for the book “Billy and the Minpins” and the founder of The Chalking Stories Café’ which was created to inspire his audience to imagine, create and share their story.
Date: Saturday 7August 2021
Time: 11:00 to 12:00
Title: Tales from the Plains of Africa
Performance: Join South African and London based storyteller, Andy Copps as he takes you to the beautiful African plains with stories of people and animals with the rhythmic sounds and sights that only Africa can provide. Once you hear the heartbeat of Africa it will never leave you.
Social media:
www.andycopps.com
Twitter / IG @andycopps
Facebook @andycopps.uk
James lives in Surrey and has been telling tales to a wide variety of audiences since 2014. He has previously appeared at the Teddington Arts Festival, the Kingston Festival of the Spoken Word, and at various storytelling nights across the UK. James also helps run Surrey Storytellers and can often be found hosting their performance night on the fourth Friday of each month.
Date: Saturday 7 August 2021
Time: 12:00 to 13:00
Title: The Marvellous Menagerie
Performance: An assortment of weird and wonderful creatures await in the Marvellous Menagerie. This series of short stories includes tales about mischievous goblins, hungry monsters and the devil's own cat!
Social Media: Twitter handle is @canvin_james
As a storyteller, Amy has toured Austria, helped found the Worthing Storytellers Club, and has featured at the Oxford Storytelling Festival and Xanthe Gresham's Goddess Lounge.
Date: Saturday 7 August 2021
Time: 13:00 to 14:00
Title: "Oh No Loki!"
About the performance: Loki, the Norse trickster god, is always getting himself into one mischief or another! Join Amy Sutton to hear how Loki stole Sif's golden hair, nearly lost the Apples of Immortality, and got into trouble with the giants of Jotunheim.
Social media: Website: www.amysuttoncreative.wordpress.com
Twitter & Instagram: @TheLadyAmelia
Hannah Need, a.k.a. The Storyteller of Southfields is a storyteller based in London. Hannah has always loved telling stories so being a storyteller is her dream job. In her storytelling Hannah often takes the traditional tales we know and love and adds in an expected twist or two.
Hannah’s storytelling work takes her to festivals, theatres, schools and many other storytelling events.
Date: Thursday 12/08/2021
Time: 10:00 to 11:00
Title: Nature Tales
Performance: How about a nature trail but without the walking? Hannah’s stories will transport you from gardens to countryside and onto to a farm. You’ll find cheeky squirrels, magical apples and a very determined goat in amongst many other wonderful nature tales.
Date: Friday 13/08/2021
Time: 11:00 to 12:00
Title: Happily Ever Afters
Performance: Hannah Need tells traditional tales with a twist or two, where we escape into the world of stories to find unlikely heroines, misadventures and a few happy endings. Afterall who doesn’t need a happy ending or two?
Social media: https://hannahneed.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/Hannah_Need or @hannah_need
https://www.facebook.com/hannah.need.1
Emily is a professional storyteller, singer and songwriter from North London, with an extensive background in performance art and teaching. With her ever growing repertoire of traditional and original tales and her background as a classically trained singer, Emily draws on her Celtic roots to create storytelling worlds filled with original music, ridiculous rhymes, pesky pixies and gothic ghosts.
She is an expert at audience interplay and tom-foolery, and loves to connect with the crowd, who help to shape and create new stories in her wild, silly style. Emily has performed at schools, museums, historic sites, festivals and community events all over the UK and Northern Ireland.
She currently hosts a story podcast with her son Leo called Dragonfly Tales. They have thousands of listeners all over the world! Find it wherever you find your podcasts!
Date: Thursday 12/08/2021
Time: 11:00 to 12:00
Title: Through the Fairy Tree
Performance: Join Emily for a magical, musical session filled with merriment as we step into a wonderous land. Frolic with fairies, hide from animals in the jungle and help a little fluffy duck save the day!
For children and families of all ages.
Social media:
www.talesfromthedragonfly.com
Instagram: @emdragontales
Twitter: @talesfromthedr1
Thursday 
Born in South Wales Carl spent most of his formative years either playing cricket or reading. Early encounters with the Greek myths sparked a lifelong love of these tales. As a teacher, Carl spent twenty six years attempting to instil a love of literature into teenagers.
In 1985 he discovered traditional storytelling was alive and part of a wider arts scene in Britain. Immediately Carl was hooked and attended storytelling performances and courses in order to find out more. He began to use storytelling as an integral part of his teaching, writing a six week storytelling module for year 9 students and telling Chaucer’s tales to “A” Level classes prior to teaching the text.
Since 2000 Carl has worked as a storyteller, telling in theatres, country parks, schools, Medieval re-enactment events, festivals, storytelling clubs and community groups. He runs workshops for adults and children and has helped organise The East Anglian Storytelling Festival. He is a past director of The Society for Storytelling, and as a member of The Essex Storytellers devised a number of storytelling projects based around the history of Essex. He has been a mentor for the Walking The Wild Woods 3 year course, which is run by Shonaleigh Cumbers, for nine years.
Date: Thursday 12 August /2021
Time: 12:00 to 13:00
Title: Strange tales from Essex
Performance: This is a set of stories from my adopted county. Essex is a county of contradictions and strange happenings and these tales showcase just some of the history and legends which lie within its borders. You will hear of dragons, smugglers, twice married Kitty Cannon, raiding Vikings, the most famous Cunning Man of his time and more. Many of the tales are true, and they are often the most unbelievable. Come and judge for yourself.
Date: Friday 13 August 2021
Time: 10:00 to 11:00
Title: “Is that you Jack?”
Performance: An exploration of the many faces of Jack, that constant hero of folk tales including his adventures as a young man to his old age. I was lucky enough to have spent a little time talking with the late Scottish storyteller, Duncan Williamson, and to have heard him tell many Jack stories. These stories fascinated me. Jack is “Everyman” and also his own man. He has his own way of resolving problems and is sometimes clever and at other times simple. These stories are a small example of the range of tales that are told about this character.
Social media:
Website: www.carltales.com
Hannah is a professional storyteller based in Essex who tells both traditional and modern tales to young and old alike. Driven by a passion to engage and inspire communities with oral storytelling, she draws on her acting background to take her audiences on playful and poignant journeys into folk, fairy, wonder tales and myths and legends from around the world. Described as, ' Captivating, compelling, high-energy and fun.', she provides storytelling for schools and families through her company Tiny Tales Storytellers and for adult audiences with Spinning Yarns Theatre.
Date: Friday 13/08/2021
Time: 12:00 to 13:00
Title: Wings and Wishes
About the performance: Come and pick from the bag of story wishes and see which tales will take flight. Will it be dragons, talking birds, bats with no rhythm or perhaps just a girl who wishes she could fly? The choice will be yours.
Social media:
Www.hannahbrailsfordstoryteller.com