Laconia Therrio performs stories (and, maybe, Jane will, too)
In the workshop, participants will learn to tell their own stories through art, pantomime, and movement. We promise not to embarrass anybody. Grades 4+ & adults welcome!
Laconia Therrio is a professional storyteller who hails originally from New Orleans, bornin 1954 at Charity Hospital on the “Colored Ward.” He has served as a minister in Allentown (PA), Newark (DE), and Stamford(CT). He also serves as a chaplain on the Spiritual Care staff at Stamford Hospital. Laconia grew up loving words, often at five years old pestering his mother to find the most difficult words to spell in the dictionary. Today, those words come together in the form of Story; mostly folktale, literature, and personal. He believes in Story’s capacity to unite, build, and connect.
Jane M. Gangi has been a professor of education and is currently an adjunct at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, New York, where she teaches courses in English/History Honors Genocide in Literature and Art and Children’s and Young Adult Literature. During lockdown, to reach out to housebound children, she and her graduate students recorded folkloric stories that were watched thousands of times: https://www.msmc.edu/about/centers-institutes/the-collaborative-for-equity-in-literacy-learning/stories-for-children/. She’s written three books: Encountering Children’s Literature: An Arts Approach; Genocide in Contemporary Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Cambodia to Darfur; and, with Mary Ann Reilly and Rob Cohen, Deepening Literacy Learning: Art and Literature Engagements, K-8. With Jen Cullerton Johson, she has written a middle school biography: Unstoppable: Katalin Karikó’s Nobel Prize-Winning mRNA Discoveries, and her memoir, Breaking the Threads: A Southern Childhood in Racism and Mental Illness, and a Life in Books and Dreams
Both Laconia and Jane have received the Connecticut Storytelling Center Barbara Reed Award for distinguished and outstanding service to the Connecticut Storytelling Community. They have performed and coached together for over thirty years, and taught a semester-long courses in Storytelling at both Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, and Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. They have also presented together at dozens of national conferences.
Laconia’s stories
For middle and high school students, and up.
The Boy and the Two Water Pots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJjBTD7EDeE,
The Basket
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyEk45Uy7z4&t=513s