A teacher reminded me this week of how distracted we are, how so many things demand our attention from the moment we wake up to when we walk out the door and travel someplace. Story Jam, an event happening once a month until Christmas at the Albany Theatre Deptford and Canada Water Theatre, demands our total attention, as its performers take us through songs about stories and stories about songs. The attention that one storyteller receives is quite magical if you listen to how silent the room becomes, all while offering a fun, scary, surprising and sensual experience.
Our imaginations are also evolving in this new digital century: images are all around us and definitely inform how we imagine things. That is why I loved the amount of details that the storytellers gave us during their stories about faraway lands. From the smell of sheets to the noise that a branch makes, and from the beat of a heart to the image of a bloody hand, we are totally there. Performer Sarah Liisa Wilkinson, the first of the evening, was my favourite as she took us through a first story about womanhood in Romania, and then to Finland with a woman looking for her warrior son. The soothing element is that these stories end well.
