Ballads, poems, stories about little old ladies and hand-sewn panoramas illustrating them all were all in store for the handful of participants who attended the Crankie and storytelling workshop with national singers and storytellers Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle.
They turned off all the lights in the center and backlit their panorama telling the story of “Miss Lella,” a little old lady in rural Kentucky who had a pet crow and would carry her fiddle everywhere so she could play music for the neighborhood children.
It was the first event in the Possum Town Tales Storytelling Festival, a four-day festival containing everything from storytelling and music concerts to workshops on different ways to tell stories.
Roberts-Gevalt and LaPrelle sang traditional ballads from their native Virginia and Appalachia-based culture, all while displaying their own illustrations on their “crankie.” Their small audience sat captivated until the end – when Roberts-Gevalt and LaPrelle told audience members they would be making their own crankies.
The “crankie” is a boxlike machine that’s been used to visually tell stories for more than 100 years. Canvases, scrolls or papers are wound up inside of them and slowly unrolled across a screen-like opening in the box, giving a watching audience a moving panorama illustrating some story or song.
After the performances, workshop participants drew sketches and doodles illustrating their favorite fairy tales or nursery rhymes and taped them into small cardboard boxes for their own crankies, while Roberts-Gevalt and LaPrelle supervised.
The festival
The two professional storytellers have toured together, performing for audiences across the country for about five years.
Roberts-Gevalt first learned what crankies were at a music festival in college and ended up making one for her final project as an English major. A few years later, she met ballad singer LaPrelle and they began incorporating visual art into storytelling and musical performances.
“The rest is history,” Roberts-Gevalt said. “That moment, we were like, ‘Oh my God, we should do one together!’ We started making them together and just touring in our rural Virginia area that we were living in. And then just got more and more requests to play other places.”
Roberts-Gevalt and LaPrelle – or Anna and Elizabeth, as they’re known in performances – are just two of the storytellers the Columbus Arts Council has brought in for the Storytelling Festival. They and their crankie will be joined by nationally acclaimed storyteller Donald Davis at a story concert at Rosenzweig Arts Center 7 p.m. today. More activities follow Saturday on the lawn of the Tennessee Williams Home from 10 a.m.-2 p.m., including children’s story time with Mother Goose, food and more performances. A concert of stories and music with Davis and musician Grace Pettis will be held that evening at the Rosenzweig Arts Center at 7. Pettis will hold her own songwriting workshop there from 2-4 p.m. Sunday.
The storytelling festival has been going on for about five years, CAC program manager Beverly Norris said. Norris has been a fan of storytelling and storytelling festivals for more than 25 years.
“You’re going to laugh really hard, you’re going to cry,” Norris said. “And it somehow makes you feel nostalgic about old times …(but) just puts you in touch with it at the same time.”
That’s something Roberts-Gevalt and LaPrelle want to emphasize. Storytelling is something almost anyone can do, Roberts-Gevalt said. Everyone has a friend or family member who can tell a good story, but as an art, she said storytelling has been lost to movies and television. They want to impress on their audiences there was a time people entertained each other by talking and listening face-to-face.
That’s one of the reasons they use the crankie. By using a hand-cranked device to illustrate the ballads they sing and stories they tell, they want to convey an older, more nostalgic feel, LaPrelle said.
Making a crankie
Each of their crankie-based stories takes about a year to produce. They sew their illustrations onto canvas – all after doing plenty of research about the time the ballad was first sung or story was first told, as well as about the singers or storytellers who may have first performed them.
They also wanted to impress on their audience the accessibility of storytelling. Anyone can learn to be a storyteller, Roberts-Gevalt said, and they don’t necessarily have to be a filmmaker or TV producer to do it.
That’s why they like doing crafts with participants like the crankie workshop, LaPrelle added.
“Doing little projects like this is letting people know that you can have art and creativity in your life without necessarily being an artist in the big gallery sense of the word,” she said.
“I think storytelling is a totally human instinct,” she added. “Everybody is always doing it. So I think that looking at different ways to do that intentionally and creatively can really satisfy people and make them smile and get them to think creatively even if they don’t think of themselves as an artist.”
Tickets for workshops and concerts are $10 advance or $12 at the door. The events at the Tennessee Williams home are free.
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