Harmony in Storytelling
Joy Kelly Smith (left) and Andrea Kamens (right)
Andrea Kamens is strongly involved in the storytelling community as a raconteur, teacher, and listener. Joy Kelly Smith is a multicultural storyteller, musician, and theatrical artist. Together Kamens and Smith create a unique storytelling experience. The duo aims to challenge perceptions, playing with words and reality while showcasing the collaborative nature of storytelling.
atac: Hi Andrea! It’s excited to have this chance to get to know you more. How about we start at the beginning, how did your early love for storytelling shape your childhood and influence your creative pursuits?
Andrea Kamens: I was always a reader, the hide on the playground with a book kind, the book on my lap during math class kind. I wrote from a really young age. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was also always telling stories. I told them mostly to myself, but also to my sister, and bossing around my friends making them the cast in all of my elaborate inventions. I loved entering other worlds. I love the delightful safety of being able to enter anywhere in the universe from anyone's perspective and come back out the other side. I'm also a word nerd; I think dictionaries are awesome reading material. Words are delicious!
atac: Can you recount the moment when you realized storytelling could be an independent art form?
AK: I was at the New England Folk Festival. One of my children was a folk dancer and I am not a dancer. I found a little room off in a corner where there was a storyteller, Ralph Chadis, who was telling a traditional ghost story. I love a good scare, and he was telling it very well, and I was able to find my place at this festival where I had been feeling like a dancer's mom instead of a full human. Afterwards, I went up to him and asked about local storytelling and he filled a piece of paper with email addresses. That's how I discovered Brother Blue's people that became The Story Space which I now help run, and potlucks, and swaps, and entire communities of people telling stories.
atac: Are there any other groups you are part of, and what are they like?
AK: Donna Washington and Sheila Arnold created an online story arts community called Artists Standing Strong Together (ASST) during the start of the pandemic in the US in the spring of 2020. It was a relief fund for artists who had suddenly lost their entire livelihoods, and runs a weekly Monday gathering. The first gathering that I went to was the first time where Zoom felt invigorating instead of draining. There was real human energy coming through the little squares. ASST opened up my world and still is.
Atac: I’m sure the people in these communities are a big source of expressiveness for you! Are there any stories that you draw inspiration from?
AK: Books I'd recommend 1) The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez. It's aimed at writers, but I come from the writing world, and it's an important book in challenging the mindset that all the arts related to words have been forced into, which is a white, oftentimes supremacist, block. 2) Collections from Peninnah Schram. These Jewish stories were my introduction to how tales that were part of my heritage that I had grown up with could be turned into something fun to read and could also be told again in your own voice. 3) Anything you love is worth reading and rereading, and fanficing on (that's officially a word now). Storytelling is taking the things that you love in the world and making them your own.
atac: Has there ever been a time when a storytelling session did not go as planned?
AK: I was working as part of a weeklong Jewish conference in England and they wanted me to tell some stories to kids in their "Family Room" – it turned out the "Family Room" was like a holding pen after the day's programming. I had a bag of puppets and tried to settle the kids with this big snowy owl whose head turned all the way around. A kid from across the room started yelling, "Owls don't turn their heads like that. They can only go 3/4 of the way, not all the way." Then he began fact-checking me on every single thing I told, and I was telling fantasy stories! This whole room full of hungry cranky children were exceedingly into the back and forth of can we catch the storyteller in a scientific error. The kid's family waited until the very end and said to me, no one has ever listened to him the way you listened to him. That was one of my reminders that storytelling is actually a listening art. You aren't just a listener when you are listening to another teller or learning a story, you are a listener in the act of telling, and if you aren't, there's no difference between storytelling and the writing I do alone in my room with no interaction and no relationship to the audience.
atac: That's a very important moral you took from that situation! Do you have any other advice for future storytellers?
AK: There will always be people who either tell you that your voice is too weird or conversely that your voice is too boring and if you waste your time listening to that, you could waste years being a really bad storyteller. Instead, spend that time finding the right listeners, the right stories, and the right growth for your voice.
atac: What are you excited about coming up soon?
For upcoming projects, I am the producing host for a bilingual Spanish-English storytelling show online through Artists Standing Strong Together (ASST) on February 28 with tellers from Mexico, Peru, Honduras, Brazil, and Colombia. I'll be telling at the Women's Storytelling Festival online and in-person in Fairfax, Virginia, on March 16. I'm co-chair of Sharing the Fire, the Northeast Storytelling (NEST)'s annual professional conference for storytellers, story listeners, and story lovers March 22-24 in Portsmouth, NH.
atac: What can the audience expect from your performance at atac, and how is working with Joy Kelly Smith going to make this performance unique?
For our atac show, expect to hear great stories! It's going to be a wild ride. We're going to play with words and play with reality. The way things appear doesn't have to be the way things are, and the way things are doesn't have to be the way things could be. Storytelling is mostly thought of as a solo craft and there's a lot of pressure to keep it that way. I wanted music in this show, so I'm expected to play an instrument mediocrely. But why not call up the amazing Joy Kelly Smith, who is actually a musician and who I've always admired and enjoyed being with? Working together deepened our stories, and has been a blast! We have different strengths and different arts and it's still not theater. It's storytelling. No one has written a script for me that I have to follow. But I get to interact with another voice on stage. We’ll even be asking each other some questions and hope you have some too!
atac: Joy, it is a pleasure to chat with you! Can you share how your early experiences with storytelling shaped your childhood?
Joy Kelly Smith: I was born in Mississippi and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. As a child, I loved all of the arts - played piano and eventually guitar. I even played double bass in a youth symphony orchestra. I also did public speaking and even painted a bit. Being Southern, as a child I performed at Ladies' Teas (yes at teas - but they always served punch!) singing or reciting a poem. I even made up stories to tell my siblings and my childhood friends. I often told the Southern scary story, "The Golden Arm" which still gets requests! Sometimes I'd get them to act out my stories. I had a rebellious streak as well. My Dad was very involved in the Civil Rights Movement when I was a child and it affected me as well. I wrote poetry expressing my feelings on social justice and my opinion was published in the local newspaper. In addition to participating in demonstrations with my father, my sister and I organized a protest in my high school against the band marching behind the Confederate flag.
atac: How did you know you wanted to be involved in the art world?
JKS: When I was 17 I looked at all the things I loved to do - public speaking, singing, art and combined them all and decided to try theatre. That became my goal. I taught myself to play the guitar so I'd have my own accompaniment (since I couldn't carry around a piano!). Eventually, I moved to New York City, where I reside now, to pursue my dream.
atac: When you initially moved to New York, what was your experience like?
JKS: New York was intimidating at first but also very exciting. I auditioned for everything. I was cast in some plays and musicals but I also saw I was seriously typecast out of some plays as well. I was not "Black" enough for many roles. I was too upscale. But this was me - who I was/am. I decided to do some one-woman shows in cabarets and my sister suggested I explore storytelling. And I did a bit of modeling as well - for magazines mostly! Something I thought I'd never ever really do!
atac: What's some advice you have for folks who want to get involved in storytelling and theater?
JKS: Follow your instincts - It can be difficult but stick to it and be open and resilient and willing to try something else that catches you.
atac: Can you share some specific influences that have shaped your love for storytelling?
JKS: I love theatre - all sorts of entertainment. I've admired the actors from the old movies - Sidney Poiter, and Katherine Hepburn as well as the actors I have worked with. Storytelling became a fascination for me when I saw a show called "Men Speaking in Tongues" - all Men of Color telling different kinds of stories in different kinds of ways. That really inspired me to try storytelling.
atac: Tell us about your upcoming performances!
JKS: I've been doing a lot of Storytelling lately. I have several gigs in New York for young audiences. I will be performing in Rye, NY in May and June at the Jay Heritage Center doing a two-person piece called "Striving for Freedom" about two of John Jay's slaves. On May 5 I will be on Zoom with the Healing Story Alliance telling stories about Kindness.
atac: What makes you excited about your performance at atac?
JKS: It's really nice to have the opportunity to perform in the Boston area. I went to Wellesley College and did some of my first public performances in this area. It is also exciting to finally get to perform with Andrea. We’ve known each for quite a while through Northeast Storytellers and Artists Standing Strong Together and we’ve exchanged views about stories and storytelling but this will be our first time performing together.
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The Question: A two-woman show with story & music is coming to atac on February 10th! Andrea Kamens and Joy Kelly Smith will be performing 3-4 stories, including traditional folk material from their respective Jewish and African traditions, a first-person story, and the debut of an original piece created by Andrea including the song "Tell Me" with lyrics and music by Alicia Jo Rabins/Girls in Trouble.
Grab tickets today, these are stories you’ll want to hear!
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