STORYTELLING THEATER, MUSIC, DANCE AND MIME
Johanna Hongell-Darsee; storyteller, dancer, mime; and Scott Darsee, guitarist, composer, take you on a journey of Ballads and Runes, Myths and Legends with traditional and non-traditional storytelling techniques.

The art of storytelling is universal and as ancient as humanity; our dreams of a distant common past.

Stories travel and have always traveled. On their way they pick up bits and pieces of different cultures and landscapes but the heroes and heroines, the villains and the mysterious creatures often stay familiar.

We tell stories using music, song, masks, dance and mime.

Come and join us on this journey of ancient tales.

Johanna studied Mime and Dance in France and in India and is using stories and inspiration from both these cultures as well as her native Finland. Scott has composed music that reflects these stories and their background.



Click here to see our presentation video 

Click here to hear a song from our CD

Our CD The Island Furthest Away can be bought from CD Baby

 

 

 

News! 
 

We will be performing at St James Hotel in Cimarron on April 20. See our Upcoming Events Page for details.

 

Stay tuned for our summer program with performances at libraries around New Mexico. Check our Upcoming Events Page for details.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stories from Far Away Islands, Deep Forests and Magical Gardens.

A princess who marries a wolf, an old hag who steals the sun and the moon, the first singer of stories, a magic rosemary plant, sea-ladies, dragons, air daughters ...

These are some of the characters you will meet in our performances.

 

 

Could you use some fantasy and dreams in your events? How could myths and legends enrich your programming?

 

Ancient stories, ballads and myths often touch chords deep within us. It is maybe hidden, forgotten, but it is there. Our distant common past.

 

For me mythological stories have always had a power to make me feel more connected. Connected to the ground, to the world around me, to other people. How, alike we all are! How alike we are to even people who lived maybe thousands of years ago. How comforting, and sometimes, how scary. What can we learn from the experiences of others, from our ancestors.

 

When we create a performance, we take the utmost care to choose stories that speak on many different levels. Often stories can be performed for many different audiences i.e. children, youth, adults, we then adapt the rendering of the story to the audience. For this we use a combination of music, storytelling, theatre, mime and sometimes masks. We have performed for everything from groups of toddlers, big groups of children in schools, high schools, detention centers, full night performances in theatres, senior centers, festivals, outdoors and indoors.

We offer:

o Ballads and Runes

o Children's Programs

o Music Performances

o Lecture Demonstrations

o Workshops

o Classes

Contact us and we will tailor a program to your needs.

We live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but are willing to tour all through the country. Look at our UPCOMING EVENTS  page for upcoming tours in your area.

 

 

 


The storyteller sits and tells a story with words and gesture. Now if he gets up and starts to move around, does it become theater? And what if he stops talking and just uses a gesture, is it then dance or mime?



For me it is a gliding scale and I like to use it all the way from one end to the other.



I think traditional stories from all cultures have their own life. The characters are not fictional. They actually live in all of us. They are different aspects of our selves and the dancer/storytellers job is to bring them out in the open so that the audience can recognize them and thus hear their own story. The same story might have different meanings to us at different times in our lives or even from day to day. They might also mean different things to a woman, a man or a child.



My grandmother was a puppeteer so I grew up among stories full of wondrous characters. I started working in theater in my teens and continued with that till I felt a need to learn more. My search for an education on how to bring stories to life - not with puppets but with myself as the tool brought me to France and Ecole Jacques Lecoq.




Around the same time I saw a performance of Classical East Indian Dance for the first time. Now, there was away of rendering stories with both music, movement and dance. I wanted to learn that.



I was very lucky to find a teacher, Sri Kama Dev, who happened to live in Paris at the time. He was a very inspiring teacher and a great dancer and he also encouraged me to continue my studies in Chennai in India.



There again I was extremely lucky. I got the chance to study with some outstanding teachers, to whom I feel I owe everything I know about the performing arts and also many aspects of every day life.



I studied Bharata Natyam with Srimati Savithri Jagannatha Rao and "Abhinaya" the mimic part of Bharata Natyam with Srimati Kalanidhi Narayanan. I was also fortunate to learn a couple of items from Sri A Janardanan.


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