Our July Concert News
We are pleased to announce our performers for the July online concert, The Gender Spectrum!
Performing will be Polis Loizou, Jon Mason, and Aaron Oliver & Cindylou Turner-Taylor for the collaboration. Of course, we will have our highly popular Cath’s Cupboard of Customs, too!
Cindylou Turner-Taylor
Cindylou is a storyteller, teacher and artist, who has been ‘Out’ as a teacher in schools for three decades, weathering the silent storms and trauma of section 28. She identifies as a woman, a pansexual and chooses to live as a lesbian.
Cindylou tells stories of every genre, with a sensuality and passion that will stir your soul, whilst simultaneously grounding you in the universal truths of human existence. She has a particular interest in uncovering ancient LGBTQI+ tales from oral traditions, that have not been ‘cleaned up’ by those who would seek deny our complex humanity.
2023 marks Cindylou’s 10th anniversary of telling stories for coin and she is celebrating with an anniversary tour of spoken word and storytelling clubs up and down the UK.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cindylou.turnertaylor/
Aaron Oliver
Aaron is a London Storyteller for children and adults
Telling stories of love, queerness and the beauty of people
Aaron, is a transgender storyteller based in London. Aaron is inspired by folk tales and myths, and loves taking inspiration
from these traditional narratives to tell queer stories that aren’t often represented in the genre.
See https://www.instagram.com/aaron_oliver_storytelling/ for more
Jon Mason
Jon is a Brighton-based storyteller with a fascination for tales that evoke magic and drama in the landscapes around us. His lifelong interests in history and mythology have led to decades of puzzling on the connections between stories, past, present and place – as well as to a degree in History with Archaeology at the University of Wales, Bangor, and his current PhD at the University of Brighton, on stories to re-enchant urban space. Born and bred in England, but with family connections to North Wales, his favourite tales include folklore old and new from all over the British Isles and Northern Europe, as well as medieval myths from Icelandic, Old English and Welsh traditions (his greatest love has always been The Mabinogi) – but he maintains that any tale will tell us something about the hopes, fears, heartaches and beliefs of its tellers: what it means to be human in a place and time.
Jon performs regularly at festivals, clubs, in schools and online, and leads walks to share the history and tales of the landscape. His Time Travel Treasure Hunt, in collaboration with the University of Sussex History Dept., was selected for the Brighton Festival Our Place outreach programme in 2019 and 2021, and he has appeared in the Brighton Fringe. Jon’s 2022 show, Merlin in the Wildwood, was called “wildly ambitious, exuberant storytelling” (Brighton Source).
Jon’s web presences are
https://jonthestoryteller.com/
FB: Jon Mason Stories and Music
Twitter: @jonmase
Polis Loizou
Polis is an award-winning Cypriot writer and performer, working across various disciplines. He tends to draw on history, social politics, folklore and ‘queerness’ in all its forms.
Polis’s debut novel, Disbanded Kingdom, was published in 2018 and long-listed for the Polari First Book Prize. His second novel, The Way It Breaks, is set in his motherland of Cyprus, as is A Good Year, a historical novella inspired by local horror folklore.
Polis is also one third of the award-winning fringe theatre troupe The Off-Off-Off-Broadway Company, (http://www.offoffoffbroadway.co.uk/) as well as a performer of folk tales and poetry.
Polis lives in Nottingham with his husband and cats.