Stepping Up & Stepping Out
What amazing performers do we have this month?
From our Stepping Up Commission, we present Hannah Moore, Lindsey Gibb, Katrina Pike, and Adam Miller. Of course, we have our regular Cath’s Cupboard of Customs, by Cath Edwards! Lindsey and Katrina are doing this month’s collaboration.
Hannah Moore
Hannah’s background is as a theatre-maker and event producer, specialising in creative workshops and social dance experiences that bring people together and sneakily contain a lot of joy.
Recently, Hannah has also developed her practice as a restorative justice practitioner and mediator, alongside working as a storyteller and facilitator, holding safe spaces for people to explore deep things together.
Hannah’s work focuses on intra & interpersonal restoration – restoration of spirit, connection, hope, possibility, purpose, resilience, emotional capacity and energy – all the things that we might speak of when we use the term ‘wellbeing’, with recognition of how deeply and holistically these things affect us.
Trained as a professional storyteller by the School of Storytelling on their flagship course Storytelling Beyond Words, Hannah has since taught, performed and facilitated programmes with the School for Storytelling, and taken her storytelling work out to a wide range of contexts.
Lindsey Gibb
Lindsey loves stories and has been telling and sharing them all her life; her connection to the land and wildlife comes through in her storytelling. Journeys also feature strongly in Lindsey’s stories as they offer opportunities for adventure, cunning and the unexpected.
As a professionally qualified trainer she runs workshops for all ages and CPD events for professionals. She has performed at the Scottish International Storytelling Festival, TradFest, Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Enchanted Forest, amongst others. She is co-author with C.A. Hope of Perthshire Folk Tales, a collection of stories, mysterious, fun, historical and dark, from Scotland’s heartland. She is also fond of Jaffa Cakes.
Katrina Pike
Katrina is a sea-loving writer and performer who can’t sit still for long.
She has moved house more than 20 times, collecting friends, poems, stories, photographs and dance moves along the way.
Home is now Shoreham-by-sea, just along the coast from Brighton where she first started performing poems more than 15 years ago. In Shoreham she runs and hosts Kollab, a sparkly night of music and words.
Katrina writes poems that ordinary people can understand. Her work has a strong sense of rhythm, shared with energy, passion, sensitivity and movement. She writes often about belonging, bodies and beaches, inspired by true life stories.
Her one woman show, Individual Medley, toured nationally and combined spoken word with physical theatre and swimming lessons, telling the tale of moving to Zambia as a teenager.
You can follow her on Instagram @katrinaswords
Adam Miller
Adam Miller trained in Drama & Theatre Studies in Aberystwyth University. After graduating he moved to Cardiff with his partner, who introduced him to storytelling as a distilled art form (separate from theatre, or filmmaking) and recognised in it experiences he’d had growing up in Ireland, something which he’d never had a name for up until that point.
Adam began storytelling in 2017, performing at his sister’s wedding around a bonfire, and developed and improved his material after receiving feedback. He has performed twice at a local festival back home in Ireland, and regularly attends the Cardiff Storytelling Circle in Chapter, Cardiff run by Cath Little.
Adam has undertaken training courses with Michael Harvey and most recently with Nick Hennessey, and gained great insight and useful feedback from them both. He has also taken singing lessons with Cardiff-based opera singer and teacher Hollie Clark, and sang onstage on multiple occasions.
With a great love for mythology, often those sources are the ones he most draws from, finding himself drawn to the lesser known or less-told stories.
The Sons of Tuireann is a favourite, as it essentially amounts to a big, rowdy, Tarantino style story of stealing magical relics from all around the known world. Adam has written several stories out of whole cloth himself, unrelated to any pre-existing story. These include The Galloping Well, and Buttercups & The Queen of the Fairies.
Cath Edwards’ ever-popular Cupboard of Customs will highlight some, lore and customs that are in keeping with the time of year
Cath’s repertoire is largely based on traditional and folk tales. She revels in sourcing stories, making them her own and passing them on so that her audiences can love them as much as she does.
Cath learnt a love of folklore and stories as a small child; as an adult she told stories to her own children, and, as a teacher, worked with children through story.
Cath tells stories to adult audiences, family audiences, very young children, school-age children and children and young people with special needs.
Cath is co-host of Lichfield Storytellers and is traditions the Society for Storytelling Midlands representative. Cath’s book West Midlands Folk Tales is available from The History Press; Warwickshire Folk Tales is in preparation.