Join England’s first storyteller Laureate, Taffy Thomas MBE and a hand-picked team of guests for a weekend of workshops, performances and presentations to stir the heart and feed the soul.
This year for the 2024 Tales in Trust weekend Taffy Thomas and his team present ‘All the Stories between the Sun and the Moon’.
Stories know not borders or boundaries and travel the world from tongue to ear. Your leaders for this weekend have toured places here and around the world enriching their repertoire wherever they met traditional performers. This weekend gives them the chance to share these riches and skills. The weekend is suitable for storytellers and traditional performers of whatever experience, those who would like to include storytelling in their work or anyone who just wants to relax and listen.
It will also feature the popular Storyteller’s Supper event on the Saturday evening.
Who is it for?
Tellers of all levels of experience, and those who just want to listen. Bring stories to share, instruments if you play one, or just come as audience: “If speaking was more important that listening, we’d have two tongues and one ear”.
The Team
The team this year will be host, Taffy, along with Mossy Christian and Richard York.
There will also be workshops and performances by special guests.
Taffy Thomas MBE, England’s first storyteller laureate. Taffy is the patron of The Society for Storytelling. Taffy received The English Folk Dance and Song Society Gold Badge award in December 2010. With Taffy’s head bursting with stories, riddles and folklore, professional storyteller Giles Abbot once commented, “when Taffy goes it will be like a library burning down.”
Mossy Christian: Award winning professional musician, singer, and dancer, Mossy Christian specialises in the musical traditions of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Drawing on a rich and diverse repertoire of traditional dance tunes and folk songs, charting the lives of everyday people, in their work and recreation, from the 1700s to the present day. Delighting audiences across the UK, with performances at festivals and folk clubs from Whitby to Sidmouth, Morpeth to Nottingham, his shows are a treat not to be missed. As a respected researcher, Mossy has presented and published multiple papers, on subjects including: ‘The Midwinter Traditions of Lincolnshire’, ‘The Musical Pennock Family of Goathland’, and the folk-song collectors Frank & Ethel Kidson.
Special guest Sef Townsend has been sharing stories for more than thirty years. animating children and adults through the medium of story, language, rhythm and song and he is equally at home in a nursery school, in the family atmosphere of a local festival, or at a national museum. Often working with refugees, the exiled and those in asylum detention, he tells in churches, mosques, meeting houses and synagogues, and has been involved in peace & reconciliation projects internationally. Recent work has taken him from shantytown schools in South Africa to the British Museum; from the Korean Centre for Traditional Performing Arts in Seoul to a remote village and refugee camp in the West Bank. In the last couple of years he has shared stories, given workshops and conducted his own research in the UK, EU, China, Morocco, Argentina, and Chile.