Event

Full Moon Story Slam

Special Guest Storyteller, Norah Dooley, Co-Founder of www.massmouth.org and the Greater Boston Story Slam series.

Before there was Zoom or the internet; before there was television, radio, or live-streaming; before there was written language; there were stories. It's how our ancestors made sense of their world and how we make sense of ours. It's how knowledge and culture are passed down.

A story slam is a competition based on the art of storytelling. It puts a dual emphasis on content and performance, encouraging storytellers to focus on what they're saying and how they're saying it. Each slam has a theme. The story tellers are challenged to tell a five-minute true story from their own life on the assigned theme without using props or notes. The story has an arc: a beginning, a point of change, and a resolution. There will be two winners at each slam: the audience favorite and the judges favorite.

The Full Moon Story Slam at The Actors Studio was conceived by Suzanne Dubus, Liz Desmarais, Marc Clopton, and Sara Quay over ten years ago, while they were on a cruise in Boston aboard a boat named "Full Moon." They contacted Kristen Petrie, our current MC, who rounds out this founding group. The Slam has remained one of the most popular programs at the Studio. If you would like to tell a five-minute story, all you have to do is contact Kimm Wilkinson at Kimm@newburyportacting.org, or you can show up and sign up on the night of the show. Ten storytellers will be chosen.

We are so pleased and honored to have Nora Dooley as our guest storyteller. A co-founder of massmouth.org and the Greater Boston Story Slam Series, Nora is also the project director of StoriesLive®, which she created, implementing a curriculum used to teach over 7,000 Greater Boston high school students to tell compelling first-person narratives. For more information on Nora, visit www.norahdooley.com.