Cantastoria Creation Workshops
Museum of Everyday Life staff have offered cantastoria creation workshops throughout the years to Vermont elementary school children, graduate art school students in Chicago, Mexican indigenous community activists, Canadian teenage mothers, and Korean feminist filmmakers, among others.
For non-artists, cantastoria creation workshops are incredibly flexible, because creating a cantastoria involves story telling, analysis of issues, and painting and performing, and thus can involve people with all sorts of different strengths, from the shy bookworm to the constant doodler to the gregarious chatterbox who couldn’t draw to save his life. It allows people to tell their own stories in a creative and multi-layered way that leaves room for all participants to contribute. This makes it a very useful tool in workshops whose goal is simple show-creation with diverse populations. Cantastoria creation can serve an alternate and fresh way for teachers to approach subject matter, a tool for activists to communicate their message, and as a collective activity which unifies communities around a common interest.
Cantastoria creation workshops are a unique tool for Artists as well. Performance of the painted image is a tantalizing thing to explore for 2-D artists as well as textile artists who are interested in bringing their art work into the realms of movement, sound and theater. It is also an exciting form for narrative artists, people who gravitate towards story-telling in their work and who are eager to explore the ways that visual, verbal and musical strategies can interact in the creation of narrative. Animation students, comic and graphic-novel artists also find that learning cantastoria can inform and enrich their practice.
About Sung Paintings Cantastoria Workshop Photos
A Brief Sung History of Picture Story Recitation