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Storyteller Lisa Facciponti will visit Lafayette College for three presentations as part of Lafayette’s 1999-2000 Roethke Humanities Festival.
She will speak on “Oral Traditions In World Cultures: Journeys Through Storytelling” at 8 p.m. Wednesday, October 27, in Room 108 of Lafayette’s Williams Center for the Arts. She will lead a workshop in traditional Greek circle dancing at 9 p.m. Monday, November 1, in the Marlo Room of the Farinon Center, a presentation cosponsored by the recreational sports program. She will also conduct a “story circle” workshop with Lafayette students, based on their reading of the Odyssey and stories from their own lives, at 8 p.m. Monday, November 8, in Room 4 of Kirby Hall of Civil Rights.
All events are free and open to the public.
Lafayette’s 1999 Roethke Humanities Festival, titled “Modern Appropriations of Homer’s Odyssey,” celebrates the epic that was this summer’s common reading assignment for the Class of 2003. Held every two years, the Roethke Festival is named for Theodore Roethke (1908-63), a former Lafayette faculty member and noted poet of the 1940s and ’50s. Roethke published several critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, including The Waking, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1954.
A resident of Lower Nazareth Township, Pa., Facciponti became involved in storytelling in the early 1990s while teaching marine science classes to preschool and elementary-school students at Mystic Marinelife Aquarium in Connecticut. She founded a storytelling guild with some friends while working at Mystic and living nearby in Rhode Island. Now an adjunct professor at Northampton Community College, her recent engagements include presentations to audiences as diverse as the National Canal Museum in Easton, Hanover Elementary School in Hanover Township, Pa., and a storytelling festival in Rhode Island.
She has given other performances at schools, libraries, coffeehouses, hospitals, women’s celebrations, and holiday events. Facciponti has appeared with the Spellbinders, Little Rest Storytellers, of which she is co-founder, Out of Pocket Theater, Word of Mouth Productions, and other New England performing groups, and with Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley Storytellers, World Theatre Workers, and Pocono Storytellers. During a recent two-year residency in Mexico and Guatemala, she presented bilingual circle dance workshops featuring a collection of community folk dances from around the world.
Along with performances and workshops for children and adults, Facciponti gives thematic performances for corporations, focusing on cooperative problem-solving and cross-cultural understanding. She incorporates songs, drumming, and audience participation in her shows.