LOVELL — The Lovell Brick Church for the Performing Arts will be hosting Boston storyteller Diane Edgecomb at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 11, where she will tell the true story of her first encounter with the Kurds of Turkey.
Jo Radner, a Lovell resident and member of the National Storytelling Network, said that Edgecomb, who is also a member of the National Storytelling Network, is a very well-known storyteller and has been working on her current story, “Forbidden Stories: Journey Among the Kurds of Turkey,” for a while.
“A little while back, the NSN held a silent auction online, and Diane put performances of her ‘Forbidden Stories’ story up for auction,” Radner said. “I ended up bidding on it and won. I decided to gift it to the Brick Church for the Performing Arts so they could invite her to perform.”
Edgecomb’s story focuses on how she first became aware of the Kurds of Turkey, an ethnic group that inhabits a region called Kurdistan in the Middle East, and attempted to collect their vanishing folkloric tales.
“I knew that the storytelling tradition was in peril,” Edgecomb said in a recent news release, “but it was shocking to see how quickly it was disappearing. Young Kurdish people, forbidden by law to study their language, are not learning and passing along the tales.”
Radner said that Edgecomb’s performance is similar to a “one-woman show” and is “incredible.”
“Diane acts as the narrator, the director, the writer and plays all the characters,” Radner explained. “She does different voices, depending on who the character is and pulls you right into the story. I’ve seen her do it before, and it’s just amazing.”
Edgecomb said in the release that when she would ask the Kurdish people to recount their stories for her, they would sometimes get lost in reminiscing. She mentioned a shepherd that was forced to switch from a nomadic lifestyle to living in a city recounted stories that had been in his tribes for generations, and that “as he told the tales, his eyes grew distant. He was lost in the memory of stories more real to him than the small room or the whir of a video camera.”
Tickets will be $10 for adults and $5 for children 15 and under. Refreshments will be available during the intermission.
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