Cynthia Changaris

To Cynthia Changaris, the vital part of storytelling is the fact that it provides connection to culture, the past, the future, dreams, and language. The stories that she finds most interesting provide surprises, twists, laughter, spookiness, mystery, and new understandings. She loves folk singing and uses a Native American flute, guitar, dulcimer, and recorder to punctuate her performances. Her style of life is one that encourages and engages others, and her style of storytelling and teaching is hands-on, encouraging, fun, and participatory.

When Cynthia leads workshops on storytelling, people come away with comments like "the best workshop ever” as quoted from Chuck Larkin, a veteran storyteller. Her students feel empowered to use strong voices to tell story.   She is comfortable with all ages and stages of students. 

A sixth grade student wrote:  “You have a special talent for turning words into personalities, situations, happy endings, scary creatures, and more.  Your voice makes an hour of plain words a great adventure for the imagination and the heart.” Cynthia will work with you to create a customized experience for you.  Your students can learn to tell, speak effectively, write a folk tale, develop personal tales, or develop cross cultural and cross generational connections.

Public Speaking or Poem Performance: Students learn effective public speaking skills through storytelling, including but not limited to use of voice, gestures, facial expression, body movement, presence, connection with audience, eye connection and movement, reading the audience, use of emotion in voice and face.

Learning Techniques for Story:  Students will learn the use of acting, mime, gestures, voice (pacing, tone, quality, and pitch), sound effects, mirroring, body movement, etc. to learn to tell the story.  Students will use techniques such as drawing, storyboarding, acting, sound poems, retelling in the group, acting in the group, imaginative play such as creating a news report, letter, tour, dialog, telephone conversation, text message, and development of still life tableaus to learn the story. Work is done sometimes individually, sometimes in groups.  Students learn from each other.

Coaching.  Students learn a method of coaching each other in writing and performing, which includes steps of: Listening actively, giving affirmations, asking questions, making suggestions (sparingly), and learning to receive coaching comments from each other. This process works for various art forms, including dancing, writing, public speaking, storytelling.