THE GROUND BENEATH US AT BUILDING FIVE
STORYTELLING AND DRAWING WORKSHOPS
COST :
$400 per workshop
$1000 for a bundle of any three workshops
$1600 for all five payable by April 1, 2024
Register at www.buildingfive.org
Five immersive, intensive weekend workshops.
These workshops connect one’s innate creative spark with deep-time storytelling and straightforward drawing exercises. Oral storytelling and image making exercises are braided together into each session. We go deep into old stories and myths to examine how they speak to our lives in the present day. Each weekend begins with a telling of a story. We build drawing exercises around the images in each story. Through discussion, exercises and critique, each participant creates their own image world from the stories.
This course is for anyone interested in unlocking their visual storyteller: teachers, writers, artists and the narratively curious. This is not about technical prowess, but storytelling and expression. The drawing exercises do not require previous training. Participants come away having created their own story based in image and text; gaining tools for telling stories with pictures and thinking in mythic time.
Saturday and Sunday 10AM-4PM
Weekends are full days of storytelling, drawing exercises and workshops.
APRIL 12-14, 2024:
The Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of the most iconic of Western stories. We look at what the story has to say about leaving home, coming home, and being a migrant in the world. What does that longing in our stories say about our own longing? Who is a migrant, a refugee, or a native? Our stories root us to the ground and allow us to travel over great distances. How do we define home? Can we find stories in the ground beneath our feet that welcomes newcomers and honors the ancestors?
JUNE 28-30, 2024:
River Stories
Stories from the Mabinogion, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Chinook stories about rivers, water spirits and the energy of moving water. We consider the energy of rivers at the Building Five site. History of the ironworks, the buried rivers of Portland and the Willamette and the Columbia.
SEPT. 7-8, 2024:
Tree Stories
Folktales from Pagan Europe, Indigenous stories from the Pacific Northwest about trees, forests and plants. We consider the presence of Forest Park that rises behind Building Five. Divinations from ravens, conversations with trees, and rivers that fall in love. These stories are remnants of old understandings between the non-human world and the human society. Can we restore our relationship with a living world in crisis if we hear the voices of other personages? Is it possible these old stories have been waiting for us to sit quiet and really listen?
NOV. 2-3, 2024:
Underworld Stories
It’s that time of year. Stories that guide us through the Underworld, visits to the land of the dead, ghost stories and divinations from beyond.
DEC. 13-14, 2024:
Homecoming Stories
What does it mean to come home? Stories of belonging, returning and finding place. Looking at Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home.