I am thrilled to announce that the hand to Hand to Hand/Face to Face Institute is hosting the first annual Therefore Festival on Saturday, August 22 — a day-long gathering of stories told and heard. I've been mulling this for years and couldn't be more excited to launch it now.

2026 lands us in a valley of thousandfold shadows. Fire, Flood, War, Authoritarianism, and Reality Collapse, just to name the greatest hits. So many of my dearest friends are crippled by soul paralysis in the midst of all this. There has never been a better time to touch in on story. As my collaborator John de Kadt says, "when a people loses its way, it's time to go back to the storehouse of story."

Telling a story — a culture-feeding, heart-engaging story — is the oldest and most reliable technology we have for meeting numbness: an essential connection to the river of grief and love that flows through everyone who has ever lived.

For me, the medicine of folklore lives on a vast spectrum — from Gilgamesh to Grizzly Man — but the one element that holds true medicine stories together is deep, rich, prismatic layering that reaches well beyond the realm of the individual, includes but extends beyond metaphor, and touches the songline of timelessness. The old myths and wisdom tales do this by default — but there are newer myths that can bestow the same transformation, and THEREFORE FESTIVAL will strum that fault line like a lyre string, as you'll see in the variety of tale-tellers this lineup has in store.

The experience will last from afternoon into evening, 1pm–10pm, with a community dinner available as an additional ticket. Space will be very limited — it's our first year, and we're hosting the whole event at our small space with limited parking. We ask you to reserve now; we'll have a hard cut-off on numbers.

PS: Kids are essential to storytelling and we need your kids with us if it makes sense - but to be clear - this afternoon is mainly for the more patient young ones. The final story of the evening told by Sean Allison at 8:30 is the only story that is R rated.

LINEUP (Saturday August22)

1:00 – RYAN SHEA

Ryan Shea is a philosopher-naturalist at The Nature Institute in Ghent, NY — one of the few places in the world devoted to Goethean science, a contemplative way of reading the book of nature. A longtime teacher of philosophy of science and nature writing, he brings audiences into direct, present encounter with plants, insects, and the living world as storytellers in their own right.

1:30 – POOJA PREMA

Pooja Prema is a Berkshire-based community 'ritual artist' — theater-maker, dancer, writer, singer, ceremonial guide and cultural activist — whose work is rooted in the folk ritual-theater traditions of her homeland, Kerala, India, where performance, healing and village tending are one art. Founder of The Ritual Theatre and the Rites of Passage Project, she creates site-specific, multidisciplinary live work that honors storytelling as world-making and initiation.

2:00 – JAY LEEMING

Jay Leeming is an Ithaca-based performance storyteller and poet who came to telling as a ranger-naturalist in Yosemite's high country, where he found the surest way to connect people to the wild was through the dream-logic of traditional stories. A National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipient praised by Robert Bly for his "surprising angle of vision," he brings the Odyssey, Gilgamesh, and world myth alive through music and the spoken word. He is the creator of the Crane Bag Storytelling Podcast.

3:00 – JOAN HENRY

Joan Henry (Tsalagi/Nde'/Arawaka) is a traditional song-carrier (dekanogisgi), lead drummer (hahesh'kah), and Native Women's Traditional dancer whose youth was filled with her grandmothers' and elders' stories, songs, and plant knowledge. Her credits run from Broadway stages and Disney's Pocahontas to two albums with jazz great Jack DeJohnette. She founded the Mothers of Nations Singers & Dancers — the first women's drum to preside at Indigenous Peoples' Day opening ceremonies for the United Nations — and makes her home in the mountains of the Northern Catskills.

4:30 – GLEN BERGER

Glen Berger is a two-time Emmy-winning writer and the playwright of Underneath the Lintel, the beloved one-man metaphysical thriller that ran over 450 performances Off-Broadway and has been produced more than 200 times in eight languages — the tale of a librarian who follows a book 113 years overdue to the ends of the earth. He spent six years co-writing Broadway's Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, chronicled in his acclaimed memoir Song of Spider-Man. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

4:50 – HEATHER FISCH & TOMÁŠ KUBÍNEK

A beloved Berkshires double act: Heather Fisch — Great Barrington performance artist, singer, and multi-disciplinary theater-maker, co-founder of the legendary klezmer-punk spectacle Bella's Bartok — joins forces with Tomáš Kubínek, Certified Lunatic and Master of the Impossible. Born in Prague, smuggled out in the wake of the Soviet invasion, and raised in Canada, Kubínek has sold out theaters in over 30 countries, from BAM and Broadway's New Victory to London's Southbank Centre. Together: song, spectacle, and the commonplace miracle.

5:15 – DINNER

6:30 – THE REMEMBERERS

The ReMemberers are a trio weaving ritual storytelling, global song, and multi-instrumental virtuosity into a prismatic experience — part theater, part concert, part ceremony. Violet Southard's numinous voice, Alex Harvey's resonant strings, and John de Kadt's percussive tale-telling create an atmosphere where ancient myths breathe again: told, sung, and drummed into presence. Tonight: THE FIREBIRD, drawn from the Russian folktale tradition.

8:30 – SEAN ALLISON

Sean Allison is a Hudson, NY writer, performer, and musician whose one-man show If It Bleeds It Leads won the Best Storyteller Prize at NYC's United Solo Festival. In the summer of 1993, at twenty-one — twice kicked out of college — he shot overnight breaking news across New York City as a one-man camera crew in an auctioned-off cop car, selling footage to all six morning news programs. Thirty years later, he began to tell the story: a coming-of-age ride through murder, mayhem, and love — and a love letter to a city best described as the Wild West.

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