Innovative Storytelling Art Performance

“I am a painter and a storyteller, and this is how I tell my stories.”

StoryFaces is an exciting storytelling show in which I paint the faces of audience volunteers live onstage to illustrate the stories as I tell them, engaging the audience with uniquely animated tales of world cultures and my original stories.

In StoryFaces assembly programs for schools, Spoken Word and Visual Arts combine in this exciting storytelling performance. Traditional tales and mask-based designs exemplify the role of art and story to communicate needs, beliefs and values in world societies, expanding student comprehension of cultural arts. Fascinating stories are presented with their cultural context in relation to modern concerns and lived experience. Variable content for grades K-12, ranging from animal tales and Aesop Fables for younger students to inspirational hero tales and myths for older grades. Featuring my personal stories exploring this artistic process and an understanding of our shared humanity gleaned through years of analysis and presentation of cultural arts. 

For schools, see also my Talking Art program on art history and mask arts for middle and high schools, and the Amazing Face Story Activity page — with a follow up DIY drawing and writing activity in which kids create an original story starring themselves.

The general performance for family audiences is a mix of folktales and adventure tales — ranging from new takes on familiar tales like Aesop’s Fables, to hero tales like Punia and the King of the Sharks and The Tail of the Dragon,  plus comic characters and surprising faces in my original stories such as The Tiger that Went to the House of the Sun, When A Man Met A Crocodile, The Adventure of 2 Lizards on 4 Faces, and The Amazing Face Story.

Please contact me with any questions or to schedule a performance.

StoryFaces shows are a surprising combination of storytelling and visual arts that engages the entire audience as the stories come to life on the faces of audience volunteers. A typical performance runs 60 minutes, with 4 or 5 stories involving 5 – 10 volunteers being facepainted onstage as to illustrate my tales as I tell them. Like a magician would do, I pick my volunteers from the audience to be part of the show onstage while I am also engaging the full audience with my interactive storytelling and audience involvement. There’s a range of content available for any age, including kids, teens and adults.

Talking Art — a special StoryFaces arts-in-education program of stories about art history origins, inspirations and appropriations, connecting students to some essential questions:  Why art? How does art work?

The StoryFace-A-Saurus Show —telling the story of dinosaurs and how their story keeps changing

The Ocean Comes to Visit — sea life, magic fish and an ocean of possibilities

The Amazing Face Story Activity — an arts-in-education exercise to get kids to create an original story starring themselves.

The Power of a Story — an essay on why I tell tales

StoryFaces Movie — available online for streaming

 Agostino Arts School Programs — a menu of our arts-in-education shows and workshops

StoryFaces came out of my 45 year adventure in theatre and facepainting, developing makeup art as a performance through my background in story theatre and physical comedy, enriched by exploration into the origins, inspirations and history of the art of transformation. In 2022, StoryFaces was presented as a special event at the 50th annual National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN