Tag Archives: transformation

Adventure Tales! — Become Your Own Hero

Adventure Tales! Become Your Own Hero

My StoryFaces performances have always featured hero and adventure tales, especially those about young or small protagonists, like The Tail of the Dragon, based on an ancient Chinese legend about a brave girl that saves her village, or Punia and the King of the Sharks, a Hawaiian tale about a boy who chooses to be a hero. The reason Punia can be brave in this tale is because he is small, an encouraging message for kids, that even the small can be heroes. A wide variety of adventure tales are available to suit the age range of your audience, from Aesop Fables to my original tales like When Man First Met Crocodile, The Tiger That Went to the House of the Sun and The Adventure of 2 LIzards on 4 Faces, or samurai adventure tales for older kids, like Raiko vs the Goblin Spider. 

Featuring my uniquely animated Amazing Face Story in which we see an audience member becomes the hero in an adventure on their own face — with a follow up DIY Amazing Face Story Activity for kids to create their own adventure tale in which they are the star. Adventure tales were the original motivational speeches, passed down through generations to inspire listeners to become the hero in their own lives.

logo image for performance called Christopher Agostino's StoryFaces: Adventure Tales! Become Your Own Hero. With 3 photographs of painted faces and the additional text "adventures come to life in an exciting StoryFaces storytelling show"

StoryFaces shows are a surprising combination of storytelling and visual arts that fully 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 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. If I’ve been to your library before, I keep a record of what I’ve told, so that I can always return with new stories for your audience.

See the video: What Is A StoryFace?

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

Always exciting. And as much fun for adults as for kids.

Montage image of photographs of Christopher Agostino performing in StoryFaces shows, including images of him painting volunteers faces while storytelling.

learn about our other programs at:

Agostino Arts School Programs — our arts-in-education shows and theatre workshops

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 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

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.

Problematic Matisse: Large Decoration with Masks

On my second visit to the Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs exhibit at MOMA in 2015, I spent half an hour in the last room, the room with the wall-sized works, the beautiful world Matisse was making with colored paper as his final act.

from Talking Art banner

At the end of a gallery talk in front of Large Decoration with Masks, the speaker connected the two mask images in the piece to the early emphasis of mask imagery in Matisse and Picasso’s work, and that this is “problematic”. In the context of that room, the comment struck me as unnecessary, as well as inaccurate. Afterwards I asked him why he said it. He gave the explanation I expected, that a current understanding links the appropriation from cultural sources in the “Modern Primitivism” those artists were doing in the 1910s as connected to European colonialism.

I gathered he felt he had to add that comment about the masks, but it wasn’t the social necessity for the statement that bothered me, I understood that, it was my perception of an incorrectness in his description of these mask images.

In this work, these are not really “masks”, these are faces. In modern art, the mask has become a face. In traditional cultural arts, the mask is a disguise and transformation of human identity. In Matisse and modern art, the mask stylization is used to explore/reveal identity in portraiture. In this work, these faces could not be more essentially human. They are the human face boiled down to the simplest form, a set of shapes encircled by a line, just as the flowers are the simplest form of flower shapes. Matisse has gone far beyond the inspirations he found in African mask art.

And to say that the inclusion of two small mask images by an accomplished elder artist nodding back to his inspirations, in this incredible 11′ by 33′ garden of colors, created in a technique Matisse invented, is somehow “appropriation” seemed so unnecessary. Especially in the case of Matisse, whose early mask exploration were just one part of a period of “Radical Invention” (MOMA exhibit 2010, how quickly they forget) as he worked through multiple inspirations to develop them into his original art.

From this experience, and others, I realize that I have an insight into problematic questions about cultural appropriation, and not just in my own problematic career. My work gives me a lens into larger questions. I have been developing stories and performance pieces on such origins, inspirations and appropriations for schools and adult audiences, and this has become my new show:  Talking Art 

Talking Art logo image with two faces painted in mask designs and two quotes: “Men had made these masks for a sacred purpose...At that moment I realized that this is what painting is all about...it’s a form of magic...” — Pablo Picasso and “Brought to life when it is worn, the mask brings gods to earth...conversely, by masking himself, man affirms he is a social being.” — Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Talking Art — Performances and Workshops

This page has been updated to a new  Talking Art  page.