Banyas, Susan

Maps & Memory

Writing is generated from storytelling, photography, painting, and movement, culminating in a map of memory places.  We warm up to memory through movement and vocal improvisation—the body as a memory place.  Students locate memory places in their world – neighborhood, school, favorite places -- and photographs these personal spots.  Each student tells a 5-minute story located in one of these memory places.  We paint images from the story—visual details that bring the story to life, then do free writes using the images as prompts.  Each student shapes a short prose piece, edits, and delivers it as performance text.  We combine the images and writings into a large map—a collage—that folds up (like a map), becomes a storytelling script of words and images, and is a beautiful artifact that each student keeps.    

Stories come from places. Writing comes from the voice of the storyteller.  The storyteller is a cartographer, a mapmaker.

Susan Banyas (sbanyas@teleport.com & www.susanbanyas.com)
is a dancer-storyteller, director, and writer.  Her current performance project, No Strangers Here Today, http://strangers.scatter.com --performed in collaboration with jazz composer David Ornette Cherry—is on tour.  The dance monologue was built around her great-great Grandmother’s Civil War diary.  Coded entries in the diary suggest that the Quaker family was a link in the Underground Railroad.  Her book-in-progress, The Hillsboro Story is a non-fiction narrative that begins outside her third grade classroom window shortly after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision. Both projects are centered in Highland County, Ohio, and dance between memory, American history, and on-going cultural detective work. She teaches Everyday Dancing, Backstage Behavior, and Soul Stories at studios and arts centers.