Performances

“Dawn Ellis is a mesmerising and accomplished story teller who can easily mash up ancient myth and cockney rhyming slang, old stories with rich themes that make them relevant to today’s audiences. I was captured."

– Monique Roffey, award-winning novelist –

Performance storytelling

Humans have been telling each other stories since they could talk and there are as many styles of performance as there are storytellers.

Performance Storytelling is part theatre, part intimate fireside chat. The Storyteller brings their imagination to stories, myths, folk tales - animating and elaborating, adding characterisation and humour, freshening them, making them live. Performance Storytelling contains spontaneity and an element of improvisation - each show and each audience will all draw out a different performance.

  • Browse some of my repertoire here.
  • Choose an audio story to fall asleep to here

The storyteller is narrator, director and actor all in one - and as such can make direct contact with the audience so that we are all connected in the story.

What to expect:

I adapt my style according to the audience and the setting: a theatre, marking a special celebration, a wedding or christening, a camp fire, a festival - adults or children, open air or indoors.

I love working with musicians and sound scapes and interweaving the audience into the fabric of the stories.

My shows range from 60-90 minute-long performances with musicians in a theatre, to a 5-20 minute story to wind up an event.

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More

We all secretly long to hear stories told to us

Humans have been telling each other stories since we could first speak

Storytelling performances are immersive and absorbing

Live storytelling reaches the parts a flat screen cannot hope to touch

In the audience you are in direct contact with the storyteller, human to human

The storyteller is performer, director, narrator all in one

You can say things in a story that might be too challenging in conversation

Storytellers are part jester and mischief-maker, part wise Elder

Storytelling can reveal deep, underlying truths to the listeners

Live storytelling is an act of rebellion against an impersonal digital world

“…a dream world with a transgressive ending that went to the heart of each person in a packed house."

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– David Templer, ex-director London Film-Makers co-op –