The Fugitives and Tanya Davis will be the featured performers during the very first “Once Upon a Thames Story Slam”. Storytellers from all experience levels and walks of life are encouraged to sign up to tell a 5 minute story and participate in our first Story Slam! Ruthanne Edward, host of Ottawa’s Once Upon a Story Slam will host the evening. Prizes for the taking too! If you’d like to sign up to tell a story, send an email to events@stmarysstorytelling.org NOTE: We are limited in the amount of storytellers we can accept for this night, so first come, first served!

Location: The Merchant House, 159 Queen St. East, St. Marys

Admission: $5 cover charge at the door. Doors open at 8pm, starts at 8:30pm
Audience: This is a licensed event for adults 19+

ABOUT THE FUGITIVES!
The Fugitives are the combined talents of Vancouver artists Adrian Glynn, Barbara Adler, Brendan McLeod, and Steve Charles. A group of multi-instrumentalists, songwriters, poets and novelists, each with their own burgeoning solo career, they’ve won individual accolades as diverse as the Canadian SLAM poetry championship, CBC poet laureate, and a place in the Peak performance songwriting series. But their primary focus lies in banding together to integrate their sensibilities into a dynamic mix of modern folk.

Formed four years ago on Vancouver’s East Side, The Fugitives have trod their instruments and words numerous times through Canada and Europe Performances that began in abandoned bank vaults and small vegetarian restaurants in England have turned into mainstage appearances on the Canadian folk festival circuit and sold out headlining shows at venues as diverse as the Vienna Literary Festival, the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, the Vancouver Jazz Festival, and the Chutzpah Dance Festival.

Like most young bands The Fugitives have weathered poverty, missed trains, and a few line up changes (parting amicably with upcoming folk talents Mark Berube and CR Avery), while honing their live act into a versatile mix of story and song. As the CBC has it, “whether you go for the poetry, the music, or both, this show is simply brilliant.”

The Fugitives last release, In Streetlight Communion, was nominated for a 2007 Canadian Folk Music Award for pushing the boundaries of contemporary folk music. They’ve returned with a five song EP, ‘Find Me’, followed with the full-length album ‘Eccentrically We Love’ in March of 2010. This album takes anxiety and isolation as its starting point. As it turns out, the band thinks anxiety is good. They are also fans of: frustration, discontent, being overworked, and living in broken down houses with noisy roommates. It’s not that they’ve suddenly developed a pessimistic worldview – the album is primarily about gratitude, but it avoids clichés by centering on topics we’re normally not appreciative of.Check for them in your town; their live act keeps on improving, and they’ve gotten much better at catching trains.

“A hypnotic and swirling mix of voice and music that straddles the line between traditional songwriting and poetry” – Vue Weekly (Edmonton)

“Wildly talented” – Georgia Straight (Vancouver)

“The Fugitives are capable of achieving dizzying, Arcade Fire-ish crescendos, replete with parallel melodies, complex harmonies and brimming torrents of emotion.” – Uptown Magazine (Winnipeg)

“One of the best events we’ve ever had…right up there with Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey” – Executive Director, Dylan Thomas Festival (UK)

ABOUT TANYA DAVIS!

Tanya Davis is a poet. She is a storyteller. She is a musician and a singer-songwriter and she fuses these elements together in a refreshing matrimony of language and sound, side-stepping genre and captivating audiences in the process. With the release of her third album, Clocks and Hearts Keep Going, in November 2010, she affirms her well-earned place in the ranks of thoughtful and hard-working Canadian Artists.

ABOUT RUTHANNE EDWARD!

Ruthanne first realized she was a storyteller while she working as a walking tour guide telling ghost stories in downtown Ottawa. It occurred to her one day that what she was doing wasn’t just tour guiding, it was also storytelling. That led to discovering the Ottawa Storytellers group and a whole world dedicated to the art of storytelling. She was hooked and hasn’t looked back since!

Ruthanne has been a working storyteller since 2000, performing for children, families and adults throughout Ontario and Quebec. She has appeared at the Ottawa Fringe Festival, NCC Winterlude Festival, Ottawa Storytelling Festival, the National Arts Centre, Voices of Venus spoken word series, The Spoken Word Plot, with the Kymeras, on CBC radio, at museums, schools, libraries, and many a campfire. (She really loves the campfire events, especially the way you can take the smell of the woodsmoke home in your hair to enjoy later.)

Ruthanne works to bring the worlds of storytelling and spoken word closer together through collaboration with spoken word artists and poets. She is a member of Kymeras, a storytelling and poetry group that performs seasonally-based shows that bridge the gap between the two disciplines. Visit www.kymeras.ca for more information about the group. Ruthanne is also the founder and Slam Master of Once Upon A Slam, Ottawa’s first monthly story slam and is one of the organizers for Capital Slam, Ottawa’s premier poetry slam series. See www.capitalslam.com for more.