About Us – African Stages

African Stages’ use of Storytelling

Officially established in 2004, ASA’s main Mission is to use African traditional art of storytelling and other performing Arts to empower vulnerable youths and to educate the mainstream Canadian community on positive values and culture, leading to the creation of harmony in the youth.

Storytelling is expressed in two different ways:

(a) Artistic: To use storytelling as well as other Performing Arts media to entertain and empower immigrants in general in dealing positively with different challenges that they face in their new land.

(b) Educational: Using storytelling and theatre as artistic devices to reach out to and educate the mainstream on African culture, thereby promoting harmony in the community.

Over the years, the demand for our interactive stories has been on the rise. Our Story-Powering our Youth (SPOY) component has recorded a high percentage of success; Most of the youths who pass through our program finish high school, colleges or university education and are gainfully employed. Their performances have won awards by the Refugee Mental Health Association of the BC Lower Mainland, The Canadian Red Cross and CAP>AIDS among others.

Storytelling is integrated into everyday life and as such, it plays a major role in shaping people’s lives. Storytelling not only entertains, it also helps children learn about good values and how to make good choices.

Studies show that storytelling has many educational benefits. It has been proven to increase students’ creativity and problem-solving skills which in turn positively impact their ability to identify challenges, dilemmas, and moral issues in the stories told. It also increases memory skills through repetition and music and reinforces strong and positive messages. In short storytelling is an effective educational tool that has a rightful place in the classroom, community centres etc.

Expected learning outcomes:

At the end of the sessions students should be able to:

Open up and work collaboratively with people in their classroom
Deepen their understanding of African culture and to better appreciate their own.
Create storytelling environments where diversity is celebrated
Tell or illustrate stories in pictures

Storytelling is a narrative framework within which we make our experience meaningful. It plays a major role in shaping people’s lives. Storytelling not only entertains, it also helps children learn about good values and how to make good choices.

At African Stages, we use our innovative skills to tell and work with our stories using an inter-disciplinary format. The students in hundreds of schools in which we have been to perform in the past have always been very excited at this model due to the interactive nature of our stories. When the story is told in an inter-art form, two or more other art domains like music, dance and dramatization are infused. Students like the fact that they were physically involved in the story through dancing, singing or acting out the story characters.

The morals and values deduced from it can be discussed and applied to everyday actions of our modern lives even when animal characters or masks are used.

At the end of the sessions, the participants should be able to:

Create storytelling environments where diversity is celebrated
Open up and work collaboratively with others in their group
Identify and apply the values elicited from the stories told, to everyday family and communal living.
Create or tell their stories independently or in a group in front of an audience