The Storyteller’s Collective is Center Stage Theatre's Annual Fringe Theatre Festival. The collective was born from the desire to tell meaningful stories through the collaborative exploration of creative storytelling. The festival gives students the opportunity to explore storytelling through the use of alternative play spaces and lighting, and original music, as well as creative movement and staging.  The goal of the collective is not to create a polished performance but rather to create the opportunity to experiment with new techniques and to dig deeper into the stories to present them in novel ways that allow our audience to experience theatre in a fresh and moving way. The collective challenges the audience experience with the goal of creating a cathartic experience between the performer and the audience in the tradition of great theatre practitioners such as Brecht, Grotowski, and Boal. 

This years Collective features The Legend of Sleepy Hollow with Lafayette No. 1 and Some Things Never Change. All three stories ask the question, “What do you really want?” each in their own way. We open with Some Things Never Change featuring two girls exploring the value of friendship over the course of 30 years. We then journey to 1816 New Orleans for Lafayette No. 1, where the Yellow Fever is taking its toll on the community leaving one group of children feeling forgotten. We end our journey in upstate New York around the turn of the 19th century in the tiny village town of Sleepy Hollow where Ichabod Crane will discover the ghosts are more than just stories.