storytelling walks
The landscape is a dominant force in our existence--and by landscape, I mean not only the geographic formation surrounding us but also the societal and cultural forces through which we move.
Streets are the primary force in mediating our urban life. Each building, each corner store, each pothole acts as a marker for unlimited cultural signifiers. This process of deciphering and negotiating the landscape has very real power in building community and shaping us as individuals.
Yet in this rich heritage, contemporary forces are actively working to remove particularity of place and replace “here” with anonymous structures stripped of meaning. Every place begins to look like every other. How can we resist? Through stories.
My storytelling practice is a site-specific experience with the audience: moving around a building or walking down a street, we imagine together possible histories and lives of the specific place and its community.
Improbable walks are creative explorations, fictional inventions inspired by factual history, created especially for a particular neighbourhood. The walks are, by their nature, collaborative experiences. I look forward to walking with you!
Streets are the primary force in mediating our urban life. Each building, each corner store, each pothole acts as a marker for unlimited cultural signifiers. This process of deciphering and negotiating the landscape has very real power in building community and shaping us as individuals.
Yet in this rich heritage, contemporary forces are actively working to remove particularity of place and replace “here” with anonymous structures stripped of meaning. Every place begins to look like every other. How can we resist? Through stories.
My storytelling practice is a site-specific experience with the audience: moving around a building or walking down a street, we imagine together possible histories and lives of the specific place and its community.
Improbable walks are creative explorations, fictional inventions inspired by factual history, created especially for a particular neighbourhood. The walks are, by their nature, collaborative experiences. I look forward to walking with you!
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From August 5 to November 2, 2019, I will be going for an hour-long public walk every day. Want to tell me a story while we walk? Drop me a line. I'll be in 10 different towns over those 90 walks.
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Lisa Pasold is an award-winning writer and storyteller, and the host of Discovery's "Paris Next Stop" TV travel show. She has been thrown off a train in Belarus, mushed huskies in the Yukon, and been cheated in the Venetian gambling halls of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi. She is originally from Montreal.
Lisa creates site-specific story-telling walks. These experiences are developed with the audience as they move through a building or along streets, re-imagining and re-membering the histories and legends of place. Lisa has been working in this improbable walk form since 2008. Over the past decade, her walks have brought to life forgotten histories of riverbanks, industrial buildings, Art Deco movie theatres, 14th-century Parisian alleyways, 19th-century boulevards, and paved-over urban streams in Canada, the USA, and France.
Lisa's most recent book is The Riparian, "Pasold strikes a meticulous balance between the hideous and the sublime... a Trump-era epic, an x-ray of a city's grit and shit and sorrow. It is a song with a love story and thirty tragedies, overheard n a piano 'dismantled, marooned, with the river washing through its exposed strings.'" - John Wall Barger. Lisa's first book of poetry, Weave (Frontenac House, 2004) was called “a masterpiece” by Geist Magazine; her second book of poetry, A Bad Year for Journalists (Frontenac House, 2006) was nominated for an Alberta Book Award and turned into a theatre piece the following year. Her debut novel, Rats of Las Vegas, appeared in 2009 (Enfield & Wizenty); The Winnipeg Free Press called the book “as enticing as the lit-up Las Vegas strip.” Her book, Any Bright Horse (Frontenac House, 2012), was nominated for the 2012 Governor General’s Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared in publications as diverse as The Globe and Mail, Billboard Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle and Time Out.
if you'd like info about books, lectures, and other performances, you might want to visit www.lisapasold.com
Lisa creates site-specific story-telling walks. These experiences are developed with the audience as they move through a building or along streets, re-imagining and re-membering the histories and legends of place. Lisa has been working in this improbable walk form since 2008. Over the past decade, her walks have brought to life forgotten histories of riverbanks, industrial buildings, Art Deco movie theatres, 14th-century Parisian alleyways, 19th-century boulevards, and paved-over urban streams in Canada, the USA, and France.
Lisa's most recent book is The Riparian, "Pasold strikes a meticulous balance between the hideous and the sublime... a Trump-era epic, an x-ray of a city's grit and shit and sorrow. It is a song with a love story and thirty tragedies, overheard n a piano 'dismantled, marooned, with the river washing through its exposed strings.'" - John Wall Barger. Lisa's first book of poetry, Weave (Frontenac House, 2004) was called “a masterpiece” by Geist Magazine; her second book of poetry, A Bad Year for Journalists (Frontenac House, 2006) was nominated for an Alberta Book Award and turned into a theatre piece the following year. Her debut novel, Rats of Las Vegas, appeared in 2009 (Enfield & Wizenty); The Winnipeg Free Press called the book “as enticing as the lit-up Las Vegas strip.” Her book, Any Bright Horse (Frontenac House, 2012), was nominated for the 2012 Governor General’s Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared in publications as diverse as The Globe and Mail, Billboard Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle and Time Out.
if you'd like info about books, lectures, and other performances, you might want to visit www.lisapasold.com
