Each year The Ark revives the oldest of all the arts with our February Storytelling Festival, featuring talespinners from far and wide. This year's tellers are New Hampshire-born Willy Claflin, Hungary's Zalka Csenge Virág, Kalamazoo's Allison Downey, and Lyn Davidge.

Willy Claflin was born before television. The only child of shy eccentric parents, he grew up in the woods of New Hampshire where he spent his childhood day dreaming and impersonating wild life. In boarding school, he found out he was funny. All grown up, next he went to Harvard where his imagination did not abandon him. He became a folk singer. Then he had to get a job so he taught school, where he found out kids love learning from puppets—and he got to sing. Eventually he was hijacked by a troupe of hand puppets, including one alien life form. A full time performer and writer for the last 25 years, Willy is a now a master storyteller, mostly for adults, but his kid fans are still really important. He tells original and traditional stories. He sings his own songs, plus 1,032 eerie ballads from the British Isles and Appalachia—and a lot of blues and rock and roll. He is also the speaking mouth person for Maynard Moose, another famous storyteller and kids' author.

Zalka Csenge Virág, also known as The Multicolored Lady, is Hungary’s first international storyteller. She travels the world, sharing Hungarian folktales with her audiences (in English, Spanish and Hungarian), and takes all the stories she learns back home to Hungary. Her story in a nutshell: "I’m fourteen years old, and I decide that I want to be a bard. I am badly on love with Irish tales and mythology, and start reading about the art of professional tale-tellers, I graduate from high school. I am informed that professional bards don’t exist anymore, so I go to college to study archaeology. I discover the world of international storytelling in one single day. I decide then and there that I am going to be a storyteller. I contact tellers via email all around the world. They start teaching me. I start doing official storytelling performances; my first gig is the Inca Exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts. I spend a whole year in the USA, studying at Trinity College, Hartford CT. I travel a lot; I attend storytelling festivals. I return to Hungary; now I am a professional storyteller. I even do taxes. You can’t really get more official than that. I represent Hungary at the Kids' Euro Festival in Washington DC. I tell Hungarian folktales in local schools, museums, and the Kennedy Center. I receive the Fulbright Scholarship to study storytelling in the USA during the 2011/2012 academic year."

Allison Downey can make an audience in a 500-seat theatre feel like they’re in her living room. “Dynamic, energetic, intimate, masterful, genuine, honest, humorous, hilarious, charismatic”—these are just a few of the descriptors chosen by critics and audiences to describe Allison’s performances. She takes her audiences on a journey that spans the gamut of human emotions, guiding them through the nuances of connections, and missed connections, across the character of landscapes and seascapes, to the bawdiness of an American in Paris, or a Spaniard in America. In song and performance Allison creates multi-dimensional characters in settings so rich with imagery that they reveal her training (MFA, Theatre) and experience as a theatre artist. Alison's storytelling career has been taking off— she appeared in the Moth Mainstage production at the Power Center during the 2011 Ann Arbor Summer
Festival.

A true Ann Arbor “townie”, Lyn Powrie Davidge remembers when admission to University of Michigan football games was free after half time; The Ark’s space was part of the local Sears Roebuck store; and going to Ypsi involved a pretty drive through the countryside. A retired librarian and teacher, Lyn has been telling her original stories, mostly to grown-up audiences, for 10 years. Those of her friends who prefer to remain anonymous run the other way when they hear, “There’s a story in that!” Because there usually is! Lyn loves making stories of the ordinary extraordinary in their power to touch hearts, forge bonds and foster connection.