Awakening Ancestral Memory (Performance)

The Jung Center presents Awakening Ancestral Memory (Performance).

Are we our ancestor’s deputies? Does the force of their intentions, aspirations and suffering continue in our life and the lives of future generations? We may believe we are making our own choices, but with digging, we often find that we are living parts of our ancestors’ stories over again.

Friday night, Josephine John will introduce this subject with a performance using historical fact alongside imagined conversations and fictitious narratives. Multi-generational family stories will be built using the available evidence of letters, census data and obituaries as a starting point for creating an understanding of a family’s emotional journey over time.

In Saturday’s workshop, participants will acquire the tools for researching their own family history. This experience includes a field trip to the Clayton Library for Genealogical Research.

Through genealogical research and writing exercises we can release the energy of our family history and create our own informed and conscious future.

Recommended Reading: Who Do You Think You Are? The Essential Guide to Tracing Your Family History, Megan Smolenyak; Writing Your Family Story, Penny Stratton (Copied article available in The Jung Center Bookstore)

Josephine John, MA, MFA, is an artist with extensive experience as an actor, scriptwriter, dancer and choreographer.

For more than 20 years she has been conducting genealogical research and brings the tools of the theatre – character development and narrative arc – to the understanding of generational change over time.