The ReMemberers are a multidisciplinary trio weaving ritual storytelling, global song, and multi-instrumental virtuosity into an experience that feels part theater, part concert, part ceremony. Violet Southard's numinous voice, Alex Harvey's resonant strings, and John de Kadt's percussive tale-telling create an atmosphere where ancient myths breathe again — told, sung, and drummed into presence. Each gathering begins with an inherited wisdom tale and unfolds as a journey inward. Musical traditions from across the planet converge in this awakening of ancient folklore. The ReMemberers, in partnership with their audience, rekindle one of humanity's oldest customs: coming together to listen, imagine, and be transformed.
About This year's story THE FIREBIRD
A Russian folktale dating back ten generations is revived this season in a fresh retelling. In a forest gone silent, a young Huntsman finds a single golden feather blazing on the path before him — a feather shed from the burning breast of the Firebird, the most extraordinary creature in all the world. Against the counsel of his talking horse, he takes it. And from that one moment of ambition, everything unravels. Task by task, a tyrannical ruler — the ego made sovereign — escalates his demands on the obedient Huntsman who stumbles deeper into complicity with the authoritarian regime. The Huntsman makes one compromise after another, each one more absurd than than the last, until he can no longer remember where his own will has ended and the authoritarian’s began.
All the while the caged Firebird watches from the courtyard with eyes full of impossible light. Something is calling to him from the far horizon of his heart. Courage won't be enough to answer that call. Neither will serenity. Only a willingness to be completely undone. This is a thousand-year-old Russian folktale. It is also a story about right now
The ReMemberers tell it whole — no screen, no set, no fourth wall to break because none was built. Sound rhythm, voice and a room full of people co-witnessing an old story that knows their names. We call it hearth-centered; the oldest technology of gathering there is. That it lands this year in a deconsecrated church on Wurts Street is not an accident so much as a homecoming: the building was made for exactly this kind of night, whatever name it went by then.
THE REMEMBERERS ARE John de Kadt — world percussion, storyteller. Has performed and recorded with Krishna Das and collaborated with Mickey Hart and a long storytelling membership under the Robert Bly; his music has had 130M+ streams on spotify. Violet Southard — Ceremonial voice and song holder - a renowned sound healer who works at wellness centers nationally. Alex Harvey — Strings - Filmmaker (WALDEN: Life in the Woods, I Am a Seagull, The Last Ecstatic Days); former music & arts programmer, Race Brook Lodge; producer of Kingston's Down County Jump; host of the monthly Songs of the Sea sing at Tempo. SITE: https://www.rememberers.org/
This event is brought to you by the HeARTbeat Collective, Inc. a 501c3 arts and cultural organization
