411: Not Just One Thing

Storyteller Gene Tagaban will share his experiences as a Tlingit/Cherokee/Filipino-American during the JustStories Concert on Friday at Dominican University. The JustStories Series was formed in 2002 by Susan O’Halloran and Derek Simons of Angel Studios in order to create a series that would be “entertaining but focus on issues of race and cultural understanding,” O’Halloran says. Tagaban is the seventh recipient of the JustStories Fellowship, a program that allows storytellers to develop individual stories relating to personal identity and race. Tagaban, with the help of O’Halloran, has been sifting through his family history and has been practicing segments of the performance on smaller groups in his hometown of Ferndale, Washington. “You see how people are reacting to it and change things; it’s a very live art,” O’Halloran says. O’Halloran hopes that the series will open up audiences’ perceptions of what it can mean to define oneself in multiple ways. “I’m really excited about Gene’s work,” O’Halloran says. “There are so many layers and I think it makes it difficult to stereotype when we get into the true richness of people’s backgrounds and lives.”