Our young reporter, Anisa (17), attended a few of this year’s Yorkshire Festival of Story events to review the acts and send us her thoughts on how the festival went.
Here are Anisa’s thoughts on The Cowfoot Prince and The Warlock Effect. We’ll be posting more from Anisa in the near future so watch this space to hear more of what she thought of YFOS and the incredible events that took place.
On Saturday (11th November), I went down to Skipton Town Hall to watch two events, The Cowfoot Prince and The Warlock Effect.
Before discussing these events, I would like to take a moment to talk about the venue. The Town Hall had a stage and a few rows of chairs, giving the events a real theatre feel. The decorations were lovely, and the lighting brought the stage to life.
The Cowfoot Prince
The first event I attended was The Cowfoot Prince. This was a wonderful performance by the remarkable Usifu Jalloh. He used a variety of songs, drumming and other instruments to capture the imagination, telling tales of Africa. This show was very engaging, requiring a lot of audience participation which was unexpected but enjoyable.
Usifu told many stories, accompanying them with song and an occasional call and response to keep the audience connected to his stories. As well as entertaining, Usifu’s stories were educational, filled with little nuggets of nostalgia for the parents of younger children in the audience.
The connections with the audience made the stories feel like something we all shared, and this was even more clear towards the end of the show when Usifu called up a few audience members on stage to help him ‘call the rats’. His vibrant personality and connectivity with the audience made it a heart-warming event to attend.
The Warlock Effect
The second event I went to was the Warlock Effect, where authors Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman were to discuss their journey through magic, writing the successful play and film Ghost Stories before writing this book. Unfortunately, Andy wasn’t able to attend, however, Jeremy was.
There were plenty of discussions about magic, as well as the exciting tale of how Andy and Jeremy first met at a summer camp many moons ago, where they shared a passion for magic. It is evident that over time their interest in magic has grown, eventually leading them to write a book together and share this skill with the world.
It was also fascinating to learn about how they’d worked together on numerous other projects, before embarking on the journey to write The Warlock Effect, which they did during the pandemic. At the end of the show, we were treated to our own little magic trick, which Andy himself had created. It was an amazing trick, that left all the audience stunned!
We’d like to thank Anisa for coming to these events and for taking the time to write her review and send it in to us. We’re looking forward to reading more from Anisa.
To learn more about the acts, please visit their websites
