love of local in Utah
Reivew of the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival
The Timpanogos Storytelling Festival has been around since 1990 and has grown each year‚ now totalling at 26,000 attendees. The Festival is recognized throughout the national storytelling world and is something Utahns look forward to every single year. The festival is full of wonderful musicians, amazing story tellers, and hilarious mimes. It’s held outside in beautiful nature at the new Mt. Timpanogos Park in Provo Canyon. As this year was our first year attending, I did have high expectations and expected the very best from this festival.
Things We Loved
-Storytelling and Music at the Scera Shell: perfectly organized, just long enough, and wonderful talent (how could you go wrong with Mindy Glidhell).
-The beautiful place it was held- just beautiful.
– The talent, the superb amazing talent. We found a storyteller that inspired us to run out and grab her CDs and childrens’ books not even 48 hours later. Stay tuned on who she is, she deserves a full post. The mimes were wonderful too. Who knew mimes could capture the attention of a tent jam packed with children? It was just awesome.
-The layout of the festival. There were SO many people there, but the way they had the tents, booths, tables, etc. set up, it didn’t feel like that. The plans were so great. You could tell they put a lot of thought into that. There were places to sit and rest, places to sit and eat, and places to take a noisy toddler for a bit of wandering.
What We Didn’t Like
– That there was no one outside to help us know what bus to get back on or if they were even coming back. We tried to stop about 5 employees/volunteers with the nametags, but no one knew how to help us and didn’t seem to care too much. There should have been signs outside OR even someone “manning” the area to help people out.
– The schedule. The schedule. The schedule. The one printed out and the one online had different details. We arrived wanting to find where the children featured were doing their story telling. They were listed in an hour slot but actually only preformed for the first few minutes. Maybe I was just being slow that day, but I had a hard time telling what was going on and where.
– People to help. I probably asked ten people for help while at the festival and none of them could help me with anything. It would be nice if all the volunteers/employees were brought up to date a bit better on the schedule, locations of things, etc.
So will we be back? YES. Did we enjoy it? YES. Although, we will go into it knowing the bus ins and outs, and more importantly, a more specific schedule.
