FYS: Storytelling, Identity, and Social Change - Capturing & Telling Your Community's Cancer Story lyrics

Roadside Theater put together the storytelling project of Capturing and Telling Your Community's Cancer Story. Through a play, multiple people's cancer stories are put together from a community and then performed to encourage early cancer detection and prevention. The stories are also recored or filmed to be placed on the Roadside Theater website. This project was around 10 months long. Roadside is located in Norton, Virginia. This is where the survivors looking to perform for their community come go prepare.This project has been worked on throughout the Appalachian. The groups of survivors and their family members that decide they would like to participate and perform for their community go through Roadside Theater's Story to Performance Workshop. Here,they are matched with a Roadside trainer who takes them through the process. The main concept of this workshop is the Story Circle. Through a process called, The Story Circle, the survivors and their family members are all given the chance to share their story. It includes active listening and shows respect for everyone's story. This allows for every person to find the true wealth and importance of their story. This is also how the scripting happens. Through these Story Circles, a script can be made for the group's performance. Mountain Empire Older Citizens (MEOC) is a non-profit organization that chose to fund this project along with four other cancer prevention projects. "You and Your Community's Cancer Story" was the most successful of these projects and even continued after funding was over. This project brings survivors and their families together and allows them to all share their experience while also helping teach others in their community about the importance of early cancer prevention. The website offers the performances to anybody online. They are either presented through a video recording of the performance, just an audio recording, or an actual script. In "Our NeverEnding Stories," the listener hears cancer stories from multiple perspectives. This play was preformed by survivors and their family members in Wetzel County, West Virginia. Here are a just a few lines from the different stories included in this 22 minute play: "The doctor said, I don't have very good news for you. The mammogram showed an abnormality in your breast." "And then she was diagnosed with having third stage melanoma…it was in the lymph nodes." "I sat there through the appointment thinking that my heart was going to burst. But I managed to wait until I was on the way home to start crying, and I couldn't stop crying. My eyes were swollen and puffy, and I couldn't see anymore so I pulled into a local mental health facility. I went in and told them about my daughter. They got me started on a program right away to help me through her cancer treatment." "I think it really hit me when I walked into the kitchen and had to tell my boys." "I've got cancer, but I'm ok. I really am ok." "I felt it was a blessing I got cancer. It made me see things all together differently." "I don't know what tomorrow holds. I don't live for tomorrow. I live for today and that takes some getting used to." These stories are more than real. The storytellers allow themselves to be vulnerable and because of this a true connection can be made though these plays. In the end, that is the mission of Roadside Theater productions. This is only one of the many projects that Roadside Theater has done. All of their projects follow this same format of multiple personal stories being put into one production for a community to hear. They strive for the community members to be the leaders of their production and for the script to strictly be their own words--all truth. The power of one story is strong, but the power of multiple stories strung into one is more powerful than words can say.