Mindport is pleased to host West of Roan as part of the 2024 Bellingham Folk Festival!
Admission is by donations to the artists.
West of Roan is multi-media performance group consisting of  Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter. Their sparsely set original and traditional songs feature carefully crafted, intuitive harmonies that emerge from deep listening. Annie and Channing met in Bellingham, WA and returned to the Pacific Northwest in 2017 after a three year period of collaboration in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Their experience of life, music, place, and lineage in both regions informs their searching and soulful music.

 

About the Artists:

We are Channing Showalter and Annie Schermer, and we are multi-media performance artists. We create performances using the storytelling methods of song and puppetry.

We draw inspiration from the old myths and legends to explore our own relationship to the wild self, and the things that come up along the way: fear, darkness, demons, love, isolation, joy and transformation. This is a seemingly endless quest for home, both in terms of place and family as well as the search for home within ourselves. We use light and shadow to set the scene and our puppets walk, swim, and fly within and between the topside world and the one below- where creatures and intricacies of the subconscious live.

We spend a lot of time in collective imagination as a duo, and our songs and stories reflect this journeying. We seek to simultaneously discover and create a world: a place of story, song, archetype and image. From this landscape we explore how our own yearnings, wounds and creations relate to and resonate with other people, and with larger social and cultural movements and patterns.

We sing (and do the same with fiddle) in close two part harmonies, exploring how singing uplifts and unites this collaboration and friendship, as well as discovering what sounds and chordal structures bring us closer to the complex emotions in the stories we tell. We play heavily with voice crossing, dissonance, and modal harmonies.

Bellingham Folk Festival

Join us for this beloved community event!