Bearing up the sky

Nicola Knappe grew up around music and movement. She studied Rhythm, Music and Movement at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Even before she went to university, her artistic interests focused on the creative transformation of language. She went on to study the teaching of Theatre and Dance with Tanzfabrik Berlin and the Exploratorium, amongst others. Since 2007, Nicola Knappe has taught rhythmic movement at family centres, kindergartens and music schools. She won a scholarship in 2016 to participate in a course in storytelling and in art and education at the UdK, which she successfully completed in 2018. She devises and realises storytelling projects for classes to welcome refugee families and children. She also appears in an artistic capacity telling stories at events, in theatres, at festivals and markets. Nicola Knappe lectures in storytelling at further education colleges in Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg. She lectures in movement at the UdK and is an active member of Erzählkunst e.V.  She lives in Karlshorst in Berlin with her three children.

Maria Carmela Marinelli is a storyteller, theater pedagogue (M.A.) and DaF/DaZ teacher (M.A.), trained at the Berlin University of the Arts and at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. She is involved in storytelling projects in Berlin and Saxony, performs at international storytelling festivals and runs training courses on tandem storytelling, multilingual storytelling and storytelling in the foreign language classroom at the University of Leipzig, Halle and Jena. Her storytelling is extremely lively, suggestive, full of humor, with an exuberant temperament, in German, Italian, Spanish – and when language is no longer enough, with hands, feet and a big heart, until the air burns.