CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) — Over a dozen storytellers will be converging for the fourth annual Celebration of Tales Storytelling Festival this Saturday at The Center at Belvedere.

The festival, which will run from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with feature over a dozen “storytellers,” featuring mostly local performers from Virginia and the surrounding regions.

“Storytelling is a range of things,” organizing committee member and performer John Alexander told Cville Right Now. “It can be kind of standard folktales, and we’ll have tellers that do that, and it’ll be personal reflection.”

The event will be headlined by Adam Booth, a nationally recognized storyteller. A Jewish man from West Virginia, Booth tell Appalachian tales, as well as stories from his own varied roots and personal experiences. While most of the storytellers with have anywhere from 10-40 minutes on stage, Booth will be given a couple of hours.

“He’s a great tall tale teller,” Alexander said, “so he’ll have a huge range that he’ll hit when he’s on the stage.”

The festival will also feature storytelling workshops as well as stories and a workshop specifically for kids. Even with the specific programming for children, Alexander said the storytellers have been asked to keep their stories family friendly.

“You can have more risqué stories,” he said, “but we’re going to not lean into that. We’re trying to stay more accessible, but there’s a lot accessible. But there’s a lot of power and depth in these stories as they come up, even when they are family friendly.”

The roots of the festival can be traced back to the Fall Festival of Tales which ran for “about 10 years” in the 1980s, Alexander said. He recalled attending that festival along with fellow organizing committee member and performer Rob Craighurst.

Alexander found his opportunity to bring back the festival five years ago, after taking a storytelling class run by another soon-to-be organizing committee member, Charmaine Corwell-White.

“There were several other people in that class who are still coming as volunteers and still coming back to witness it,” Alexander said. “So that was the genesis that started this particular emphasis.”

Since then, Alexander said the festival has helped grow the storytelling community in Charlottesville, with regular attendees to the festival inviting friends and family and two of festival’s founders launching monthly storytelling sessions. He shared one story about how one of the headliners from the festival’s second year, who Alexander said told a “really challenging story” was particularly long and complicated, said afterward she appreciated how engaged the audience was, calling it rare in storytelling festivals she had been to in recent years.

“She said what we’re doing is actually working,” Alexander recalled. “That the storytelling audience is really buying into this, is really wedded to it. And that was a great encouraging moment for me.”

Alexander hopes attendees at Saturday’s festival will have and experience as moving and cathartic as his first experience seeing skilled storytelling was. He called the experience of watching storytelling “transformational,” and hopes attendees will have moments of reflection with themselves and moments of connection with others.

“There’s some kind of dramatic magic that happens with storytelling, that I think is even more unifying, even more connecting than drama or film or music or anything else,” he said, “because the lights are on, and we see each other and we see each other’s reaction and there’s this dramatic tension that between the people in the audience, between each other, between them and the storyteller. So, there’s lots of creative tension that happens because of that. I want them to experience some of that and be excited about it.”