The co-founders of Secretly Y’all are back again with an exciting new event this time with the theme on one of the things that makes Richmond, Richmond: tattoos.
On September 4th, Secretly Y’all will present (Im)Permanence at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which currently has a Japanese tattoo exhibit on display until the end of this month.
Co-Founders Colin King and Kathleen Brady are working with Bret Payne and Breton Pezzelle of the VMFA to set up a great first Friday and weekend festival.
For those who aren’t familiar, Secretly Y’all events are all about people telling stories around a central theme. Whether it be love, life, death or monkeys, one is picked and then storytellers tell experiences of their own based on that theme.
Check out a video New Belgium Brewing put together Secretly Ya’ll’s bike festival below.
“For this event we decided to do stories about tattoos,” King said. “Richmond is a fairly tattooed town and people usually have very personal stories about their tattoos. Usually they are interesting personally, but a lot of times we talk about tattoos so much, that maybe that might not be an interesting concept, for people to just get up and be like, ‘this is my tattoo and this is why i have it.’”
To make the event a little more interesting, King and Brady decided to create themes based on images and traditional tattoos.
“Dragons, a phoenix, koi fish, lots of flowers, maple leaves and cherry blossoms,” Colin added.
King or Brady will get on stage, introduce the theme, image, what it represents and then someone from the crowd will come on stage and tell their story based on the tattoo theme. While contributors are presenting, images from the Japanese tattoo exhibit will be projected on a screen behind them.
King said that he enjoys all the themes of their (Im)Permanence event, but that he’s excited about certain stories.
“Koi is a kind of cool thing, because like salmon they travel upstream, and there’s this story about this koi fish that jumped this dam and turned into a dragon,” King said. “There are stories behind the themes that I think are pretty cool. Themes like unrequited love, phoenix rising from the ashes, are some of the things we will be discussing.”
There will be 8-10 storytellers and King said the group is still eagerly looking for more. To submit your story, email secretlyall@gmail.com with a personal bio, title of story, synopsis of story and the appropriate theme.
Secretly Y’all Presents: (Im)Permanence @ The VMFA is this Friday, Sept. 4 from 5:30 to 8:30 pm.
