Of the thousands — or more likely tens of thousands — of times Dylan Pritchett has performed as a professional storyteller, his upcoming Arts for Learning program at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg is sure to be among the most meaningful.
A native of Williamsburg, Pritchett returns to the Hennage stage on June 13, decades after he helped develop and perform Colonial Williamsburg’s first programming focused on African American history.
“What we started could be looked at as the root for all of the fruit that has come forward,” Pritchett said.
As Pritchett puts it, he’s only had one employer in his life: Colonial Williamsburg, where he started as a member of the Fifes and Drum Corps at age 13 and continued past high school and during summers while off from Hampton University. He then accepted a full-time administrative job at Fifes and Drum, while continuing to instruct corps members.
But in 1984, a new phase of Pritchett’s career began when his position transitioned to a role in Colonial Williamsburg’s first African American programming department as an interpretive program specialist. In addition to performing programs at the Hennage and in other places at Colonial Williamsburg — telling stories that illuminated the lives of enslaved children and adults — Pritchett wrote programming and supervised other staff members of the African American department.
“Colonial Williamsburg had never done African American programming. So this was something new,” Pritchett said. “No one else did programming that dealt with the African American experience like we did. All of the museums that later on did African American interpretation and talking about being enslaved was a direct connection to us. Colonial Williamsburg was a trendsetter. All of these museums found that it’s OK to talk about being enslaved. It gave everybody license to talk about that time in history because no one else was doing it. We take great pride in that.”
During that time, Pritchett grew as a storyteller.
Around that time, Colonial Williamsburg began outreach programs to schools. That’s when Pritchett began exploring his next career move. After taking a leave of absence for a year to make sure he could support his family, Pritchett became a professional storyteller in 1990, performing in more than 100 schools per year, including in areas of rural Virginia.
“It was a time when that was a novelty,” Pritchett said. “For assemblies you had the clown that comes in for the kids and you got the magician and puppeteer. And here’s this guy who tells African American stories. It’s like, wow. And to be real honest, I went into a lot of places where I was probably the only Black performer they had ever seen, of any genre. That meant a lot.”
A later partnership with the Kennedy Center took him all over the country, using his storytelling techniques to do workshops and performances to train educators. And his storytelling was again a novelty in many places. He recalls visiting New Castle, Wyoming — “three hours from nowhere” — and the educator liaison telling him, “These people have never seen a Black person in person. I said, ‘Whaaaaat?’ He said, ‘Yeah, they’ve seen Black people on TV, but they’ve never seen a Black person in person.’”
When Pritchett joined Young Audiences/Arts for Learning Virginia, he was able to cut down on travel and perform primarily in Hampton Roads. One of the organization’s most booked artists, last year Pritchett was also among a select group of artists to become credentialed as a teaching artist for Arts for Learning Virginia’s new affiliation as Coastal Virginia Wolf Trap.
Thinking about his upcoming program at the Hennage brings back some powerful memories, he said. He recalls performing at a festival where he and other storytellers split their program between the Williamsburg Theatre (now the Kimball Theatre) and the Hennage Auditorium. It was the first time he’d ever done a program at the theater, a place where both he and his father had worked.
“My father was a custodian at the Williamsburg Theater who passed away in 1977 after I had just graduated from high school,” Pritchett recalled. “I mentioned on the stage that my father was a custodian there, that I was an usher and had spent a lot time at the theater when we showed movies, and that was a moment. And going back to the Hennage is probably such a moment.”
“I’ve been thinking about what stories to tell, and I think I’m going to do a little hodgepodge,” he added. “A little bit of what I used to tell there and some stuff I never had. It’s kind of like full circle, but I hope it doesn’t complete the circle because I want to be around to go back later on, too.”
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Want to go?
Dylan Pritchett will perform at 5:30 p.m. on June 13 at the Hennage Auditorium at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg. The free, family-friendly program is underwritten by the Williamsburg Area Arts Commission, Virginia Commission for the Arts and National Endowment for the Arts. No admission ticket is required for the museum.
Cindy Willett Sherwood is a communications consultant for Arts for Learning.
