Story Jam’s Alys Torrance and Lucy Lill are excited to be launching their latest storytelling show, We Are Fox.
What if curiosity is the antidote for despair?
Their previous show, Women Who Gave No F*cks is a celebration of women, full of pacey myths and legends and riotous audience participation. It packs out houses, it’s still relevant, so why risk making a new show?
Story Jam is a city-based company.
The talking heads on our screens often tell the story that our streets are dirty, dangerous, unfriendly and grabby. Tension is sky high, prices are higher and you can’t trust your neighbours. Stranger Beware! It’s dog-eat-dog in the Big Smoke. The best thing you can do – so the messaging goes – is escape to the countryside.
But is that true?
‘It felt like a curse being laid on us. We were being told to look away, to disconnect to survive. But we want to connect, to be nosy about our manor. We want to defy the curse, and feel maybe blessed by the place we’ve lived in for decades.’
When they told their friend, Stephe Harrop (‘storyteller, academic researcher, boulderer and total one-off’) what they were mulling, what she said was a real lightbulb moment, ‘What you need are foxes.’
And Lucy and Alys were off. Foxes are everywhere in the city, and everywhere in the traditional stories that the company mines for their work. Foxes survive and thrive alongside us humans by being curious – and smart. Or rather, not to anthropomorphise them, wised-up. It’s how they keep so very alive. What better guides through a show which is a hymn to our home!
In Women Who…. Story Jam threw the lights up on the audience, invited them to take control, to storm the stage, to vote and give out prizes, to dress up in ridiculous bits of costume.
We Are Fox takes a different path, beckoning audiences into a familiar world made mysterious,re-focussed. The stories in We Are Fox are old stories: a man drops to the ground and transforms into a beast, a sailor comes home with treasure that buys him…what? A midwife is called out by a stranger who rides the wind. Foxes and Banshees strike a deal. A woman follows her nose and changes her fate, in the darkest of English folktales, Lady Mary and Mr Fox. And through it all runs the city.
Story Jam will be inviting a local citizen to be our guest on stage for part of every performance, people engaged in their city’s life – urban geographers, community workers, mural painters, city visionaries, artists, activists. ‘We have a platform. And we want to do the thing we hear every day on the tube: “Move along the platform, please”. We are pretty confident audiences will be as fascinated as we are in our guest’s life. And wWho knows who we’ll all meet, what connections will happen?’
The show deals with strong material at times – you can’t tell meaningful stories about human adults without doing so – but the spirit of We Are Fox is not innocence. It’s bright-eyed, head-on-one-side exploration of life in cities.
We invite our fellow citizens to claim back the streets and be more fox!
Posted on 15 April 2026
