If you see people running around the Clinton Square in chicken hats on the third weekend in January, don’t be alarmed.
The Chicken Festival is in town. Specifically, the 31st Annual RAPS Chicken Festival.
RAPS stands for the River And Prairie Storyweavers, a regional group based in Kansas City. Every year, RAPS holds a Chicken Festival, choosing a different community in the Midwest to hold the festival for the next two years.
“We call it the Chicken Festival because one year we were telling all kinds of animal stories, and Tim Manson pointed out we had not told any chicken stories,” said Linda Kuntz, RAPS event coordinator.
The purpose of the group is to promote the art of oral storytelling and help communities develop story-telling resources. A combination festival and winter retreat, the festival draws 40 to 50 storytellers each year, Linda said, to hone their storytelling skills, try out new stories and have fun. RAPS has members who live all over the Midwest, Linda said, plus one in the Netherlands and one in Japan, which they acquired when they held meetings on Zoom.
Connie Grisier, who organizes programs for the Henry County Museum, suggested RAPS hold the festival in Clinton after she met RAPS member Joyce Slater who was in town as one of the “Civil War Women Come Alive” portrayers at a museum-sponsored program in 2022. As the one-time Baby Chick Capital of the World, Clinton was a natural choice for the Chicken Festival, Connie said.
To hear a sample their stories, go to the Clinton Senior Center, 970 Sedalia Ave., on Friday, Jan. 19, where the Storyweavers will be holding forth from 10:45 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
In partnership with the Henry County Museum, the Storyweavers will present a children’s program at the museum, 213 W. Franklin, that afternoon from 12:30 p.m. to 1:45 p.m.
On Friday night, January 19, the Storyweavers will give a storytelling concert from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. as a benefit for the Henry County Museum’s restoration of the Dorman House.
The project is now in phase two of a three-phase effort to save the historic home. Dorman family history encompasses local and American stories from the American Revolution to the California gold strike and the steamboat era through the Civil War and two world wars.
On Saturday, Jan. 20, the Chicken Festival starts at 8 a.m. with registration. It concludes on Sunday, Jan. 21. Genres include tall tales, ghost stories, Ozark folklore and frontier history, and are further broken down by time: three-minute stories, eight-minute or less, and epic tales, which are longer.
On the schedule for Saturday morning is “Chicken News and Chicken Stories,” followed by the “Chicken Socks Give-Away.”
The Saturday afternoon auction starts at 1 p.m. on Jan. 20, and includes a music break for the Chicken Dance. If you’ve never seen the Chicken Dance, you’re (a) not from the Midwest or (b) never attended a wedding in the Midwest. For the uninitiated, the dance consists mainly of flapping your arms like a chicken, preceded by opening and closing your hand like a beak, and followed by wiggling your tail, each motion done four times, then clapping and spirited partner-swinging.
Another part of the festival covers “Gigs from Heck,” about story-telling jobs that have gone wrong and how to avoid them. “Pies” is literally that, Linda said, pies that a RAPS member brings to share at the end of the day.
Linda’s husband, Gary Kuntz, is director of the RAP Storyweavers’ board. The last time the festival was held in Clinton, about 16 years ago, Gary told a story called “The Little Princess,” recruiting volunteers from the audience of students to act out the parts of the fairy tale. For the prince, chose a boy who seemed a little reluctant to come up. When Gary got to the part where the boy had to go down on one knee and ask the princess to marry him, the prince froze.
“Everybody realized, except my husband, that this is an unrequited 8th grade crush,” Linda said. “That was maybe in 2008, and we’ve often wondered what happened. Now it’s a story of its own.”
Folk tales and fairy tales are part of the mix, Linda said, plus this year they’ve added a new category,“Death and Taxes.”
Local residents can register for the Chicken Festival for $15, the same rate as for members. You can come and tell a story if you wish, or just sit back and listen, she said. The drill if you want to tell a story: write your name on a slip of paper and the type of story you are going to tell, and they put the slips in a bucket and draw names and write them on a chart. They also ask the members to prepare a one-minute humorous story to share during the auction on Saturday afternoon.
Warning: judging from the videos on the RAPS website of people talking about how they got involved in the group, story-telling can be addictive.
Because the festival is meeting in a building on the Clinton Square, RAPS members will be dining at local restaurants and staying in local motels. Look for the people in the rubber-chicken hats with the red combs on top, posing in front of the baby chick wall mural downtown.
Go to www.riverandprairiestoryweavers.org. RAPS makes a two-year commitment to the festival’s meeting place, so will be returning to Clinton next year.
