Rebecca Lemaire is a versatile Belgian-British storyteller and is currently based in the Alpujarra mountains in the South of Spain. She tells stories in English, Spanish, and French wherever the wind takes her from Europe to Asia and Africa.
She has lived, studied, and worked in Belgium, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Arabia (Sultanate of Oman and Kuwait), Morocco, India, France and Spain.
Her passion is to look into people’s eyes and travel with them through stories, whether at a festival, in a prison, a yoga school, a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas, a theatre, or a library.
Her repertoire includes mystical and healing stories, humorous tales from her Belgian and British roots, and magical stories from the times of Al-Andalus when the Arab culture was pre-dominant in Andalusia where she lives. She has played music since she was a child and often uses sounds (flute, kalimba, voice, and drum) to support the stories she tells.
She also leads groups into explorations of death and grief through storytelling, conversation, creativity and meditation online, as well as in person. She has recently co-written and published a book on the subject called, ‘Stories of the Heart – A Journey into Dying and Living’.
She also leads introductory storytelling courses for teenagers and adults, trains language teachers in storytelling techniques for the classroom, and coaches storytellers online and in person.
She obtained a BA in Indonesian and French literature and an MA in Medical Anthropology from SOAS, London, before moving to Asia (Oman and India), where she spent 8 years. She studied music, yoga, Reiki, and meditation in North India before spending two years by Ramana Maharshi’s ashram and Arunachala in the South, mostly in silence.
Although she had already been telling stories when teaching yoga, Reiki, English, and meditation, it was when Rebecca returned to Europe that she trained in professional storytelling for three years with Numancia Rojas in Barcelona, Spain. She has also trained with other storytellers from around the world since then, and continues to learn from her colleagues and audiences.
She says: “Storytelling is a form of communication that goes way beyond words; it is a heart-to-heart interaction, and that is why I love it!”
IG: rebecca.storyteller