Wallace and Haskins to take stage at the Friday Center

The voices of both singers and storytellers will come together Saturday under the UNC Friday Center’s glass ceiling.

As part of the facility’s annual “Under the Atrium” event, the Friday Center will host Fables in Story and Song, a blend of music and storytelling. The event will feature folk noir singer-songwriter Django Haskins and “Big Fish” author and UNC English professor Daniel Wallace.

Tyler Ritter, the Friday Center’s associate director for communication and instructional design, said that the event is inspired by the response to last year’s “Under the Atrium” event, which featured Mipso, a Chapel Hill-based bluegrass band.

“It was a sold-out event, so we could see there was a need and interest in doing something like that,” Ritter said.

Ritter said that the “Under the Atrium” event has a more profound mission — one that transcends entertainment.

“The purpose really is to open up the doors of the University to the public and give the public access to some of the interesting things going on with the campus and faculty on campus,” Ritter said.

The Friday Center initially reached out to Haskins to conceptualize the event.

Haskins said when he spoke to the Friday Center’s program director about doing an eclectic and varied performance, Wallace immediately came to mind.

“When the Friday Center came to Django originally to have a little concert there, he thought it would be a lot more fun to have me there as well to mix it up, and everybody was into it. So that’s what we’re doing,” Wallace said.

Wallace said the show is a real blending of music and words.

“It’s not simply Django playing a song and me reading a story. We work together. To me, it’s the perfect distillation of story and song,” he said.

“I think that most, if not all, of the audience will never have seen a show that does what we’re doing in the way that we’re doing it.”

Haskins wouldn’t reveal much about the show, but he did give a preview of some of the aspects of the performance.

“I wrote a song that I perform with (Chapel Hill band) Old Ceremony, on our first record, called, ‘Blood and Oil,’” Haskins said.

“It was loosely based on a scene from the movie adaptation of ‘Big Fish,’ so we’ll definitely be doing that as a sort of serendipitous crossover.”

Haskins also said that Wallace will tell one story with his hands lit on fire.

“It’s a weird kind of psychoanalytical literary device. It really has to be seen to be believed,” he said.

Both Wallace and Haskins said that the performance would be the show to end all shows.

“I hope they walk away saying, ‘I’m glad I didn’t stay in my house tonight,’” Haskins said.

arts@dailytarheel.com