What a year.
What a remarkably engaging, diverse, and warming year we’ve had across Scotland with this festival to celebrate the art of storytelling in all its traditional (and some new) guises.
The launch of a new podcast, Another Story, which explored the themes of the festival in a more accessible and communal manner, enabling audiences to hear (first-hand) their favourite tales from some of the critical storytellers and guests from across the festival. It furthered the stretch of the festival, which has long celebrated the lands and cultures outside of Scotland, now fully able to allow those from across the world into the heart of the festival wherever they may be.
On this occasion, in line with the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Edinburgh and other venues across Scotland (and indeed, online), come together to celebrate and explore the common threads we share.
In a month-long celebration, join audiences and participants in exploring traditional storytelling, live music, workshops, theatre, community gatherings, and open hearth events to consider the many challenges we face, from the displacement of families to the human health and well-being of mental health and future of our planet.
Right now, more than ever in recent years, there is an enormous worldwide movement to meet these challenges and to exist imaginatively, fairly and in a community with a whole diversity of life. Storytelling has embraced these values from the dawn of culture and stories today can help us be more connected to the world around us, as well as our rights, showing us how to be more alive and creative as humans.
Below, we’ve collected our reviews and thoughts from the previous three ’round-up’ articles we’ve released across the festival. From the opening event, Gauri Raje’s Tales of Exile and Sanctuary, to the final main-line performance, Once Upon a Time There was a War, this year’s festival celebrated the principle of everyone’s right to be human. Perhaps one of the organisation’s most self-explanatory ‘themes’ across the years, it’s undeniably one of the most pertinent and accurate for the year it debuted.
Tales of Exile and Sanctuary
Opening the event, following a rousing and touching series of conversations and speeches from Donald Smith, the 2023 Scottish International Storytelling Festival launches to an eager audience who thirst for a shared love of stories – and of the necessity and championing cry for the basic right to be human, to live.
With the Netherbow theatre lights low, and a comforting orange hue around the venue, Gauri Raje’s sombre, and easy-flowing storytelling session marks an ideal way to launch the festival: without bells, whistles, or distractions, Raje’s Tales of Exile and Sanctuary follow her work with refugees and long-term migrants to the UK. It offers an immediate personal touch, one which threads the professional manner of their work, but hones in on the the vital (and often lacking) human element.
Doing this, in a conversational manner, they lace together a series of stories from Iraq, Iran, India, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa to bridge the gap into a land where the travesties of exile are often misunderstood and manage to locate the unexpected beauty and community which comes from the necessity of sanctuary. The tales spun may not be ones with which UK audiences are most familiar, but the roots and themes carry through this excellently gentle and modestly told hour of wonderful storytelling – tying cultures and nations together. A perfect start.
The Town Mouse & The Country Mouse
What a magical piece of theatrical storytelling: and a reminder of just how necessary it is to ensure an accessible home to aid in the artistic expression of children and those with additional needs. Something in which both the Scottish Storytelling Centre and the Scottish International Storytelling Festival have excelled.
A multisensory adventure, in a similar manner to the remarkable Man Who Planted Trees, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse is performed and created by artist and illustrator Kate Leiper and storyteller Ailie Finlay. Armed with tinkling balls, crisp crunching leaves (perfect Autumnal theatre), cosy and soft quilts, snuggly nests, and lashing of additional sensory props, this is a re-telling like few others.
For many, this familiar tale is one we’ve become detached from as we grow up – one often relegated to the children’s shelf with little to no resurgence. Here, Leiper and the audience dip into their art box to create an artwork based on the narrative and experiences, incorporating colours, textures, and tactile materials to offer a dimension of sensory activity. Together, Leiper and Finlay captivate the audience and encourage their curiosity and play. It may be an 11. am show focused on younger audiences, but it is easily one of the festival’s best.
Letters to Jackie
From Jackie to the Bunty, DC Thomson’s reign over youth and teen magazines has largely been unchallenged in Scottish journalism.
Sixty years ago, the Dundee-based journalism juggernaut created its most successful magazine for the teenage market, with legions of young readers (my mother included) who found solace and an outlet in Jackie’s ‘agony aunts’ Cathy and Clare. A much welcome relief in a world where the immediate privacy and efforts to help young women understand their feelings and emotions were less than revolutionary.
But now, in a world of excess and too much unqualified and potentially dangerous information, where can we turn to find a solution to our present-day dilemmas and the challenges of life? Sgàthach Storytellers Bea Ferguson, Heather Yule and Maria Whatton bring the power of the old tales to answer the queries of today. A smart, very canny piece of ponderousness, Letters to Jackie both celebrates our fascination of the past, and looks to just how valuable the advances we’ve made are, and what we’ve lost along the way.
Joyfully Grimm: Reimagining a Queer Adolescence
Accompanied by a relatively grumpy frog, playwright, poet, and storyteller James Stedman leads the festival into what begins to be a more concentrated sense of familiar storytelling – and creative management in utilising the Netherbow’s space.
Fusing elements of storytelling with an autobiographical sense of the theatrical, Joyfully Grimm: Reimagining a Queer Adolescence threads us through Stedman’s youth in the era of Section 28, the legislation which prohibited ‘promoting homosexuality’ between 1988 and the start of the twenty-first century. Immediately, it’s a frank reminder that while we have so very far to go, we have also come very far, making it (somewhat) to the base levels of rights.
And while times have mercifully changed, though with a contemporary conservative backlash against the LGBTQIA+ community, trauma was heavily imparted to hundreds of thousands of people and communities (including Stedman). Initially, the production starts back in blissful ignorance of youth – a young boy, growing up surrounded by whimsy and magic, entirely unaware of Section 28 and the impact it would later have.
Clad in a handsome royal outfit, Stedman forges an affection with the audience from the initial beats of Joyfully Grimm. It’s a nice play on both the traditional elements Stedman utilises in the production and the eventual rejection of this part of himself to appear more normal.
Stedman possesses a natural affinity with the spoken word, and together with terrific direction from Molly Naylor, Stedman enlists original poetry and traditional fairy tales to conjure a deeply heartfelt, mildly irreverent look throughout Queer history, and towards an uncertain but hopeful future to remind us – that the fabulous always win out.
Don Quixote Rides Again
With crashes of light, it’s always a welcome sight whenever the Netherbow Theatre puts its theatrical chops to use. Inés Álvarez Villa’s storytelling, even as they charter the many, many, many adventures of Don Quixote and craft them into an exemplary showcase of spoken word, borrowing Spanish flair and some deftly threaded humour into the mix. The encompassing show is as melodically appealing, as it is enchanting and dreamlike: truly original, but traditional storytelling.
Breaking into the more sequential nature of Quixote’s adventures, Don Quixote Rides Again feels like a tremendous undertaking, that for the most part is riveting and captured perfectly in tone and performance. It also feels the longest of the festival’s shows, both positive and negative. If anything, Rides Again could easily remount another staging with a two-act structure to offer a breath and intermission for both audiences and performers.
Orchestrated to flamenco musician Danielo Olivera’s live string performance which ripples throughout the theatre with an otherworldly sense of nostalgia and voyage. Don Quixote Rides Again fuses an intensity of narrative, storytelling and instrumentals into a fervour which warms the cold Edinburgh night into a Spanish Noche: captivating, intense, and best paired with a Rioja.
The Displaced Heart
Vying for one of the festival’s most comprehensive and well-executed productions, The Displaced Heart channels a primal and elegantly overarching theme to which all audiences can relate: a lost heart. A world in which the husk remains – its heart taken from it through traditional and fantastical means: location, destiny, trauma, or other elements.
Offering one of the festival’s most engaging concepts, and tightly orchestrated – The Displaced Heart from the trio of creatives and performers Peter Chand, chanteuse Gráinne Holland, and Eamon McElholm on bass guitar. This Indo-Irish production seams Indian folklore and culture through a purposeful command of Irish song and language from Holland. It’s all pitched with McElholm’s orchestrations, but for the Edinburgh performance, they are joined by Argentinian musician Alec Cooper on the Sitar.
Less a conglomeration or treasury of tales, The Displaced Heart follows one strand of narrative, Chand’s adaptation of The Princess with the Longest Hair, and breaks off into other avenues of folklore. Much of the evening’s success rests in the hands of Chand’s storytelling and audience control. Thoroughly pleasant interactions, drawing us ever closer into the narrative tales, and toying tremendously with humour, even as the darkness swirls around.
Still somewhat sequential, between each concluded story, before Chand returns to the principal narrative, Holland provides an aethereal coating to the entire performance with a melodic song – ranging from harrowing, to touching and warming. Each is perfectly married to the tone of the concluding tale, and brings together nations thousands of miles apart, in one unified evening of universal praise of beauty.
Once Upon a Time There Was a War
From the tinkering notes as Tea Bendix begins to punctuate a clear Perspex canvas with stars and snowflakes, it’s clear that one of the festival’s closing performances, Once Upon a Time There Was a War is something remarkably special. A trio of Bendix, legendary trad-musician and singer Mairi Campbell, and expertly nuanced and charming Swedish storyteller Svend-Erik Engh offer up a fluid interpretation of real-world events, to confront and present the evolution of war, the language surrounding it, and the horrific circumstances we find ourselves now.
The old world collides with the new in this series of true (and also Biblical) tales of violence, war and hardship which has been gathered across the decade. But audiences do not follow the famous or the valiant during Engh’s tales, but rather we are immersed into the trenches, on horseback, or looking out to the world in hopes of seeing our protagonists return. This is war seen through the eyes of those who lived it – perhaps not always from the front lines. To describe Engh’s style as timeless would be too commonplace, an old soul, a rare and talented performer, Engh does superb work and presents centuries of pain to audiences while reminding them of the value of life, and even a smile.
The weight of Bendix’s illustrations offers an additional, non-distracting presence that fleshes out the words and spoken elements of Engh’s storytelling. Principally monochromatic, colour makes a stark appearance which heavily commands attention and screws in the brutality of war without having to pander to shock or awe in words or descriptions. Taking from the canon of Scottish folk and traditional songs, lacing them around the Danish tales, Campell’s song and instrumentals reinforce the power in Bendix’s work.
Not only is Once Upon a Time There Was a War arguably the most successful and well-tuned performance of the festival, being one of the most well-conceived arrangements of pain and pathos with a celebration of love and peace, but it also captures the ethos of the festival, its audiences, and more hopefully of a Scottish mindset. It finds, that even in the harrowing brutality of war – there is a right to be human, a right to survival, to smile, and to share.
The Scottish International Storytelling Festival ran from October 13th – 29th.
For additional information about the festival, please consult their website here.