Would you mind giving us insight into your art/event/performance?
My new show Sheep Stanes explores connection to landscape, grief, more-than-human community and tradition by engaging with the folktales, songs and tunes of the Orcadian island of North Ronaldsay. I spent a chunk of my summer researching my masters thesis by helping rebuild the North Ron Sheep Dyke, a structure which has stood since 1832, and keeps the native feral sheep on the beach eating seaweed while preserving the rest of the islands limited inland fields for arable cultivation and cattle grazing. I fell in love with the islands sheep, the stones, the landscape and the stories, and my quite academic research quickly became a creative story-collection effort. The experience involved having amazing conversations with islanders, listening to old archival audio recordings of storytellers and musicians from the island, and a lot of hefting stone, and unexpectedly threw up a lot of personal feelings around loss, connection and belonging. The show explores these feelings through folktales from the islands, personal reflection and beautiful fiddle music. I think about grief and loss on multiple levels – personal, cultural and environmental – and the theme shows up in different ways throughout the show. Ultimately, it’s a folkloric meditation on belonging, and the ways in which engaging with tradition, be it stone dyke building or storytelling, allows for conversations throughout time and space with people and creatures long since gone.
Tell us about the creative team and the process involved in producing your performance?
Sheep Stanes is my first big solo commission as a Storyteller, which is so exciting as most of my previous shows have been collaborative creations with other talented tellers. The show began life as my masters dissertation, involving countless hours of reading, archival research, in person fieldwork, interview transcription, thinking and writing. The process of transforming scholarly work into a storytelling show is new to me, and is involving a lot of ‘stripping back the layers’ to reveal the heart of what I want to say, and considering how my ideas can be communicated through images, story and music rather than footnotes and citations. Although I’m the sole storyteller, I am so lucky to be working with a brilliant team. On stage alongside me is the wonderful Kirsty Harrison, a phenomenal Orcadian fiddle player. She performs as part of the band ‘Meallan’, which won the 2026 Danny Kyle Open Stage Award at Celtic Connections, has toured internationally with the Royal Military Tattoo and across Europe with the Hjaltibonhoga fiddle group. She has a brilliant knowledge of the Orkney tune tradition and has a very sensitive and creative approach to accompanying folktales. Behind the scenes, Niall Moorjani, a previous collaborator, fringe-first winner and wonderful storyteller, is providing dramaturgy while Shona Cowie is working with me on physicality and movement. I should also shout out my dissertation supervisor Tuber Falzett, who supported the research that became the basis of this piece, and will also be in Edinburgh giving the annual Alan Bruford Memorial Lecturer at the Festival.
With the launch of this year’s programme, Birds and Beasts, how does it feel to be involved in the Festival?
For me, storytelling has always been about connection between people, place and tradition. Landscape, and the non-human inhabitants of the world around us are entwined with every element of our traditions and existence, an idea I’ve explored before in Aderyn/Bird, my previous storytelling collaboration with Ffion Phillips that will be taking to the festival stage on the 21st. Its so exiting to really celebrate these more-than-human cultural entanglements through this years festival theme, and I am incredibly excited to be one of many incredible shows engaging with ideas around human/animal connection throughout this festival
With shows from all over the world, is there anything in the production/team’s backgrounds and identity that influences the show?
One of the central questions I explore in Sheep Stanes is the question of ‘faur ye bide’. My dad grew up in Orkney, and while I have always had a strong connection to my heritage and family on the islands, and the traditional songs and stories, I grew up in Aberdeenshire before moving to Edinburgh. Kirsty grew up on the islands too but now lives in Glasgow, and neither of us are from North Ronaldsay itself. The show is incredibly place specific to the islands of Orkney, and North Ronaldsay in particular, and my relationship with my dad has really informed the shows development. The complexities of this relationship to landscape and community, and where you do and don’t belong really sits at the heart of the piece. I really hope I’ve made a show that is rooted in place, and really specific to Kirsty and I as performers within the Orkney tradition, and yet any audience member can feel connected and drawn into.
Storytelling in Scotland is a treasured, if often unsung, craft within the media. For those who may be unfamiliar with a live performance, what can audiences expect?
You can expect to have a brilliant time! Its not a play, there is no script, its much more live a (admittedly one sided) conversation. As a storyteller, I am not pretending to be someone else – I am me, sharing stories and songs with you – a lovely audience! No storytelling show is the same, it is really created by community gathered together. In Sheep Stanes, you can expect some folktales about magical creatures, pieces of history, and some personal storytelling and reflection where I’m chatting about my own life (and maybe a poem or two….and loads of tunes!) Once you’ve seen storytelling once, you’ll want to come back.
With one foot in tradition and another in the present, what do you hope for Storytelling’s future, either as a performance or as a community?
Storytelling will always be a way to connect with people, communities, landscapes and traditions. I hope we keep telling the old tales, and find new ones along the way. One of my greatest passions is encouraging young people to get into storytelling and the traditional arts. As a traditional musician, I spend so much of my life playing folk tunes at sessions with folk of all ages, including huge amount of engaged, crazily talented and creative young people playing in the tradition and exploring and expanding the carrying stream in innovative ways, and I can see the beginnings of a similar movement happening in storytelling. My big dream is for folk music, song, dance and storytelling to continue to intertwine, support each other, and develop in new directions while keeping tradition at our core.
Sheep Stanes runs at The Scottish Storytelling Centre as a part of The Scottish International Storytelling Festival on 29th October
Running time – One hour without interval
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