JOIN USWho is a professional storyteller? “Somebody who gets money for storytelling,” Emily Parish gives a plausible reply. She chuckles. “You have to be an artist. You can’t just pick a story and start narrating.”
“You need to look at the compositional element and put up the questions within the story. It is not just about sharing it but artistically becoming a part of that particular story,” she says on a erious note.
ut Sarah Rundle, a professional storyteller from UK, who has worked along with Parish, believes storytelling has to be revived across the globe and people from all walks of life are gradually becoming a part of it. Apparently for this reason, the trend of storytelling has grown over the last few years and so is the tribe of storytellers. Storytelling has become popular in the city too. Recently , Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts hosted ‘Kathakar’ International Storytellers Festival.
“In UK we have Grandma Storytelling Festival, where people tell stories which they have heard from their grandmothers. Years ago, people in our country were thrown in factories. They had no time for family. As a result, the trend of storytelling died. It
is a conscious decision to revive it by going back to the books. It is a treasure that we have to retain.”
Parish, obsessed with Hindu mythology agrees that there is no certificate for storytellers. “In UK we have courses where people from different paths can learn skills and techniques of storytelling. As such there is nothing official, still it requires a lot of practice. Professional storytellers work in schools and as freelancers but this is not the situation everywhere,” exclaims Parish.
Hungarian storyteller Daniel Hall, who was present at the recently held ‘Kathakar’ along
with Parish and Rundle says, that options available for recreation are more these days, so storytelling is trying to find a place for itself.
Though he calls himself a ‘professional storyteller’, for he has been practising the art since his school days, Hall clearly points out it is difficult to make a living exclusively from storytelling. “We Hungarians are very proud of our language because it is not European. Ours is a very language-based storytelling. Since the language is difficult no one can easily penetrate into the storytelling job easily,” says Hall.
An actor by profession, his storytelling is largely influenced by theatre. “I try to bring alive the characters in my storytelling,” says Hall, whose stories are a blend of traditional Hungarian folk tales and new tales which he himself translates in English. Archana Mishra