Professional storytellers

Eight international storytellers from Austria, France, Greece, Israel and Italy and a number of Maltese storytellers will be participating in the First International Storytelling Festival organised by the Department of Maltese at the University of Malta G. F. Abela Junior College to be held in Malta for students and the public in Floriana and Valletta from December 11 to 13.

The festival is being organised in collaboration with the Enzyklopädie des Märchens at the Academy of Sciences, Göttingen, Germany, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Malta, the Austrian Embassy in Malta, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Malta and the European Commission Representation in Malta. The official sponsors of this cultural event are Middlesea Valletta Life Assurance Company Ltd, the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts, the Ministry of Education, St James Cavalier, Valletta, Farsons Foundation, Publishers Enterprises Group (PEG) Ltd, the University of Malta Junior College Administration, Casa Rocca Ltd (Valletta), Park Hotel (Sliema), Heritage Malta, the Malta Photographic Society, the Malta Tourism Authority and Air Malta.

State and private schools have already booked their students to participate. The venues include Robert Samut Hall, in Floriana, and St James Cavalier, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura and Casa Rocca Piccola in Valletta.

Stelios Pelasgos is a Greek master storyteller and a well-known scholar and researcher in the Greek oral tradition. He initiated the revival of the art of storytelling in Greece and Cyprus since 1990. He holds a Ph.D. degree in the use of the storytelling of Greek folk literature in education referring to the methods of traditional apprenticeship of storytellers using multiple intelligences and its applications in modern education.

He is an author of children's literature, author and director of theatrical plays. He performs in Greek, English and French. He will be participating in the Malta Storytelling Festival with stories of the Wise Fool that are found in ancient Greece (Aesop's fables and philosophical comic stories), in the eastern tradition of Nasrhrentin Hotza, in Georgian fables, Indian stories and Zen stories from Japan.

Domniki Mavridou is a traditional musician. She has studied Byzantine and traditional music as well as folk musical instruments manufacture. She holds diplomas in the Mediaeval Greek music and teaches in the Music School of Volos. She mixes seamlessly traditional Greek and eastern tunes with improvisations enhancing the different mood of each folk story and creating a small oasis of pure sound and serenity amid the excitement aroused by the storyteller.

Yoel Perez is another storyteller. He is a lecturer within the Department of Hebrew Literature in Ben Gurion University, Israel. He has been editor (1997-2003) or member of the editorial board of Mizracha Lashemesh, Ma'arava Layareach, a scientific journal for storytelling and folklore (in Hebrew). He has taught courses in folklore and literature to students of a second degree in Ben Gurion University and Achva Academic College. He has been presented with various awards, and has authored many books and articles.

For the Malta Storytelling Festival, Mr Perez will be bringing with him his Karagoz theatre. He has restored the original theatre, using electric bulbs and plastic, but the figures are traditional. He makes use of Jewish-Spanish folktales as a basis.

Another storyteller is Robin Gwyndaf, born in Llangwm, North Wales, an area famous for its rich musical, storytelling and bardic tradition. Since 1964 he has been on the staff of St Fagans National History Museum, formerly known as the Museum of Welsh Life, near Cardiff. A former head of the Department of Cultural Life, Dr Gwyndaf has interviewed hundreds of informants and recorded thousands of items of narrative, folk traditions and folk poetry.

He was also honorary lecturer in Folklore, Department of Welsh, University of Wales (1982-99). This year, on retiring, he was made an Honorary Research Fellow. Dr Gwyndaf has authored hundreds of studies and produced a series of sound cassettes on Welsh folk culture. He lectures regularly in universities and ethnographical institutions abroad.

Agnès Chavanon is a renowned storyteller and artistic director of the Paroles en Festival in Rhône-Alpes, France. She studied music and the arts and then dedicated her time to teaching music and the theatre playing the part of various characters from Voltaire to Woody Allen. Ms Chavanon narrates stories on everyday life for adults and children in hospital wards, old people's houses, prisons, foreign communities, primary, secondary, post-secondary school, and university students.

In the Malta Storytelling Festival she will be accompanied by Guzè Cutayar, who will translate her stories to Maltese. Mr Cutayar was born in 1938 in Tunis. He is of Maltese origin and has Maltese culture and language at heart. He studied at a seminary in Lyon, where he received Holy Orders in the diocese of St Etienne and worked for 20 years with disabled children. He has published a French-Maltese dictionary and a Maltese-French dictionary Parlons Maltais for the teaching of Maltese. He has also translated Oliver Friggieri's short stories A Malte, histoires du crepuscule.

Anna Maria Civico is an actress, singer, teaching both acting and singing, and researcher. Born in Calabria, she studied at the University of La Sapienza, Rome. She followed various theoretical and practical courses on the performing arts for actors in India, followed many working sessions on technique in drama and the American traditional folk songs, embarked on systematic fieldwork research, and attended various drama workshops during the Biennale Teatro di Venezia. She has participated in various shows as singer and actress as well as coordinated many cultural events in different parts of Italy.

Since her early childhood Austrian storyteller Claudia Edermayer loved listening to stories and fairytales. As a young adult she visited the Austrian storytelling festivals in Linz and Graz. There she was touched and fascinated by the manifold stories and by the different kinds of storytelling. Very soon she started to collect books of fairytales and legends from all over the world.

In 2001 Ms Edermayer founded the First Storytelling Café in Linz in Upper Austria, where she still tells stories twice a month, once for adults only, the other for children. In the same year she quit her job at the Lebenshilfe and worked full-time as an independent storyteller. In addition to her storytelling programmes she has introduced special story-walks where she combines nature's experience, herbal knowledge, faith and superstition. Etty Ben-Zaken, singer, author and interdisciplinary artist, studied singing at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy and theatre at the Jerusalem School of Visual Theatre. She performs widely in Israel and abroad, focusing on contemporary works, some of which were written especially for her voice. Ms Ben-Zaken teaches at the Theatre Department of Haifa University.

In the Malta Storytelling Festival she will perform a narrative concert. She will be accompanied by guitarist Oded Shoub and composer Eitan Steinberg.

Three conferences for the public will be held at St James Cavalier on The Storyteller's Way of Mastering and Educating the Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Intelligence (in English) by Stelios Pelasgos of Greece, addressing teachers and educationalists, on December 11 at 4.30 p.m.; The Function of Folktales in Contemporary Society (in French and Maltese) by Agnès Chevanon, on December 11 at 6.30 p.m. and The Function and Value of Storytelling (in English) by Robin Gwyndaf of Wales on December 12 at 6.30 p.m. For further information, contact the organisers on 2590 7201 or 2590 7328 or Dr Mifsud-Chircop on george.mifsud-chircop@um.edu.mt