World Storytelling Day   

We asked the Festival organisers, Brydee Jenkins-Strang and Kaitrin McMullan to explain their plans for what looks to be an exciting inaugural event.  

The initial idea for our Storytelling Festival was a small one. Originally the concept was to highlight the multiple languages spoken by the staff at Dunedin Public Libraries. There are many hidden talents throughout the Library.

We planned to select a well-known story and have each line spoken in a different language in the Children’s Storypit. We quickly realised, though, that this lent itself to much wider community involvement, celebrating the ubiquity of stories and the diverse population of Dunedin.

After throwing ideas back and forth with the Libraries’ Events Coordinator, Kay Mercer, we sent an open invitation to various bilingual and multilingual citizens around the city, asking if they would share a story both in their native tongue, and in English.

Our aim for the Festival is to give the Dunedin community a chance to hear traditional stories that will transport them around the world and home again! These are the tales that will remind recent immigrants of home and that any person from that story’s culture would be familiar with.

There are many ways to tell a story, so naturally we will have dance/puppets/music performance in addition to the oral storytelling. All this is happening to celebrate World Storytelling Day and will certainly be a first for Dunedin, if not the whole country!

We have a full set list for the 2017 event and more storytellers interested for the future. For now we want to leave a bit of mystery so we won't list every performer and story teller here, but we promise it will be a fun event for all ages.