15th annual Blas Festival launches programme of Highland musical events

This year’s Gaelic music festival will culminate on St Andrew’s night 18th October 2019, The programme for this year’s Blas Festival has launched today and revealed an outstanding line-up of musicians from Scotland and further afield for this year’s Gaelic music festival which will take place next month in venues throughout the Highlands. Blas, which … Continued

JOB OPPORTUNITY: CLARSACH SOCIETY ADMINISTRATOR

Purpose: To support the Honorary Secretary and Office Manager in achieving the aims and objectives of The Clarsach Society and Edinburgh International Harp Festival. Location: Edinburgh Salary: £13,500 Hours: 22 hours per week – flexible working will be considered The Clarsach Society’s aim is to promote, encourage and develop the playing of the clarsach, nationally … Continued

SISF 2019: Q&A with Louise Profeit-LeBlanc

Tell us an interesting feature of traditional storytelling in your country. Indigenous storytelling is very diverse and is only in the last 20 years beginning to make a comeback with many of the younger generation discovering their own through knowing the ancient stories. How did you become a storyteller? My grandmother was a great teller, … Continued

SISF 2019: Q&A with Mimesis Heidi Dahlsveen

Tell us an interesting feature of traditional storytelling in your country. Troll is an important part of the traditional stories told, and there are some stories all children grows up with. In Norway, we are so lucky to have the Cultural Rucksack Programme. The Cultural Rucksack programme is part of the government’s cultural policy. It … Continued

SISF 2019: Q&A with Margaret Grenier

Tell us an interesting feature of traditional storytelling in your country. Storytelling of our oral histories has been carried through song and dance for the Indigenous people of the Northwest Coast of Canada for thousands of years. Our word for oral history translates to coming from the ice, meaning that our stories go back to … Continued

SISF 2019: Q&A with Michael Williams

Tell us an interesting feature of traditional storytelling in your country.  Traditional storytelling in Canada consists of different strands reaching back to Indigenous storytelling traditions, European traditions, and other immigrant and local traditions. I grew up in a multi-cultural neighbourhood in Hamilton, Ontario, where the city’s steel mills attracted families from around the world. As … Continued

SISF 2019: Q&A with Joseph A Naytowhow

Tell us an interesting feature of traditional storytelling in your country.  Traditional storytelling approaches differ across the country. There are 634 First Nations in Canada with 50 distinct languages. Joseph is Nehiyo (or in the anglicized version is ‘Cree’). On the prairies, storytelling is used as a teaching tool, and certain kinds of stories are … Continued

SISF 2019: Q&A with Giovanna Conforto

Tell us an interesting feature of traditional storytelling in your country.  In many villages and towns now, in Italy, we have storytelling circles. Groups of people who come together to share stories, songs, anecdotes. It was a tradition, in Italy, to sit in a circle “a veglia” in the evenings, especially in the countryside, but … Continued

SISF 2019: Q&A with Deborah Dunleavy

Tell us an interesting feature of traditional storytelling in your country. Canada is a relatively young country. Since the first visit by the vikings, newcomers have steadily landed on the shores of our ancestral peoples, and with these early global transitions came the old customs and the old stories. But the exponential evolutionary process has … Continued

SISF 2019: Q&A with Dawne McFarlane

Tell us an interesting feature of traditional storytelling in your country. I live in the city of Toronto, one of the greatest crossroads cities in the world. It’s in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee people, the First People to live here before others came. The Toronto Storytelling Festival, which began in 1978, has become … Continued