Archive for August, 2008

Ten stories

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

Ten people engaged in the multistory.net workshop have indentified and scripted their stories today. It was a large storycircle but the storytellers all came with some skills. Tomorrow is a complicated day scanning their images and recording their scripts. I normally structure this as a series of appointments but in this case I have to find ways of getting them to work unsupervised.

Alexander Solzhenitskyn has died aged 89. Coincidentally I had brought his book August 1914 to read again 30 years after my first largely unsuccesful attempt. Now I feel I must do it justice.

Roughshod Excell

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

I’ve just watched a totally absorbing perfomance by Roughshod.

Riding Lights Roughshod is a professional touring theatre company – created by Riding Lights in 1992 to concentrate on the grass-roots community touring which characterised the early years of Riding Lights itself – which annually reaches a live audience of around 65,000 adults and children. It has been acclaimed from Belfast to Brixton for creating powerful new pieces of theatre.

Their collection sketches in the show Hope Street are compelling and moving. A mixture of traditional storytelling from biblical, classical and North American sources, mixed with the actors personal stories of hope. I’m at the Riding Lights Summer Theatre School in Harrogate.

This  afternoon we introduced our storytelling groups to the plan for the week. Sarah Rundle warmed everyone up and I explained how they will put the digital into storytelling. We haven’t worked together before but I feel good about the partnership. Sarah is a traditional storyteller and with her our group will develop their performance skills. I am running two slightly squeezed digital storytelling workshops so that everyone can experience both styles of story making.

Riding Lights and Digital Stories

Friday, August 1st, 2008

I’m about to set off for a week long residential where I am running two digital storytelling workshops at the Riding Lights Summer Theatre School.
I am particularly excited about this event because five Palestinian students from Bethlehem will be joining us. A month ago I was cycling round the Yorkshire Dales on a sponsored ride to raise money for their trip here this month. You can read more about that event on my Rising Dawn blog
I hope to be live blogging from the event if I can secure a suitable connection.