The world will come to South Wales this summer with the Beyond the Border International Storytelling Festival at St Donats Castle in the Vale of Glamorgan from 2 – 4 July.
From Georgia to Gambia and England to Egypt, storytellers, singers and musicians will descend on the idyllic setting of St Donats Castle for the UK’s leading festival on storytelling in a weekend of inspirational tale telling with great food and drink aplenty.
Highlights this year include In The Footsteps of Marco Polo, stories from Arabia in Nights in Baghdad and Celtic stories, including two from the Mabinogion which will be retold in words, music and song in a series of stories entitled Out of the Twilight.
Nearly 20 storytellers will feature including Sergio Diotti from Italy, Melanie Ray from Canada and Wales’s own Sioned Davies. Sioned is Head of Welsh Studies at the University of Wales, Cardiff and author of the recent critically-acclaimed Welsh translation of The Mabinogion.
Award-winning music
The spoken word will be complimented by many award-winning musicians also appearing at the Festival. BBC Radio 3 World Music Award winners Justin Adams & Juldeh Camara will perform as will BBC Radio 2 Folk Award Winner Chris Wood. These three musicians are a huge coup for the Festival, especially Justin Adams who has played with many of the greats from Robert Plant to Led Zeplin.
Bro Ar Men (Land of Stone) a trio led by Pol Huellou from Brittany, performing with Vasken Solakian from Armenia, & Osian George from Wales – son of the late great Welsh singer Siwsann George, will make their first appearance in South Wales on the Saturday night.
Wales and the World
The Georgian Ministry of Culture is supporting this year’s Festival by funding the visit of a professional male voice choir called Mtiebi from the Republic of Georgia. Wales has incredible strong choral traditions and this all male choir will blow audiences away on the opening night of the Festival, Friday 2 July with their passionate singers. They will also bring their Tamada to St Donats – a rare honour for Welsh audiences as it is the role of the Tamada (toast-maker) to toast the health and good fortune of honoured guests.
A leading family of Armenian singers called the Kotchnak Ensemble will continue the world music theme as they visit the festival from Paris, where they currently live in exile. Exiled Iraqi concert musician, the brilliant Ahmed Muhktar will also perform his acclaimed music suite The Road To Baghdad as part of the Nights in Baghdad programme, which includes Egypt’s Chirine ElAnsary telling stories from 1001 Arabian Nights author Robert Irwin.
Artistic Director of Beyond the Border, David Ambrose says; ‘One of our many exciting plans for Beyond the Border was to explore the stories and oral traditions of the countries along the Silk Road, starting in Italy, moving through Greece, Turkey and The Caucasus, and ending this year in Iraq. We want to spend the next two editions of the festival continuing this journey, with storytellers from Iran and Central Asia (all the Stans) coming to Wales in 2012, and ending the journey with a major feature on Chinese traditional storytelling in 2014.’
Mr Ambrose continues ‘Of course, travel is a huge theme for Beyond the Border, as the name of the Festival obviously suggests. We all know that good stories travel well and the best stories are universal. It’s not all about storytelling from overseas though, as part of the Travellers Tales section this year we are delighted to welcome Wales Book of The Year Longlist author Horatio Clare to St Donats. Clare’s Running For The Hills was a BBC Radio 4 Book of The Week recently and he’ll be telling the story of his epic journey from South Africa to South Wales, tracking the migration of the swallow, in A Single Swallow’.
Also in Traveller’s Tales is The Homing Stone which is an award winning story and music piece from Hugh Lupton and Chris Wood. And on the Sunday only, English Acoustic Collective will tell the story of Swallows and Amazons by author Arthur Ransome and his epic flight across Bolshevik Russia.
Adults Only
BTB 2010 also features some of the world’s best known (and extremely adult) love stories. Canadian storyteller Melanie Ray will be recounting the great story of doomed lovers Tristan and Iseult; there will be special adult-only performances of stories from Bocaccio’s famously bawdy Decameron; and late-night erotically-charged performances about two ancient love goddesses – Aphrodite and Inanna in Inanna Banana and Aphrodite & The Red Shoes performed by Xanthe Gresham.
Tickets for Beyond the Border start at £20 for a single daytime ticket or you can bring the whole family for an entire weekend for £220. You can book online at www.beyondtheborder.com or www.stdonats.com or by post to: St Donats Arts Centre, St Donats Castle, Vale of Glamorgan CF61 1WF or call 01446 799100.
Beyond the Border and St Donats Arts Centre would like to thank the Welsh Assembly Government, Arts Council of Wales and the Vale of Glamorgan Council for their kind support of this Year’s Festival.
