The Confluence : Indigenous Storytellers Festival, 2011

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Via Acoustic Traditional

The Festival of Indigenous Storytellers is an initiative of Acoustic Traditional to build a platform for our disappearing folklorists/storytellers across various tribal communities of India to get together and revive the tradition of oral storytelling towards conserving our rich but dying ancestral legacies from spiritual to cultural to scientific. The event is unique in many ways and will bring in various partnerships to emphasize the need for the preservation of this

disappearing tradition.

Stories are at the heart of any tribal community. With most of our history being passed down by word of mouth in the form of fables, myths, legends, rituals, practices or folktales, it is at the threshold of being lost forever. The Festival provides a great opportunity to revive this important tradition of storytelling through our disappearing storytellers – from shamans to medicine men to the elderly. By bringing them under one roof to share not only their rich folklore but also – and perhaps more importantly – their wealth of community knowledge such as myths, legends, beliefs, practices, medicine, spirituality and so on, all of which are on the verge of near extinction, it can potentially help revive interest in the value of oral storytelling both within and outside the participating communities. With a growing support of expert agencies and organisations, from environmental to developmental, it provides a great stage to bring out the relevance of these stories in the present modern context, apart from the mere pleasure of listening to them.

In many ways, the Festival is about the revival of our tribal cultures and our practices that have had strong links with sustainability and many other critical areas of survival, which are being lost to the modern world. This is the second year of the Festival (the first was organised in Sikkim 2010 with support from the State Culture and Heritage Department, Sikkim Government) and we are glad to open the invitation for storytellers from our tribal communities for their participation in this years three-day event to be held in Bangalore during the last week of September, 2011.

We are organising it in Bangalore this year at the Fire Flies Ashram between the 30th of September and 3rd of October 2011. For registrations, please download the Confluence schedule and registration guide.

Registration/Schedule here.

Click here for more details.