Stories in Transit IV

Stories in Transit IV

Chiesa Santa Chiara, Orto Botanico
16-19 November, 2017

To read the full programme of the workshops please click here. The workshop report can be found here.
To view photographs from this workshop series, please click here. A short film by Letizia Gullo with footage of the workshops and performance is on our Youtube channel here.

This workshop focused on the story of Gilgamesh, which we had begun exploring during previous workshops in Palermo. Several key parts of the Babylonian epic poem were selected and prepared for performance, complete with masks and props, music and animation elements. One workshop was led by the young artist collective Giocherenda, whose members specialize in creating tools and games to accompany and inspire storytelling. The high point of the workshop was the public promenade performance of the scenes, first in the Botanical Gardens in Palermo and secondly in Piazza Magione in the square next to the primary school. The performance even attracted even press attention – for the coverage in the local Palermo newspaper click here.

Pictures of the workshop and the performance can be found here.


Participants

Students of Centro Provinciale per l’Istruzione degli Adulti (CPIA)

Clelia Bartoli - teacher, writer, and coordinator of the educational experiment Polipolis at the "CPIA - Palermo 1," dedicated to unaccompanied foreign minors; lecturer in Human Rights at the Department of Legal Sciences of the University of Palermo, she has served as an expert at the Italian Ministry of Integration

Valentina Castagna - lecturer, translator, writer, former Associate Research Fellow at the Birkbeck College (University of London), worked for several years as an independent interpreter and translator for the Law Courts of Palermo

Roberto Cavosi - Director and playwright

Giocherenda - artist collective of young refugees building, inventing, animating and selling storytelling games

Claudia Gualtieri - Assistant Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Milan

Yousif Latif Jaralla - storyteller

Kali Jones - artist

Mercedes Kemp - writer and Director of Community and Research for WildWorks Theatre Company and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Falmouth University

Alice Oswald - poet

Peter Oswald - poet, playwright and performer

Loredana Ottomano - guide and interpreter

Lee Shearman – Arts educator, illustrator and designer

David Swift - artist and toymaker, see his work here

Wafa' Tarnowska - children's writer, storyteller and translator

Inigo Thomas - writer, London Review of Books

Philip Terry - poet, professor at the University of Essex, where he teaches Creative Writing; writer and editor of The Penguin Book of Oulipo (2019)

Marina Warner - writer and cultural historian, Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, Fellow of the British Academy and President-Elect of the Royal Society of Literature

Steve Willey - poet and lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, co-founder of Watadd, a research and creative writing network that explores the intersection of Western and Arabic poetic traditions to create new communities through poetry

Mary Kay Wilmers - editor, journalist and co-founder of the London Review of Books

Stevie Wishart - musician and composer, B.A. Hons Music (University of York), MLitt (Unviersity of Oxford), fruitful and passionate career in experimental as well as traditional music, focusing on the ability of music to bring people together


Supported by the Metabolic Studio, with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London; The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford; Diparmento di Scienze Umanische, University of Palermo; School of Arts and Humanities, Birkbeck College, London; Oxford Comparative Criticism (oCCt); Holberg Prize.