Orkney, 21-24 October 2010

WEEL BAIRNS, the nichts is drawin in and the clocks is gaan back – just the time for cooriein in roond the fire telling a few yarns…

Which was what was happening at various venues around Orkney last weekend. The Orkney Storytelling Trust was founded in 2001 and had faded a touch, but has re-emerged, bouncing, as part of the Scottish International Storytelling Festival. A printer’s quirk in the leaflet’s booking form invites punters to a ‘made up event’,  venue to be ‘the moon’ – one  small step too far, perhaps.

But ambition is written all over this venture; the performers’ blurbs are enticing and the events are pleasingly non-town-centric – Westray and Sanday both host hops and workshops. It’s surprisingly hard to find good performing spaces in Orkney, but organiser Fran Flett Hollingrake and her team have made nifty choices to maximise audience turnout.

16th century Skaill House is home to late night eerinesses under the baronial rafters. Plout kirns, kishies and washboards are shifted aside at Kirbuster Museum to make room for tale tellers. The Old Kirk, in Stromness, now called the Town Hall, though barely changed from the days when the minister held sway, is transformed – tables, chairs, Orkney ale, red wine, low lights which glint off the organ pipes. You can attend open mic sessions in the hotels, or go to the Arts Theatre for Appalachian high jinks. “It’s a learning experience for us,” Lynn Johnston tells me. “We’ll be watching and listening to see what people like and how they want things to develop.”

Organised storytelling is a bit of a contradiction in terms, I’ve always thought; but it does tell us a lot about the way society’s developed, and a lot about human beings’ need for nostalgia. Not to mention our need to be sat on someone’s knee, metaphorically speaking, and soothed or scared or tickled half to death.

Sir Walter Scott, who is, it would seem, single-handedly to blame for Scotchifying a perfectly dignified little nation, loved the high coloured tales of derring do his grandfather told him so much that he put them in a book for his grandson which became a best seller.

‘Trust the story’ James Robertson has a character tell us in his big canvas new novel spanning the last fifty years of our history, And the Land lay Still. It’s all in the stories we tell each other.

Bob Pegg hold forth (photo by Andrew Hollinrake, courtesy of Andrew and Orkney Storytelling Festival

Bob Pegg has an audience pleaser with his one man show about local hero John Rae; it’s enlivened by his genial presence, plus his singing, his squeezebox and whistle – though I found the seamless segue from the tragic discovery of gnawed human femurs on King William Island into a rendition of W S Gilbert’s ditty ‘Yarn of the Nancy Bell (rejected by Punch because it was “too cannibalistic”…) just a touch uneasy.

It was an Englishman’s tribute to Rae, with a nod to Assipattle (well on the way to becoming the most overused folk tale in the islands), Inuit legend and generic shaggy dog stories woven in.

Nothing could have been more of a contrast than Jerker Fahlstrom. He was tale telling behind the baize curtain before he even emerged onto the stage; he manifested as the Norse god of mischief and misrule, Loki, in yellow and red with a leather helmet and a selection of arcane things dangling from his belt (storytellers seem to favour amulets, or eye catching headgear, or big earrings. It is a performance, I tell myself. This is not your granny in the kitchen).

Jerker Fahlstrom in action (photo by Andrew Hollinrake, courtesy of Andrew and Orkney Storytelling Festival)

Fascinatingly, this Swedish bundle of energy begins by telling a snatch of tale in the way his ancestors might have – hands clasped, he intoned in Swedish (I think – maybe Icelandic…) and I did get the shivers. It felt like nearly touching Njal. He had the best of subjects – gods are so nice and human, with magic thrown in, and there are as many How-the-world-began tales as there are cultures, thank goodness, all of them colourful and clever.

Fahlstrom is a big personality, a powerful engager, flirting with his audience, disarming them, touching on  big themes – violent societies – without preaching. (I did wonder how many Old Kirk elders were spinning in their graves, as Thor sorted the universe out under the pulpit…)

Grey clouds were made of brain matter from broken skulls, horsetails soaked in rainbow colours spattered the birds to make them coloured (“what is it you call them, they are so…spotty?”). He would be marvellous with children, he’s got that infectious wickedness they like. But – like all good storytellers – it’s really adult material he deals with, gory and untidy and slightly crazy.

Craziness, too, in Kirbuster Museum on a wet cold afternoon. Lawrence Tulloch, a much loved yarner from Yell, in Shetland , remarked, deadpan, “usually whan I com to do storytellan dey lat me gyit in da room.”

It was mobbed. Clambering room only. The peat was reeking as only damp peat can on a wet cold afternoon in a flag-floored crofthouse with a chimney open to all airts. Atmosphere there certainly was – it wasn’t just the line of ceuths which were kippering. Really, you couldn’t have chosen a better place to tell stories – intimate, lamp lit, sooty – all we needed were a pig in the corner and a few broody hens on the rafters.

Shetland storyteller Lawrence Tulloch (photo by Andrew Hollinrake, courtesy of Andrew and Orkney Storytelling Festival)

Tom Muir has a soothing presence and a strong voice; he excels at a kind of gentle understated irony which Orcadians recognise as being part of their own way of dealing with dramatic events. Lawrence Tulloch gave us wandering seafarers, and nearly made me believe it was a true story when he said it was – and the Appalachian gipsy Jerry Harmon (another great hat) told tales from his childhood full of moonshine and hickory and countless crazy relations, playing a mean guitar in between times.

I had forgotten one of the great joys of living, as I did as a child, amongst folk who told stories every Friday night and unstoppably on holidays and high days – the sheer variety of voice, and style each teller brings with them.  Accent, dialect, burr; pausing, winking, pacing – they all vary and add to the performance.

For the Ghostly Tales at Skaill, appropriately, there was a full moon with a ring around it – and it too was a sell out.

The organisers are right to be pleased with the way the Festival went. Next year, now they know there’s a keen audience, they can build up the programme with confidence – more events for children would be a great addition for starters, and it’d be great to identify tale tellers in the islands. Nothing, but nothing, beats the opening ‘once upon a time…’ except perhaps ‘wan time, when I wis peedie…’

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

Links

• Orkney Storytelling Festival