The East Anglian Storytelling Festival, 30 May – 1 June 2025 - A Personal Review

Over the final weekend of May (crossing over into June) I made my first foray to the Food Museum in

Stowmarket for the East Anglian Storytelling Festival, which celebrated its tenth anniversary this year.

I will admit that my festival going did not get off to an auspicious start because a family emergency looked as though it would prevent me attending. Fortunately, however, things were resolved sufficiently for me to be able to drive up to Stowmarket from the middle of Kent (something that I would not recommend doing on a Friday), and I managed to get onto the site a few minutes after the first act had started – fortunate, as Bronia Evers’s crankie performance of tales from Joan Aitkin’s book ‘A Necklace of Raindrops’ was on my ‘must see’ list.

I have been intrigued by crankies since seeing them online during the Covid pandemic, but it was not until spring of this year, I was able to see a live performance of a crankie being used. For those unfamiliar with the crankie, imagine a long sheet of paper, on which is painted either one continuous

picture or a series of images. This is held on two scrolls which sit within a frame. The paper is cranked from one scroll to the other as the storyteller tells their tale. My first crankie experience was also with Bronia when she teamed up with Cath Little for their performance of ‘Beyond the Glass Mountain’ at StoryNight at Torriano (in north London).  What had surprised me then was the contribution of the sound of stiff paper being rolled across the frame.  In a digital age, when digital sound promises the removal of unwanted audio artefacts through noise reduction, this noise of the mechanism was an honest sound that reminded me that I was in the room with the teller and crankie, not watching a recording. Whilst I don’t see myself including crankies in my own performances in the near future, I was enchanted by the connection between tale told and images revealed as the paper rolled. Bronia is clearly very skilled at illustration and how to convey meaning with limited figures and a restricted palette (which exploded into colour towards the end of the story.

In this review, I am restricted to highlighting only a few of the performances that I saw and, whatever

else I mention, I do need to include Malcolm and Josh Green performing ‘Gone Cuckoo!’ This show mixes science and story in telling of the migratory patterns of the common cuckoo and Malcolm’s adventures as he tried to follow a bird tagged with an electronic tracker across Africa. In ‘Gone Cuckoo’, Malcolm took on the role of the traditional oral storyteller, creating mental visions of vast landscapes, the perils of weather and humankind, and the strength of this small brown bird. While Malcolm led the spoken word for the evening, his son Josh sang and played multiple instruments – occasionally encouraging the audience to participate.

The standing ovation at the end of the show was all the evidence that you will need to know how we were taken by Malcom and Josh on that immense journey from the northeast of England to central Africa. And how much we invested in that small brown bird, willing him to make it to his warm migratory home and then back to the cold temperatures of England.

I love a story walk. I have been on some great ones, and I have been on some for which the final story and dismissal have come as blessed relief. That second outcome was always going to be a remote possibility on the Friday night Bat Walk, given that Lisa Schneidau was the teller, sharing bat tales as we

walked with the sunset and saw the stars unfold in an almost clear sky above us. 

In my youth, I toured with a theatre company that also led nature workshops and walks. This Bat Walk took me back to my twenties as we took turns with the supplied bat detectors to listen to the echo-locations as the animals wheeled above us. In addition to Lisa’s captivating stories, we had expert input on the native species of bat, and their lives and habitats which, in combination with the fleeting sightings of the fast-moving flittermice overhead, grounded Lisa’s stories in our, the walkers’, time and space.

The festival concluded, on the Sunday afternoon, with a performance of Greek Myths from the

combined forces of Daniel Morden and Hugh Lupton, both stalwarts of the storytelling festival circuit.

The familiarity of most of the narratives didn’t reduce the freshness of the tellings and the joy that I could take in hearing known tales brought to life by such skilled tellers, both at the top of their game.

Given the quality of the professional sets for which I was an audience member (and they were first rate), it is interesting that the standout storytelling moment for me was watching a young teller, Aaron Oliver, give a masterclass in how to engage children as he told 'The Magic Porridge Pot' with a small multi-generational audience. The way that he embodied a dialogic approach to storytelling was a useful reminder for me that storytelling at its best will always be an act of engagement and exchange. I hope that I get to experience many more of such special storied moments.

And finally…

The East Anglian Storytelling Festival is the smallest of the festivals that I have attended over the years,

but the adjective small should not be seen as pejorative. The smallness of the festival meant that there was an intimacy to the event, with audience and tellers sharing spaces, eating, drinking and chatting.

I have written in the past about the desirability of ‘fellowship’ between storytellers, and credit is owed to the organisers of the EASF for managing to create an environment where fellowship was evident in every corner of the site.

My hope is that the East Anglian Storytelling Festival continues to provide a special and intimate space in which stories can be shared and friendships renewed (and, indeed, formed).