When did you visit Australia and what was it that brought you to
our shores?
I
visited Australia in December 2011 to present a paper in The Written the Oral
and Other Verbal Media International Conference that took place at Victoria
University.
How did you learn about Storytelling Victoria and in what ways
have we assisted you?
As
soon as I knew I was going to Melbourne I researched on the internet and I
found Storytelling Australia (Vic's) website. Then I researched the storytellers listed and
I found Julie Perrin’s and Jackie Kerin’s websites. So I contacted them saying
I was coming and that I would like to meet them and they were amazingly open and
generous. They both hosted me in their houses and I interviewed them for my Phd
research and we talked and walked (I had the opportunity to hike with
Julie around Cape Schanck) and it was one of my pleasant trips thanks to them.
Australian Storytellers are in the process of forming a national
website where the state and territory bodies will all be listed. This will
provide a gateway for tellers around the world to find our scattered
organisations. Do the storytellers in Portugal enjoy an organisation which
connects and supports their practice?
In
Portugal we have small associations or individuals scattered around the
country. But you must know we are a very small country: 56000 square miles and
10 million habitants. So in fact we are quite connected to each other and we
share information and links. Still, a national platform is missing and it would
be useful although I would say, because of our size and number, not urgent.
You're currently working on a Phd about Portuguese Folk Tale,
can you tell us in a nut shell the subject of your interest?
In
fact, my masters dissertation was about Portuguese Folktales and it was called
"Representations of Death in Portuguese Traditional Folktales" and it
is published in Portuguese. My Phd research is on Arts and Communication and it
is about contemporary storytelling. My goal is to help build a theoretical
framework for storytelling analysis under the umbrella of the Performing Arts.
How important to you is the building of relationships with
storytellers who work in other languages and cultural traditions.
Storytellers
are the subject of my research so I could say these relationships are the most
important thing to me at this point. And it is thanks to these relationships
with different ways of doing and thinking, that I can try to understand my
reality in a more interesting way. But in fact, when you start talking to
performers from other countries you soon understand we are all dealing with the
same issues.
Where do you tell your stories and who is your preferred
audience?
Before
I started my Phd, my major public were school children. As in many other
countries, storytelling is still seen as something for kids and as I was living
exclusively from storytelling the most part of my daily work was that. But I
have always preferred adult audience, not because I prefer adults (I work
with adults, all my friends are adults) but because the themes and stories I
like are for an adult audience. Of course some stories, especially in the
traditional repertoire, can reach different ages, but those are not the stories
I like and I am not very good on that.
Now
that I am doing my research I had to stop my daily work and I am only
performing in festivals. I also have had time to record some stories I was working
on and build a show in which I tell those stories playing
accordion and accompanied by a percussionist. These are the stories I will be
telling in the near future, not regularly, for adults.
Do you have a favourite story you like to tell?
In
fact I do not have I favorite story but I do have a favorite theme:
relationships.
Are there any storytelling festivals or other opportunities in
Portugal that Australian storytellers might be interested in?
I
believe so as it is not very difficult in some contexts to work in English in
Portugal. We have the biggest Portuguese festival in Beja called "Palavras
Andarilhas" (Wonderer Words?) http://www.palavrasandarilhas.org;
a new festival in Lisbon organized by an association called
"Contabandistas de Histórias" (stories smugglers: the word
"contabandistas" does not exists, it is a game with the words
"contrabandistas" = smugglers and "contar" = to tell) http://www.contabandistas.com;
a festival in Montemor-o-Novo called "Festa dos Contos" (Tales
Party) http://festadoscontos.blogspot.pt; among
others. You can know some portuguese storytellers in the blog http://narracaooral.blogspot.pt.
Will you visit us again?
I
would love to. Melbourne, thanks to Julie and Jackie, was the kind of place you
imagine yourself living in it.
