Traditional stories from Africa, Sweden, UK, etc in Delhi fest

In an effort to revive the fading culture of story telling in India and to generate awareness on the traditional methods of storytelling in different parts of the world, a three-day International Storytellers festival will be held here from tomorrow.
The second edition of Kathakar-International Storytellers festival organised by The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) and Nivesh India will be held in Amphitheatre at IGNCA lawns.
"We are organising the programme to promote the fading story telling culture of our country. Earlier it was a daily affair at homes. Now the scenario has changed in our society. We have performers from the foreign countries also. This is the second edition of the festival which started last year, Programme Director Mangalam Swaminathan said.

"The programme mainly targets the children who don't even know what storytelling is. We are trying to revive the storytelling cultutre. Artists from Manipur, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu will participate in the event," she told PTI.
"Earlier, the story teller would sit under a tree surrounded by adults and children and entertain them with tales. We are setting up the same concept for programme at the Amphitheatre here under a Peepal tree. Though novel concepts of storytelling have been introduced in contemporary times, the traditional methods are still alive, she added.
The programme will have two sessions with special sessions for students in the morning and an evening session for the public.

The artists from Tamil Nadu will perform the "Villupattu". It is an ancient tradition in which stories are narrated using a unique musical instrument, bow (villu) placed on a mud pot. The lead singer beats the pot while singing and co-singers play active listeners uttering appropriate oral responses to the song in between.