Storyteaching
Symposium

Bilingual Storytelling

There are many forms that storytelling can take, and for many years the Weber State Storytelling Symposium has provided a platform to foster many of them – especially storytelling forms that have to do with live performance storytelling.

Live performance storytelling, and the historic surge in International storytelling, has highlighted storytelling's community building power, especially across traditional language barriers. Bi-lingual storytelling offers a bridge to understanding, a cross-cultural opportunity to share in the human experience, and in some measure to embrace "likeness" instead of "difference".

In this symposium we will work together to increase your capacity to tell a good story, to be more aware of bi-lingual storytelling issues, and to better relate to a bi-lingual community by crafting and performing a bi-lingual story onstage. For the purposes of this symposium we will designate that one of the languages used will be English. Also, if your story is an adaptation, or retold story, it must be public domain and free of copyright.

The final product of our work will be a live public performance of the bi-lingual stories you have crafted, or retold, using a bi-lingual storytelling form of your choosing. Stories will be 3-5 minutes long, learned and told orally without notes (ie, not read). Please invite your family and friends to be a part of your audience.