Setting sail for Cape Clear Storytelling Festival

The annual Cape Clear International Storytelling Festival will celebrate the live art from Sept 6-8. The festival, established by writer, Chuck Kruger, in 1994, attracts storytellers from all over the world.

Festival co-director, Gerry Clancy, says that Cape Clear “has always been known as the storytelling island.”

Clancy runs it with Daphne Babington. He says last year “was probably our biggest festival ever. About 500 people attended. (The population of Cape Clear is 120.) For the first time ever, we had to turn away people. The difficulty about Cape Clear is that the venues are quite small. So, in many ways, we have the opposite problem of many festivals. We don’t want it to grow too big. We want to keep the quality of the festival.”

There will be six venues, including the island’s hostel and its new Irish college. Despite our preoccupation with social media, Clancy says ‘old-fashioned’ storytelling is growing. The Sneem International Festival of Folklore and Storytelling was set up last year.

“Every year, people clamour to be invited to perform at Cape Clear. It’s one of the reasons why, this year, we’re starting an emerging storytellers’ concert. We’ve invited five storytellers, who have been seen by our committee members performing around the country.” The international storytellers are Tim Tingle, from the US, Paola Balbi, from Italy, Batt Burns, who divides his time between Ireland the US, and Ursula Golden-Gill, from the UK. Ger Woulfe will perform the music.

Clancy says the featured storytellers “are on the circuit all the time. They are artistes who live by their art form. Tim Tingle has been one of the top storytellers in the US for the last 30 or 40 years. He’s particularly interesting, because he’s a Choctaw Indian. He uses a lot of Native American stories from his own background.”

The others will relate personal, mythological, humorous and heart-rending tales. Balbi tells Italian folktales, including stories from the Decameron, a 14th century Italian epic of 100 tales.

“The Italians have quite a strong background in storytelling. There’s a book called Italian Folk Tales, by Italo Calvino, who collected tales over the years. The book runs to over 600 pages. Paola Balbi relates some of these tales, which are quite gripping.”

Holden-Gill won the ‘best newcomer award’ at the ‘At The Edge Festival’ in the UK. “We see ourselves as the Irish equivalent of that festival,” Clancy says. Some motifs are universal. “I have a favourite, which is a Korean story. There are about 30 versions of the story all over the world. They’re variants on the original. It’s a bit like Chinese whispers. The story changes as it’s retold, but there’s still an essence there.”

Grant-aided by Fáilte Ireland, the Arts Council, Cork County Council and Foras na Gaeilge, the festival draws 20% of its audience from abroad, mostly the UK.

* www.capeclearstorytelling.com.