It is not about reading a story, but telling it. It could be anybody’s story, or from anywhere, but in the telling it becomes real and touches you as a listener and shifts something in your understanding of people and the world around you.

The Storyteller 'lives' the story to make it real for you. Like an anchor person of the news, the storyteller must connect with different parts of the world. But unlike reporters, the Storyteller must also become the characters, and report the action of the story as it is being told.

Storytelling has similarities with Acting and Stand up Comedy, but the difference with Vayu Naidu Company’s signature of storytelling is the reliance on two things: Oral imagination and Total presence. Our Masterclass will unravel how this happens.

But for now let’s look at Storytelling and what its function was in the first place.

A long, long time ago  when people developed language and formed social groups that then grew larger into civilisations, the shape of the society was like that of a pyramid. Diverse people and their functions or professions of hunting, defending, sowing and harvesting, providing and bartering were all independent strands that were held together by a Chieftain. Women had diverse occupations within these professions and storytelling was a chief way of embedding continuity and values.

The professional aspect of Storytelling was taken by men who were effectively commissioned by the chieftain and the keepers of ritual. The stories of birth, rites of passage such as puberty, marriage, children, wars, victory and defeat songs, lament,  death, burial, cremation, and afterlife, were told, sometimes in song, and remembered.

This is the premise of an oral tradition as early societies were nomadic or lived by rivers.

In time societies established themselves through powerful chieftains and his fighting forces, and more than being defensive, societies expanded through trade, and exploration, and conquest.

Today we have different traditions ascribed to the Storytelling from diverse regions around the world.

Vayu Naidu Company is interested in myths, folk and fairy tales from world cultures and presents them to contemporary audiences by making the past significant to the present. The storytelling here is about metaphor. What myths reflect our contemporary concerns? How do folktales enable children to understand between what is good and what is harmful? Why do fairytales tell us something about our wildest dreams and darkest fears?