Phil Okwedy is currently on tour with the production company Adverse Camber with his new show The Gods Are All Here. I say 'new' but this show is a lock-down baby that was a couple of years in creation. I worked with Phil on the show and this is the story about how it grew from a glint in his eye to a funded touring production.

This is another fascinating insight into the moment that someone knows that an uncomfortable shift into a creative lifestyle cannot be put off any longer.

A story from Reverb. A father-son collaboration between Michael Harvey, storyteller and author, and bass player Fred Harvey-Love.

This was a commission from the Festival at the Edge, a storytelling festival based in Shropshire in 2010 and includes stories from an international repertoire based around the theme Boys and Men.

This story is from the Middle East and inspired by the telling of Laura Simms.

A story from Reverb. A father-son collaboration between Michael Harvey, storyteller and author, and bass player Fred Harvey-Love.

This was a commission from the Festival at the Edge, a storytelling festival based in Shropshire in 2010 and includes stories from an international repertoire based around the theme Boys and Men.

This story was adapted from a story in Michael Meade's collection 'Men and the Water of Life'

The Introduction to Reverb. A father-son collaboration between Michael Harvey, storyteller and author, and bass player Fred Harvey-Love.

This was a commission from the Festival at the Edge, a storytelling festival based in Shropshire in 2010 and includes stories from an international repertoire based around the theme Boys and Men.

This introductory section features a story adapted from Duncan Williamson's 'The Thorn in the King's Foot'

The seven survivors return to Wales. While they have been away another king has come and seized the throne. The survivors drift into a dreamworld where time stands still. The spell is broken, they return to reality and tell the story.

The Hall of Peace is opened and the Irish and Welsh assemble for a feast. Efnisien starts a fight that turns into an all out battle in which nearly everyone is killed. Bendigeidfran and the survivors return home to Wales.

Bendigeidfran leads his army over the sea to Ireland to save his sister, Branwen. A truce is declared and a huge feasting hall built that even Bendigeidfran, the giant king, can enter.

Efnisien's actions catch up with Branwen. She goes from queen to mistreated servant. She enlists the help of a starling and calls her brother, the giant Bendigeidfran, to her aid.

The giant king Bendigeidfran sees ships coming from Ireland. It's Matholwch, the king of Ireland who has an interesting proposal to unite the two families and countries. A feast on Anglesey is arranged but Efnsien, Bendigeidfran's half-brother, is not invited and he takes a bloody and cruel revenge for this insult. This causes problems between the two kings which are solved by Bendigeidfran (the king of the Island of Britain) giving Matholwch (the king of Ireland) a magical cauldron from the Otherworld, the Cauldron of Rebirth.

Matholwch recognises the cauldron and tells the story of how he first came across it and his encounter with two giants and their terrifying children.

Once the cauldron is given there is peace between the two kings and their countries and Branwen sets sail with her new husband, becomes High Queen of Ireland and has a baby boy, who she calls Gwern, after the alder tree.

The landscape of Wales and the parts of the country where the story takes place and an introduction to the main characters of the story.

Angharad Wynne is a storyteller based in South Wales. She has a particular love for the stories of the Mabinogion and has a clear and deep connection with both the landscape of the stories and the characters in them. She has made a particular study of Rhiannon from the first and third branches.

She is an important figure in the contemporary cultural landscape of Wales and has played a major role in projects and institutions including the Wales Millennium Centre and Beyond the Border International Storytelling Centre and musicians including Catrin Finch and 9 Bach.

She organises a range of myth and walking events including landscape expeditions that  explore the history, archaeology, myths and 'dreaming' of the land. She also runs  retreats and workshops including Return to Centre, In the Footsteps of the Ancestors and Dreaming the Land held at Cae Mabon in the  foothills of Snowdonia in May each year.   
 
Storytelling and running workshops take her far and wide, from Wales,  to Festivals in Portugal and as far afield as India this year. She  combines her deep knowledge of the ancient mythology and spiritual  traditions of Wales with insights drawn from wisdom and healing tales  from indigenous cultures across the world.

In this far ranging conversation we talked about…

• The Mabinogion as a stratified piece of landscape   
• Our shared humanity with the characters of the Mabinogion
• Archetypal nature of the characters and their godlike nature
• Mabinogion characters as types of real people and inspiration as role models
• Otherworldly space co-present with the ‘real’ world
• Annwfn and Nwyfre - Otherworld and cosmic energy. 
• Land

Award-winning, international storyteller and director Michael Harvey is in conversation with Indian-born, UAE resident, multi-disciplinary artist Shereen Saif.

Shereen and Michael have been collaborating over lockdown on a Shereen's new project 'A Woman's Mind' based on the story of Ahalya from the Ramayana. In September they will work together in Dubai to put the final touches to the production and including live Indian music.

A Woman's Mind is sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation

A few minutes of informal conversation between Michael and Tamar about the importance of the Mabinogi and the business of being a storyteller.

• Mutual support network for storytellers
• Self-sufficiency vs community
• The dislocation between social media and what storytelling actually is
• The importance of rootedness and connectedness that storytelling offers

Tamar Williams won the national Young Storyteller of the Year  award in 2013. She has appeared at festivals such as Whitby Folk Week, Beyond  the Border International Storytelling Festival, Lakefest, In The Woods  Festival and the Birmingham Book Festival. 

In this interview Michael and Tamar talked about…

• Language, habit and identity. The strangeness of changing from one language to another
• The Mabinogi as Welsh language heritage told in English
• Bilingualism as a spontaneous response to specific audiences. Allowing the music of language to be heard.
• The apparent randomness of parts of the narrative in the Mabinogi
• Negotiating different linguistic registers whilst telling the Mabinogi in Welsh and English and from epic to informal.
• The character of Rhiannon from the First Branch of the Mabinogi
• The moral complexity of the Fourth Branch
• The character of Manawydan and Guto Dafis’ treatment of him.

We still had a few moments left before Katy had to go and prepare for her performance and I took the opportunity so show her the images of the figure on top of Carn Ingli. I had the photographs with me on my laptop and they provoked some fascinating observations. Recording in a car gives really good sound quality until a delivery lorry parks beside you. Sorry about the revving and beeping!

Here’s what we talked about in the EXTRA session...

• Showing Katy photographs of Carn Ingli and the pregnant giantess on its summit.
• The multivalent nature of imagination and stories in landscape.
• Getting lost and the strange relationship of strangeness and familiarity in landscape.
• The Otherworld - again!

A conversation with Exeter based storyteller Katy Cawkwell who delved into the Mabinogi for her Festival at the Edge Commission in 2003 with her story of Rhiannon. You can order the CD of Rhiannon, as well as other stories on the shop page on her site. We talked in Bristol just before she had to go and prepare for the show Women Who Gave No F**ks with a stellar line-up of women storytellers at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol. The video below is from a storytelling tour Katy did with the production compant Adverse Camber.

Our conversation which ranged far and wide and covered the following…

• The influence of Eric Maddern and Hugh Lupton’s courses at  Tŷ Newydd 
• The illustrations of Margaret Jones
• Understanding Annwfn - the Welsh Otherworld
• W J Gruffydd’s study of Rhiannon
• The challenges of finding the narrative line of Mabinogi stories
• The inspiration of the Welsh landscape, particularly Carn Ingli in Pembrokeshire.

Paula Crutchlow has played a pivotal role in my development as a storyteller over the last ten or so years. We first met her as the dramaturg on the show Hunting the Giant’s Daugher and then asked her back for the show Dreaming the Night Field. Our conversation took place in the garden of the Felin Uchaf Centre on the Llŷn Peninsula in North Wales. Felin Uchaf in an important place for the Dreaming the Night Field team because it was one of the places where the spade work was done for the show. It was from there that we went on site visits; worked on our improvisation and blending our artforms of story, song and music; ate, drank and discussed together and even forged a spear and threw it through a rock!

In this discussion we ranged far and wide and talked about…

Paula in the devising period of Dreaming the Night Field

• How the two shows Hunting the Giant’s Daughter and Dreaming the Night Field are different in approach and style
• The nature of magic in Dreaming the Night Field
• The relationship between teller, audience, place and space
• Paula’s ways of working on the material and with performers
• The importance of making a real spear and using it with intention
• How human made things are wedged into the wo

Luckily we had a few minutes to reflect what we had talked about after the main interview. In just six minutes we talked about…

• The inclusion of non ‘natural’ objects in Dreaming the Night Field
• Uncontrolled and harmful human intrusion into the world
• What we have to learn from Thomas Hardy’s granny
• Stories happen in the present tense
• The intimate connection of landscape and story

Guto Dafis is a storyteller and musician . You can find out more about his music here and his storytelling here.

Guto talks about the reasons why he is a great fan of the 3rd Branch of the Mabinogi. Structure. The relation to the 1st and 2nd branches and the Mabinogi and the challenges of getting that information into a live telling of the story so that the audience understand the backstory without suffering from information overload. 

Guto is fascinated by the character of Manawydan who, after being involved in a long a bloody war, now refuses to indulge in bloodshed. It is  mysterious story  with  the disappearance of people, domestic animals and buildings how and the story tells how  the surviving four people move from subsistence hunting and gathering to the use of domesticated animals and finally farming.

Our conversation ranged far and wide and including…

• Survival
• Family
• Relation to other branches of the Mabinogi 
• How to contextualize the story without information overload

It is through his patience and endurance that the main character of the story, Manawydan, survives the various trials he goes through, even when the others urge him to use violence. Finally he catches a mouse stealing the wheat from his fields and decides to hang it. He is urged several times by various people not to do such an ignoble thing but by sticking to his guns he manages to undo the curse and settle a long standing fued.

A mural of Guto on the wall of a (now demolished) building in Cardiff

A lively discussion with myself and Peter riffing on many things including the following...

• Connecting visual imagination and literacy
• Complexity as richness and abundance
• Clarity that comes after dealing with complexity over a long time
• The Mabinogi and other stories as lessons for living
• Hard won kernel of truth that lies in the stories for us
• Plant Rhys Dwfn (literally 'the children of Rhys the Deep' ) aka the fairies
• New archeological evidence mirrors the stories

Peter Stevenson has been a major catalyst in the revival of creative interest in the Mabinogi over the last few years, particularly with the two Mabinogi based festivals he organised in Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Y Mabinogi in 2015 and Y Bumed Gainc in 2017.  It wasn’t just the artwork, storytelling and music he curated but the people as well. Visual artists, academics, storytellers, storylovers and musicians mixed, mingled and laughed in a great bubbling cauldron of  contemporary creativity.

As you can imagine I was really keen to have a chat with him about what the Mabinogi meant to him and we met in his studio, which he shares with other artists, in a former billiard hall that is, literally, behind a secret door in the centre of Aberystwyth. Some of his work is included below.

In these conversation we talked about…

• the connection between images and memory and images and words
• a formative experiences of communal and shared creativity
• the range of storytelling from individual folk-tales to the Mabinogi
• live drawing with storytelling
• stories in a wider weave of landscape and community
• the relationship of dream, memory and events and the fragility of chronology
• using folktale, myth and other orally derived material to see the world more clearly

Peter is also a hugely experienced and much-published illustrator and author of the book Welsh Folk Tales published by the History Press. In the interview we also mention visual artist Maria Hayes and harpist Harriet Earis.

Don’t forget to have a listen to the ‘extra’ recording where

Naomi turned the tables on me in this extra and started asking me questions! I wasn't expecting this and did my best to talk about...

• Landscape and the Mabinogi
• Deep listening and embodiment
• Inhabiting landscape and slowing down
• Creative Community
• Storytelling as film

Sharon Blackie is a writer and teacher who is on a mission to reconnect us to our mythical past and the landscape around us with academic rigour, openness, imagination and humour.

This  conversation ranges wide and includes an exploration of the Peredur/Perceval story from the Welsh and French Arthurian cannon, a good look at the Cailleach - the wild, wise and scary old woman of Irish mythology, as well as how we can use these stories and our landscapes to reconnect to each other, our creativity and our time on the planet.

Learn more about Sharon's writing, teaching and podcasts here https://sharonblackie.net/

I feel incredibly lucky and priveledged to have worked with producer Naomi Wilds on two Mabinogi inspired shows Hunting the Giant’s Daughter, and Dreaming the Night Field which tour with the production company Adverse Camber, a groundbreaking company that specialises in taking high quality storytelling performances, often with music as a central component, on tour nationwide and internationally. She is also the Artisitc Director of Beyond the Border International Storytelling Festival. I was really looking forward to this conversation and it did not disappoint, as you will hear…

• How the translation and invention of contemporary tellings amplify and compliment the manuscript versions
• The richness of experience that audiences have of listening to different tellings of stories they already know
• The bodily presence of certain story characters in the telling
• Naming, summoning and magic
• The interweaving of recognisable character and landscape worlds with the Otherworld
• The cinematic skills of the storyteller

I really enjoyed my conversation with Fiona. She was one of the first professional UK storytellers and tells with great verve, commitment and humour. She was one of the first people to complete a PhD in storytelling and is a pioneer in the field of education and storytelling and was a founder member of the brilliant and brazen Ogresses storytelling group. She has made her home in Wales and regularly tells stories from the Mabinogi to a variety of audiences in Welsh and English. She also speaks French, Italian and Russian!

She leads creative writing groups and has published three books of  Welsh folktales and is currently working on the fourth, all with the  History Press. 

In this podcast Fiona talks inspiringly about many things including…

• The inspiration of The Owl Service by Alan Garner
• The importance of the courses run at Tŷ newydd by Eric Maddern and Hugh Lupton
• The way the continuity of landscape and place names links very old stories with tellers and audiences today
• Cooking as a metaphor for the art of the storyteller
• The difference between the writer’s and the storyteller’s attitudes to traditional narrative
• The value and joy of working on collaborative projects
• Closing the gap between audience and teller
• Dreaming up projects

In this bonus Cath talks about the effort and graft of making these stories live again. She sees it as challenging and rewarding work and, for her, primarily a process with images. This work takes time and effort and is a re-oralisation putting these tales back in the imagination and hearts of the people, and making them real once more by telling them.

I am really pleased to have had the chance to talk to the Cardiff based storyteller Cath Little and find out more about her practice and how she gets herself into the strange material that is the Mabinogi. Cath runs the Cardiff Storytelling Circle, runs events that celebrate the turning year and is warm and generous storyteller with a great singing voice.

In this interview Cath talks about…

• Her connection to the infrequently told Romances of the Mabinogion, particularly Iarlles y Ffynnon / The Lady of the Fountain and Enid a Geraint.
• The inspiring courses run by Hugh Lupton and Eric Maddern at Ty Newydd in Llanystumdwy in North Wales. 
• The haunting image of the flaming tree that dies and lives again   
•  Animism and the old dieties    
• The importance of Caerleon as part of the landscape and her  personal connection   
• Annwfn, the Welsh Otherworld, as a place of deeper learning and knowing, mystery and beauty, awe and wonder   
• Women in the Mabinogi and the heroic female   
• The Mabinogi and Welsh identity

That’s quite a lot in fifteen minutes so don’t  forget the more informal and shorter bonus interview that follows.

I am delighted to present a conversation I had with the storyteller and social enterprise director Dafydd Davies-Hughes who has the good fortune to live in the incomparably beautiful and myth-soaked landscape of the Llŷn Peninsula where he works as a storyteller and is the director of Menter Y Felin Uchaf. 

I was particularly interested in talking to Dafydd because of his close connection to landscape in the Llŷn Peninsula in North West Wales and his commitment to community building. I first met him making traditional Welsh furniture in an Eisteddfod many years ago and was struck by the way he let the natural beauty and form of the wood speak for itself in furniture that was both functional and beautiful. More recently he has devoted himself to building much bigger structures at Menter Felin Uchaf including the amazing roundhouse which has become a lively and well attended venue for storytelling.

Our conversation was wide ranging and included

• the way narrative knowing hides inside academic practice and the bridge between art and science
• story as the breath of landscape
• the need to digest c

Here are my responses to questions from Jenny White of the Western Mail prior to a tour of Dreaming the Night Field (aka the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi) with the storytelling production company Adverse Camber.

A brief introduction about why I wanted to start asking storyteller's why they were telling stories from the Mabinogi in this day and age and the type of questions I thought I might ask

Trafodaeth gyda'r storïwr a'r cerddor Guto Dafis. Siaradon ni am y ffordd mae Guto wedi trin chwedl Manawydan o Drydedd Gainc y Mabinogi a sut mae'n  defnyddio y Gymraeg a'r Saesneg ochr yn ochr wrth adrodd, wedi ysbrydoli gan ei fagwraeth dwyieithog.

Mae Dafydd wedi bod yn gyfarwydd gyda'r Mabinogi ers yn blentyn. Mae wedi crwydro'r dirwedd a dod i nabod y straeon a'u gweld nhw'n dod yn fyw wrth droedio'r tir a dod i'w nabod nhw 'trwy sodlau eu traed'. 

Mae'n gweld y Mabinogi fel rhan o'n hunaniaeth fel Cymry a'r cymeriadau fel drych i ni'n hunain a'r ffordd rydym yn ymddwyn yn y byd. Wrth ymweld â'r llefydd mae'r stori yn sôn amdanynt mae bron yn amhosib teimlo mai 'yma ddigwyddodd hi'. Wrth adrodd, rhwng y storïwraig/wr a'r dirwedd a phwy bynnag sydd yn clustfeinio.

Wrth dyfu gyda'r Mabinogi ffeindiodd bod cymeriadau gwahanol y straeon yn atseinio gyda'i fywyd ei hunan mewn ffyrdd gwahanol nes cyrraedd y rhyfelwr Zen Manawydan sydd yn dadwneud hud a lledrith wrth beidio â gweithredu. Y  mae Dafydd yn edmygydd o fersiwn Guto Dafis o hanes Manawydan.  Y mae cyfweliad gyda Guto nes ymlaen yn y gyfres.

I gloi mae Dafydd yn dweud mai cwestiynau yw'r Mabinogi. Pwy oeddem ni, pwy ydyn ni a phwy ydyn ni am fod fel Cymry.

Y mae Dafydd yn gyfarwyddwr Menter y Felin Uchaf ym Mhen Llŷn

Cyfweliad ffraeth a threiddgar gyda'r storïwraig Tamar Eluned Williams www.tamarelunedwilliams.com  

Mae hi'n sôn am ei thaith o'r theatr i'r chwedl a dod nôl i Gymru a'r deunydd oedd wedi bod yn rhan ohoni eirioed - y Mabinogi.

Siaradon ni am rym y chwedlau arnon ni fel rhai sydd yn eu hadrodd a'r effaith ar y gynulleiddfa; natur 'carpiog' naratif y Mabinogi fel adlewyrchiad teg a deinamic y byd sydd ohoni; grym cymdeithasol chwedleua fel arf diwylliannol sydd yn gallu gwneud ei hunan yn anweladwy ac wedyn camu ar lwyfan fawr a llawer mwy.

A story from Reverb. A father-son collaboration between Michael Harvey, storyteller and author, and bass player Fred Harvey-Love.

This was a commission from the Festival at the Edge, a storytelling festival based in Shropshire in 2010 and includes stories from an international repertoire based around the theme Boys and Men.

In this concluding story we return to the beginning to find out what happens at the end of Duncan Williamson's story 'The Thorn in the Kings Foot'.