[Pictured above: George Ewart Evans (1909–88) was a pioneering oral historian. He published a series of books examining the disappearing customs and way of life of rural Suffolk, the best know of these is Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay. He was also an accomplished story writer and wrote short-stories, novels and poems. George Ewart Evans was born and raised in the mining community of Abercynon, a stone’s throw from the University of Glamorgan where the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling is based.]
George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling Annual Lecture and Symposium 2008 - Storytelling and Authenticity
Event Date March 18, 2008 10 a.m. – March 19, 2008
Location – Atrium
The George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling annual lecture and symposium takes place on Tuesday 18th and Wednesday 19th March. This year we are holding the event in our new ATRiuM building in the centre of Cardiff.
Final details are still to be confirmed but so far we are pleased to be able to announce the following sessions
George Ewart Evans Lecture and Reception Tuesday 18th March 2008
Professor Richard Bauman will present his keynote lecture on Tuesday evening, this will be followed by a reception and dinner in the newly opened Atrium building of the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Glamorgan.
The dinner will be followed by story and music performance by Guto Dafis.
Professor Richard Bauman The Remediation of Storytelling: Narrative Performance on Early Commercial Sound Recording
Professor Richard Bauman, Distinguished Professor and Chair in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, has published widely on the ethnographic study of language and performance.
He has served as president of the Semiotic Society of America, the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, and the Society of Fellows of the American Folklore Society. Among many other professional activities, he has been chair of the Folklife Advisory Council of the Smithsonian Institution, editor of the Journal of American Folklore, and a member of more than 15 editorial boards.
He has also been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Folklore Fellow of the Finnish Academy of Sciences, and twice holder of National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships.
Professor Bauman’s keynote lecture will focus on narrative and development of sound recording. The years between 1895 and 1920 represented a formative period in the commercial development of sound recording in the U.S. as nascent recording companies attempted to create a consumer market for phonograph records and the machines on which to play them.
As recording companies sought to discover what might attract consumers to purchase records, they drew heavily upon traditional performance forms, such as storytelling, oratory, and religious sermons, and upon popular entertainments, such as minstrel shows, early vaudeville, medicine shows, tent shows, and Chautauqua, all of which had proven themselves attractive to popular audiences.
The adaptation of these traditional and popular performance forms to phonograph records involves the process of remediation, specifically, the rendering of embodied, face-to-face performance forms through the mediation of another communicative technology, sound recording.
In this paper, I explore what happens when we render oral storytelling, formerly experienced live, in situations of copresence, when the immediacy of copresence is transformed into a mediated experience.
Chair: Professor Mike Wilson
Symposium Tuesday 18th and Wednesday 19th March 2008
This two day symposium will examine issues raised in the keynote lecture and the implications for storytelling and authenticity. The symposium is structured around a series of keynote ‘provocations’, with maximum time allocated for debate and discussion on the issues raised.
Tuesday 18th March 2008
Tale-Enders: Gathering the Narrative Heritage of Welsh Cricket Launch
We are proud to be able to launch this project which brings together the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling and Glamorgan Cricket to explore the use of storytelling and technology to populate the new Museum of Welsh Cricket at Sophia Gardens as part of the current £9.6 million redevelopment in advance of hosting an Ashes Tests in 2009.
The launch will be followed by a free buffet lunch.
Susie Pratt and Lisa Heledd Digital Storytelling
Susie Pratt (Research Fellow, George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling) and Lisa Heledd (Capture Wales, BBC Wales and Postgraduate Researcher in Digital Storytelling, George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling) will run a digital storytelling workshop.
This session will explore the latest developments in digital storytelling and present some of the current research being carried out by members of the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling team.
Joseph Sobol The Razor’s Edge: The American Storytelling Movement in 2008
Joseph Sobol (Associate Professor, East Tennessee State University), author of The House Between Earth and Sky: Harvesting New American Folktales and The Storytellers' Journey: An American Revival, will present a lecture and workshop exploring issues raised in the American Storytelling movement and the resonances they might have for people working in Wales and the UK.
The American Storytelling movement has matured in certain unmistakable ways—and not in others.
This mixed development has placed major stresses on the organizational base and on those working in the field.
This talk will identify some of the stresses—organizational, artistic, and economic--and suggest some avenues of potential evolution and relief.
Wednesday 19th March 2008
Dick Leith “Authenticity” and “Ownership”: How to Shut People Up
Academic and storyteller Dick Leith will explore his own recollections of the 1950s and 60s folk revival in Britain and how issues raised during that period are resurfacing today.
He will examine notions of the authentic voice and questions regarding how this concept has been used both to silence and to empower. Chair: Susie Pratt (Research Fellow, George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling)
Professor Hande Birkalan Gedik Uses of Authenticity: Responsibility, Re-presentation and Re-contextualization of Folklore Performances
Professor Hande Birkalan Gedik (Associate Professor, Yeditepe University, Istanbul) will aim to bring light to the concepts of “authenticity” and “authority” in folklore performances in selective examples from Turkey.
She will be discussing these concepts primarily as a “native” woman and as a folklorist with an educational up-bringing in the American folkloristics. Chair: Joseph Sobol (Associate Professor, East Tennessee State University)
Neil Lanham 'Who is the truly educated man: The one who can grown onions or the man who can spell them?' - (George Ewart-Evans P.17 'The Horse in the Furrow 1960). A view from the onion grower's perspective
Neil Lanham was born in 1938 into a rudimentary small farm way of life. He observed early in his life that culture came from the spoken word of the indigenous vernacular people around him.
He has recorded both mentally and physically oral idioms ever since. This paper will investigate concepts of authenticity and indigenous voice. Chair: Hamish Fyfe (Co-Director, George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling and Professor of Arts in the Community)
Venue: Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries, ATRiuM, University of Glamorgan, Adam Street, Cardiff Cost:
Lecture is FREE but booking is essential. Dinner and story and music performance: £30/€40 Symposium: £60 /€80 organisation, £40/€55 individual waged, £25/€35 individual unwaged
To book your place at this event call 01443 3668631 or email storytelling@glam.ac.uk
For additional info please contact Dr. Mark Leslie Woods at mwoods[at]glam.ac.uk
Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries
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