On Storytelling

We all live in one kind of ecosystem or another, and as we spend time in them we can start to understand their stories.  In the process of gathering the stories that run through the piece, we simply asked people to pay attention to the world around them, to notice how completely they were embedded in nature, and to tell us about this experience.  At the centre of Above Me The Wide Blue Sky is an act of storytelling that repeats this process: the ancient art of bearing witness to the world and bringing it to life through words.  The stories we tell here concern love, home, loss and belonging.  They report back from a rapidly changing world.  As technology slips deeper into our daily lives, there are many distractions to turn us away from nature.  Storytelling asks us to turn back towards it, towards something deeper, more communal, more complex.  It asks us to step out of time, to sit together around a fire, sparks spiralling into the dark, starlit sky.  To listen to the sounds deep in the undergrowth, to feel the textures of things with our animal skin.  To taste the weather, to hear, to look, to really see; as someone starts to speak, to weave a story, to remember...