Just came back from Hastings Storytelling Festival and telling there as part of Tales Unveiled- Dawn Powell, Sharon Carr-Wu and myself.

Little things made the whole go smoothly. The friendly taxi driver who picked us up at the station, showed us the sights on the way to the Tackleway, stopped to show us where a friend had stayed and then came back half an hour later to take us to scope out our first venue whilst pointing out the steps down to the sea front from the cottages, thus depriving him of revenue for the weekend. We were greeted by a flourish of fireworks as the lights were switched on as we arrived. We thought it was for us for having travelled five hours to get there. 🙂

The cottage we were lent was lovely and soon was incorporated into one of our stories. The narrow stairs without banisters were carefully negotiated initially. By the end of the weekend we were running up and down them without thinking.

The venue for our first show, the Italian Way, has a great host, Claudio. He made us very welcome and allowed us to go and look  around the night before. We asked for candles and they appeared. We asked that the music be turned off and it was. And we were fed! So all we had to do was deliver to an appreciative audience.

The venue for the Sat shows, the Stade was different again being a new building, part of the regeneration project of Hastings. Hung with pictures round three sides, we soon changed the space into a storytelling venue with drapes on the fourth wall and musical instruments set out on the floor.

Numbers fluctuated during the day but we enjoyed working together.

How hard it would have been if we had had to fight every step of the way. All the rehearsal in the world wouldn’t have mattered if we had been ambushed on the way. This was one weekend when the ambushers were stymied. Perhaps they had fallen in the bogs of their own making.Or slipped down the cable cars.

Storytelling is alive and well and coming in on the fishing nets at Hastings!

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