“I will tell you a truth – I don’t tell these stories to you in English. I will tell them in Fingilsh”
That’s the way how I often start my storytelling performances. For me it’s being honest of my broken English, giving myself a permission to make mistakes and same time giving the audience a permission to smile and laugh with me to my language.
Mobile Dreams UK – 3Troubadours
Three weeks of touring and performing in UK with 3Troubadours and my dear collagues Tom Van Outryve (BE) and Torgrim Mellum Stene (No). In our performance “Mobile Dreams” we mixed the languages, searched the ways to use our own native tongues (Finnish, Dutch and Norwegian) with English (to English speaking audiences).
Language carries so much – it carries my identity
When I speak my native tongue, I expose something about my self. And at the same time I tell something about my home country. Using these different languages together in one show, mixing them together in an understandable plot to the audience. This mix can make a language as a window to different emotions, feelings, attitudes, world views and gives a feeling of musicality of a speech. Our languages are different, they can sound weird and are not easy to understand. Still in a same performance they tell a story about diversity and the same time about culturally rich world we are living in, they tell a story that we are all human.
In UK we performed in more than ten venues – gave few workshops and had countless of conversations with storytellers, artist and audience members about topics of storytelling, multilingual aspects and about situation in UK, in Europe and in the World. And we all understood how we need these international collaborations – to learn and to be inspired by the others and to find ways to take storytelling and our own art to new dimensions. Working together we understand who we are – within small stories and fragments of our native tongues we understand our differences and in the end we understand how similar we are.
Thank to you all who we met on our journey! Thanks all of you who supported us, helped us to make the tour happen! And a big thanks for their support to Nordic Culture Point, City of Helsinki Cultural Office and Norwegian Arts Abroad/STIKK!
And thanks for the Tea!
Markus Luukkonen 