By Ruba Hattar
"This year, due to the pandemic, we were not able to be together, to meet face to face; audience and storytellers, as we have been used to every year since 2008. Yet we are determined to raise the sound of stories, even if the method differs, let us bring you this year's festival of stories through screens stressing that the voice of the storyteller can rise above the silence of the pandemic." Al-Balad Theater's 13th edition of the annual Hakaya Storytelling Festival launched last night from Amman, Jordan with a show of women singing traditional wedding songs from the Levant and Europe entitled the sounds of weddings.
Translation: The Sound of Weddings Performance- "We are a group of women from different countries and backgrounds residing in Jordan, proud to meet and sing the heritage of our mothers and grandmothers and bring it to life to preserve the history and move towards the future."
"At the beginning of the ban and quarantine, storytellers began to leak through social media in order to weave the threads of their communication with the audience, and we discovered that, despite the difficulty of narration without an interactive live audience, the virtual space opened the door to reach new audiences that were previously far away and are now at the same distance with the local closer audiences," the organizers stated.
Thus the Hakaya Festival 2020 is devoted to exploring and experimenting with the different ways, in which female storytellers can use this new medium (the digital visual-audiovisual medium) in a way that serves their art and does not kill it. It brings you nine experiences in multimedia storytelling from Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Sweden and France.
This year the festival also launched for the first time the digital “story challenge,” in an effort to involve all people in making stories by completing stories after they have listened to the first minute or two of from one of the storytellers who participated in the previous Hakaya festivals.
The Hakaya Festival team Aya al-Nabulsi, Raed Asfour, Sally Shalabi, Hamza Al-Aqrabawi, Hassan al-Jaritli, Sirene Hulileh, Yamen Omar, Hayam Mahmoud, Muhammad Abu Duha, Rafiq Nasir Al-Din, Ribal Jaafari, Moaz Al-Saeed, Dalal Metwally, Muhammad Omaireh . In partnership with: Fann Wa Chai - Amman, Kown - Madaba, Garage - Irbid, Khalil Sakakini Center - Ramallah, AlWarsha Band – Cairo.
