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From south India to east Yorkshire, Sita Brand has made a profession of keeping our oral traditions alive. Graham Snowdon went along to hear her
Sita Brand is recounting the tale of how storytelling came to be in her blood, and as one might expect of a professional storyteller, she is doing a pretty good job of it.
"I've always loved stories and storytelling ever since I was a little girl," she recalls. "My mother read to me and my sisters a lot, and I remember I always wanted to be the one who read the story, to the point where my mother said to me, 'Isn't it time you just wrote your own.' I grew up in Bombay, and in India, everything is stories. There's always some cultural festival taking place and there's always a story behind it. There's always a story being told to you."
It's a dismally wet and chilly evening at the Limetree arts and music festival in North Yorkshire, where I first find Brand huddled in a tent behind a stall in the health and healing field. She has been booked to tell rounds of stories – children's fairy tales during the afternoons and some darker, more ghostly recountings after dusk but has suffered some unexpected nocturnal goings-on herself, her tent having filled up with rainwater the previous night, forcing her to abandon plans to stay for the rest of the weekend. Yet in keeping with the festival mood, she seems stoical. "It's just the way with these things," she says, grinning as we squelch through a custard-like mud swamp by the gate.
With a couple of hours to kill before her evening performance of ghost stories, she leads me over to the infinitely more convivial surroundings of the Hungry Elephant cafe tent where we order mugs of ginger and lemon tea and decamp to a welcoming pile of scatter cushions.
Brand has lived and worked in several parts of England but most recently in Settle, the Dales town beloved of walkers and railway enthusiasts but not hitherto known for its storytelling scene. In the four years since moving there, however, she has worked energetically to change that perception, establishing her own business, Settle Stories, as well as founding the annual Settle Storytelling Festival, the second of which will be held in October.
Bombay to Ribblesdale might seem an unlikely path to tread but for Brand – with an English mother, a south Indian father and an accent somewhere in-between – it is the fulfilment of a dream. Her introduction to Settle came about 10 years ago on a trip to look up old family friends, "who'd visited us in India when I was knee-high to a bottle of milk. I just fell in love with the place; I thought, this is where I want to live", she says.
Not that her yearning came entirely without precedent. "The most exciting thing," she says, sounding genuinely excited, "is that I recently discovered that my mother's side of the family came from east Yorkshire. So deep down inside I was always a Yorkshirewoman!" She laughs at the thought.
Having worked on and off as a storyteller for several years, Brand conceived the idea for the Settle storytelling festival as a way of establishing herself professionally in the area while also doing something that would genuinely add to the town's mix. "Settle's a small place, and when I moved there, I looked around the town centre, with shops closing down in the recession. I felt it was a way to combine my passion and bring other artists together as well as to do something useful for the community. Which it did."
She first arrived in the UK to study at Exeter University, and after graduating soon found work with Common Lore, a company of storytellers and musicians. After touring with them for several years, mostly around schools, libraries, festivals and theatres, she branched out and worked variously as an actor, writer, director and producer. "I meandered a bit really," she admits. "But in my heart I've always loved stories and storytelling."
Part of that meandering took her back to India and to south-east Asia, touring with a show based partly on her own upbringing in India, and which she staged successfully again in Settle soon after relocating there, further encouraging her to set up the storytelling enterprise.
To the surprise of many local people though, the Settle festival's first incarnation was pitched mainly at an adult audience, a deliberate move on Brand's part to get across her conviction that storytelling should not just be aimed at children. "When you look at books of traditional stories, they're called folk tales," she says, raising her voice above the thudding jazz-rock bass emanating from beyond the tent. "They're literally tales for the folk. That's all of us."
This year she says there will be more events specifically laid on for kids, "but the emphasis is very much on the oral tradition, about stories being passed down from generation to generation. Sometimes I feel we lose that in this technological age". Despite this, a strong tradition of storytelling remains in parts of the British Isles, most notably in Scotland and Ireland, and Brand hopes that over time, it can be reawakened in England too.
She points out that many of the classic stories told today have evolved over many ages and through countless retellings.
"These old folk tales like Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood, or the other versions of them, you can find them the world over," she points out. "That's what I find so satisfying. Take Cinderella, there's a Vietnamese version and various north African versions, a North American version, a European one …" She smiles. "I like that."
Brand says many of her own stories were themselves passed on from family members, that she has then changed and reworked. "The way I tell it today might be different to the way I tell it tomorrow or the day after." Through that process, like a Chinese whisper, she says a story is honed and shaped in different directions.
Yet an interesting commonality among many traditional tales is the theme of fear. Having recently reread many of the classic fairy stories to my young children, I'm often surprised by how populated they are with episodes of cruelty, abandonment and the threat of being eaten. I mention this to Brand and she nods vigorously.
"One of the wonderful things about stories is the way, within that safety net, you can explore those difficult feelings and experiences you wouldn't want to in real life," she says. "And once you've come to terms with them and found a way through them, that allows you to put them to rest."
Even so, as a practising Zen Buddhist who meditates each morning, such difficult themes also presents her with a moral dilemma. "One of the stories I'm going to tell tonight is a version of Bluebeard, a very dark and horrible tale that doesn't end happily," she says.
"There is part of me that wonders whether it's the right thing to do, whether I'm watering the dark seeds in people. It's something very much at the front of my mind. I feel that what we take in during our lives is very powerful and we have this ability as adults to try to do things in a way that doesn't cause harm. I haven't got a complete answer to it, but it's something I'm questioning."
By now it is time for Brand to prepare for her evening performance so we venture back out into the dusky quagmire of Limetree farm, where musicians stationed in several quarters are doing their best to reward pockets of bedraggled festivalgoers.
At the appointed time, in the pitch dark, I show up at the storytelling yurt, shuffle in and find a quiet spot at the back. An even mix of around 20 adults and kids squeeze into the space, which is dimly lit by a wood-burning stove. With Brand having admitted to me that one child burst into tears during the previous night's performance (leading her to promise him she would not retell the offending tale tonight), I'm interested to see whether she will moderate her stories accordingly.
In the event she begins with the gruesome story of Mr Fox, a serial killer in the Bluebeard mould, followed by a more gentle tale of a boy pestered by fairies during the night. Then comes the story of a man who dreams he is forced to dig his own grave, and finally a Scottish tale of a bereaved young woman invited to dance by the ghost of her former husband. Throughout, I'm struck by how well Brand retains the attention of her young audience despite having to make herself heard above the thumping musical beats coming from outside the yurt.
Afterwards we troop into the darkness. From the conversations outside, it's apparent that many of those in the tent have returned for the second night running, reminding me of something Brand had said earlier about how, at last year's storytelling festival, many people went thinking they'd just go to one event but found themselves attending to several. Why? "That's just about the simple pleasure of listening to a damn good yarn."
Curriculum vitae
Graham Snowdon
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