The plan had been to make this year’s Scottish International Storytelling Festival a wee bit smaller. The event in 2022, which was Scotland’s Year of Stories, had been so big, with its highest ever number of dates, the organisers felt no need to match it.
But then the applications started coming in. For the 15 slots in the commissioned programme, more than 80 storytellers stepped forward, nearly twice as many as last year. Nor was there a shortage of ideas for the rest of the programme.
“It would have been a shame to cut out 30% or 40% of these great ideas,” says Daniel Abercrombie, associate director of a festival that extends beyond its Edinburgh base to cover the whole of Scotland. “It’s a collaborative festival and as soon as you open the programme to a network of people there is a huge amount out there.” [READ MORE]