Researching New Repertoires (2023-2025)

Contemporary storytellers are highly-skilled professional performing artists, committed to establishing engaging, diverse, and accessible presences for traditionally-inspired narrative arts across multimedia platforms. They can spend a lifetime building a repertoire of stories that speak to and stir our imaginations, helping us reimagine connections between past, present, and future in new, empowering ways.

But what happens when a community of storytellers needs to explore new stories? In the past, England’s storytellers often borrowed (or appropriated) tales from other places and cultures. Now, a rising generation of storytelling artists are embracing different ethical values, seeking to create work that doesn’t perpetuate exploitative or colonialist practices. This project set out to support England’s professional storytellers in this enterprise, creating a space for a group of artists to experiment with stories from local narrative traditions, and identifying how artists and researchers can work together to create more ethical, sustainable futures for England’s storied imagining.

Over two days in September 2023, a group of 10 professional storytelling artists came together in Liverpool to discuss, explore, and ask questions, as well as experimenting with new sources and story-repertoires.

An academic article documenting this process, and its outcomes, is on the way soon. I’ve also given talks and workshops based on insights emerging from this research for Liverpool Hope University (2024), The Open University’s Creative Interactions Research Group (2024), The Society For Storytelling (2024), and Space for Storytelling (2025).

The project was funded by The British Academy / Leverhulme Small Grants Scheme.