A magical hour of storytelling in the company of two adepts of the art, steeped in Hungarian folklore, and delivered from the heart.
📍Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh
📅 18 Oct
💷 From £5
🕖 6:00pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 1 hour
🗣️ Performers: Lily Asch and Csenge Virág Zalka
🎂 12+
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets. Audio Induction Loop
What a wonderful hour spent in the company of two accomplished storytellers, exploring the space between belonging and becoming. Not a cabaret of two storytellers, but rather a deft weaving of elegantly curated true life stories with traditional tales plucked from Hungarian folk lore, this was an hour of narrative alchemy. More than the sum of its independently skilled creators, the effect was quite magical.
Zalka infuses her words with a wry quality which prompts consideration beyond the well polished, and precisely measured surface. Asch enjoys a weighty stillness wrapped in velvet, the spaces between her words as meaningful as the sounds being bridged. The combination could play out as so much oil and water, but the reality couldn’t be more opposite.
Asch is 2nd generation American, homed in Scotland, only more recently steeped in her Hungarian ancestry, whilst Zalka is a native Hungarian who only re-imagined herself as a ‘Hungarian’ storyteller when she left her natal borders. Thus there’s a sense of coming, and going, of consistent becoming, and rediscovering the self.
It’s ultimately in the layering of self-truth, and folk stories of dragons and dreamweavers that they create storytelling magic. It’s so very difficult to do, to show through words, rather than tell. There’s also elements of foreshadowing worthy of a good stage play, as rules of Hungarian folklore are calmly, and deceptively introduced long before they play out in fascinating tales of wizards and hungry worms.
Put simply, this was a fascinating, insightful hour of storytelling, steeped in Hungarian culture, and delivered by two adepts of the storytelling art.
(Featured Photography Credit: Scottish Storytelling Festival)
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