Mabinogi Monday #9 with Tamar Williams
Tamar Williams won the national Young Storyteller of the Year award in 2013. In the same year she was awarded the Welsh Prize and the People's Prize by audience vote. She has gone onto work nationally as a performance storyteller, creating spoken word shows for a range of audiences, and appearing at festivals such as Whitby Folk Week, Beyond the Border International Storytelling Festival, Lakefest, In The Woods Festival and the Birmingham Book Festival.
Tamar has worked in collaboration with a number of arts organisations in Wales and the West Midlands to produce family storytelling events, including Sherman Cymru, mac Birmingham and the Birmingham REP. In 2016, she was the resident young storyteller for York St John/York Theatre Royal's Storyknowing festival and created a spoken word response to the conference interweaving traditional and autobiographical storytelling.
She was awarded the first Gwobr Esyllt Harker Award for an emerging Welsh language storyteller by Beyond the Border International Storytelling Festival in 2016. She created a new show based on the Welsh myth "Pwyll a Rhiannon" for the festival in 2018 and received support and mentoring to develop her work over the following two years.
In these interviews Michael and Tamar talked about…
Language, habit and identity. The strangeness of changing from one language to another
The Mabinogi as Welsh language heritage told in English
Bilingualism as a spontaneous response to specific audiences. Allowing the music of language to be heard.
The apparent randomness of parts of the narrative in the Mabinogi
Negotiating different linguistic registers whilst telling the Mabinogi in Welsh and English and from epic to informal.
The character of Rhiannon from the First Branch of the Mabinogi
The moral complexity of the Fourth Branch
The character of Manawydan and Guto Dafis’ treatment of him.
Don’t forget to listen to the short, informal, extra conversation that Tamar and I had about the Mabinogi and storytelling in general…
Mutual support network for storytellers
Self-sufficiency vs community
The dislocation between social media and what storytelling actually is
The importance of rootedness and connectedness that storytelling offers