Please note that the Week of Storytelling is not being offered in 2021. Other courses courses are available – please go to the menu for more information.
Bleddfa Week of Storytelling
Our resident tutors, Michael Harvey and Hazel Bradley, guide and facilitate the whole week as well as leading workshops and tutorials and performing. For our twenty-fifth birthday in 2019, we invited participants from previous courses who have made their mark on the current storytelling scene to perform and share something of their storytelling practice. We found that these storytellers had a lot to offer our participants and had more understanding of their experience and needs than more experienced tellers. Since they had all done courses at Bleddfa more than once they were able to tell our participants how to make the course really work for them.
In 2020 we will invite one experienced and recognised storyteller, Clare Murphy and one former Bleddfa student Steve Killick, who is also a professional performance and applied storyteller in his own right, to lead sessions for us and perform during the week.
Resident Tutors
Michael Harvey and Hazel Bradley
Michael has told stories both as a solo performer and with other artists throughout the UK and Europe as well as Australia, the Middle East, the Far East and North and South America. He is a familiar performer in the UK festival and club scene and draws particular inspiration from the Welsh oral heritage and landscape. He combines depth of material with lightness of delivery which is timed and paced to perfection and minted fresh for every audience. Following on the success of Hunting the Giant’s Daughter in collaboration with the production company Adverse Camber he toured Dreaming the Night Field in the UK, Europe and Australia. He has won a Major Creative Wales Award, and took part in the the 3rd Labo at La Maison du Conte in Paris and has been a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee.
Hazel has had a lifelong interest in storytelling. She trained originally as a drama teacher, then for many years worked with people with learning disabilities. She has travelled extensively performing and giving workshops in India, Japan, Australia, Canada, Slovenia,
France and Belgium. After many years of living in South India she trained as a movement and drama therapist and then as a storyteller. She has co-facilitated the Bleddfa Week of Storytelling since 1999. Her particular love is for Japanese folk tales and myths but she draws from an extensive repertoire. She also leads myth enactment workshops where participants delve deeply into the meaning of a particular myth or folktale in a non-verbal way.
Visiting Tutors
Clare Murphy and Steve Killick
Clare Murphy is an Internationally renowned storyteller who has worked with the National Theatre, the RSC and the Globe Theatre. She draws her inspiration from myth, science and true-life stories and was recently Michael Rosen’s guest on Radio 4’s Word of Mouth.
Steve Killick Steve Killick is a Clinical Psychologist and Storyteller. He has a strong interest in storytelling in health and education and has written ‘Telling Tales:Storytelling as Emotional Literacy’ with Taffy Thomas and ‘Feelings are Funny Things-A Storytelling Toolkit’ with Phil Okwedy as well as papers on applied storytelling. He also hosts ‘Kemi’s Storytelling Suppers’ in Cardiff and is a Visiting Fellow at the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling
Both Steve and Clare will offer evening performances which are open to the public and share elements of their practice with the group.
Course content enquiries: Michael Harvey +44 (0)7812 166138 michael@michaelharvey.org
Storytelling at Bleddfa 