A talk by researcher and folklorist Marina Warner, followed by a live performance by Kurdish singer Nawroz Oramari accompanied by Mikey Kirkpatrick and a performance of Deptfordia by John Bently.
Doors: 7pm
Tickets: £7 - £15
This event is part of the Raft Festival programme (see the main festival page on our website for full listings).
One-off tickets are available for every Raft event on a sliding scale basis. We encourage you to consider purchasing a ‘festival pass’ bundle ticket which will allow you, at a reduced rate, to access a given number of events across the full programme (either 5 events, 10 events, or all 30 events). See the link below for more details about these options!
7pm: Seeking Refuge - On Sanctuary, Song and The City
Where do we seek shelter when our concept of home, land and belonging fall apart? In these times of turmoil and upheaval, Marina Warner joins Chiara Ambrosio on her Raft, to set off on a journey through storytelling, song, and the powerful, transformative, and redemptive power of the imagination as a tool with which to build solid refuges and plant defiant gardens.
“I liked reading first and then writing; and inside stories was the place I wanted to be, especially stories that went beyond any experience I could live myself at first hand. The very first stories I heard were saints’ lives: the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries of the Virgin Mary, the terrible gory violence of the martyrs’ ends. I learned from my Catholic childhood how to visualise when praying and how to examine my conscience: both excellent disciplines if you want to write.
Then I discovered myths, wonder tales and fairy lore: ordinary life went on but I was diving to the bottom of the sea with weights on my feet to pick the flower of immortal life and then losing the magic elixir to a passing snake – for ever; […] I could go on, but these are the kinds of stories that kept me reading under the covers with a torch, stories that every culture created long before print or even, perhaps, writing itself.
When I first encountered myths and fairy tales, the wonder I felt was pure wonder. But as I have grown older, wonder has taken on its double aspect, and become questioning too. In all my writing, fiction and other, I wonder what the work of the imagination means, and what it does and can do. Using a historical perspective, I try to explore the way imagination leads understanding, how fantasy shapes goals and values for individuals as well as societies. I look for mythic material now in other places besides the covers of fairy books: my work explores the interactions of imagination and reality in art and literature and the effects they have both on individuals and societies: how ideas about the middle east, for example, are imbued with fantasies from Salome’s dance to Aladdin pantomimes. The literature of the imagination isn’t separate from ethical and political issues and facts; it develops in active dialogue with them, illuminates experience in history and now, and I believe its effects are overlooked and misunderstood, with sometimes dangerous consequences.
[…] Stories come from the past but speak to the present (if you taste the dragon’s blood and can hear what they say). I need to write stories as well as deconstruct and analyse them because I don’t want to damage the mysterious flight of imagination at the core of storytelling, the part that escapes what is called rational understanding.
I hope, I believe that literature can be ‘strong enough to help’, to borrow Seamus Heaney’s wonderful comment about poetry.”
-Marina Warner
Marina Warner is a distinguished author and researcher, as well as the founder of Stories in Transit, that organises storytelling workshops in the UK and in Palermo, bringing young migrant students together with artists, writers and musicians.
8pm: Nawroz Oramari in concert `
Nawroz Oramari is a renowned Kurdish singer. As a teenager in Iraq in the 1970s, Nawroz Oramari was told he’d be executed if he was caught singing in his native tongue, eventually having to cross many borders in his quest to sing freely. He is a member of The Citizens of the World Choir.