Bhubaneswar: City-based Bakul Foundation is organising the Bakul Festival of Storytelling this weekend (Saturday and Sunday) here at the Bakul Library in Satyanagar to make children sing, dance and enjoy listening to the best storytellers of the city.
Since most of the summer camps organised by schools and different organisations are already over, and children still have a few weeks of summer vacation, Bakul decided to organise the event from 4pm to 8 pm on both days. More than 20 of the best storytellers from the City including professional storytellers, teachers, students, retired persons, grandmothers and homemakers will tell their favourite stories in English, Hindi and Odia, said the organisers.
Bakul Foundation, which had conceptualised and curated BhuFeSto in 2018 and organized it recently in 2023 with BDA as part of the Dot Fest, has played a pioneering role in bringing back the popularity of storytelling.
Sujit Mahapatra, the founder of the Foundation, said, “When we first curated BhuFeSto, we were struggling to find Odia storytellers to match the best international and national storytellers we had invited to the festival. But now, we have enough storytellers (more than 20) to have a Storytelling Festival only with local storytellers.”
Bakul has been organising regular storytelling sessions at the Bakul Library since its inception in 2007. Moreover, during the very popular online storytelling festivals during Covid, Storytime @ 9 and Rabibaar Gapabaar, children watched the storytelling sessions organised by Bakul often with their parents and entire families.
During the lockdown, Bakul had also invited the children, who were listening to the storytelling to tell stories and featured them in the online sessions as part of a series called “Tiny Tellers, Mighty Tales.