Story-telling Space for Dark Nights

Michael Hedges October 9, 2009 Follow on Twitter

Great story-telling is and always will be media’s most important trait. While headlines just pass through, stories and their tellers endure. Like the languages that transmit them, good story-telling will always have that special warm spot.

“Getting cold and dark, the season for ghost stories is approaching rapidly,” writes Thorgerdur Sigurdardottir from Iceland. Nothing is better as the nights grow darker and colder than finding that warm spot on the radio and listening to a good ghost story. “We are using contemporary ghost stories from Iceland and Greenland,” she says.

Ms Sigurdardottir is part of a team producing for radio listeners a program of Icelandic and Greenlandic ghost stories. The program – “Ghost Stories, Present Tense” (roughly translated) - received a special grant for multilingual productions from Prix Europa and will be featured at the Radio Day of European Cultures, October 18th, in Berlin. This years Radio Day theme is “Languages Through Microphones.”

“Me and Elísabet Indra Ragnarsdóttir are from Iceland and Henriette Rasmussen is from Greenland and we are making this program together,” she explains. “We all met when we were doing a course together (RANA), which is a vocational course for radio professionals in Iceland and Greenland.”

RANA is a radio feature production program offering workshops in Iceland, Greenland, Denmark and Sweden. The Icelandic Film School and the University of Greenland are the principle organizers. Funding, in part, comes from a Leonardo di Vinci grant through the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning vocational education program.

“A visit to Greenland was part of that course and we found it interesting how vivid the storytelling tradition is in Greenland,” said Ms Sigurdardottir, “and they especially like to tell each other scary stories. That tradition is quite vivid in Iceland as well, many people claim to have met ghosts so we wanted to talk to them and get them to tell us the stories.”

“We didn't really know what the outcome would be but we are trying to find out in the process what those stories mean in our societies and what they have in common. So these two nations who live quite close to each other but are in many ways different meet in this story-telling space.”

“On the Radio Day of the European Cultures, all over Europe scrolling the radio tuner you will be able to hear dozens of different languages,” said EU Commissioner for Multilingualism Leonard Orban. “Even if you can understand just a couple of them, you will end up with the feeling of being familiar also with the ones that are foreign to you. You do not need to understand all words of a hit to appreciate it. You may just like the rhythm. In the same way, you can enjoy a language just listening to it and learn by heart some words. Some languages will sound musical to you, of some others you may appreciate the strange sounds and feel like knowing more. It is exactly in this way that you learned your own language. Languages are the soundtrack of our life.”

“Radio knows no borders, is fast and direct, it reaches every home and office, every individual. More than television, the radio can always be with you.”  Commissioner Orban’s office is the principle patron of the Radio Day of European Cultures. The event is now in its fourth year as part of Prix Europa.

Back in the studios, as of Thursday afternoon (October 8), the team from Iceland and Greenland are piecing together the program. “Me and Elísabet Indra are editing and assembling the program,” said Ms Sigurdardottir. “Henriette sends us her interviews from Greenland with translations. The program will be bilingual with some interpretations and we are trying to use this as creatively as we can.”

In addition to the Icelandic and Greenlandic team, six others received special grants from Prix Europa for “bi- or multilingual radio programmes connecting audiences who do not usually listen or talk to each other,” according to Prix Europa. They include such tantalizing subjects as “Universal Kisses” from Austrian community station Radio Agora, “When mum and dad are from different countries” from Bulgarian National Radio and Polish Radio Zachod, “500 kilometers along the border of the Thorn Valley” from Swedish public radio Sisuradio and “Language Tape Disco” from Irish public radio RTE. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has organized an exchange of all Prix Europa Radio Day submissions for public broadcasters.

The Icelandic National Broadcasting Service - Ríkisútvarpio (RUV) – operates two radio channels serving the whole of Iceland. Promoting Icelandic language, history and culture is its public service mandate. Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation - Kalaallit Nunaata Radio (KNR) – broadcasts throughout the country in Greenlandic and Danish. Both will broadcast “Ghost Stories” October 18th.

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