Fortellerhuset is a group of professional cross-cultural story-tellers working both individually and as a group.

Stories have never needed passports to travel. They carry with them thoughts, values and experience, just as if they were a human being. When we examine them closely we may recognise in a foreign tale a mirror, a reflection of one of our own.

Fortellerhuset puts voice to these rich treasuries of tales, myths and stories which all too often lie locked in print.
We free them from the dusty volumes of the past and give them new life for our times, with tongues of flesh and blood.
We seek to infect modern ears with the love of listening and the joy of language bubbling on our lips.
We seek out laughter and courage to meet the dark stories.
We spread the wondertales as a banquet for hungry youth, starved of fantasy.
We pry into the shadowy corridors of myth, with burning torches of curiosity.

Here are some of the projects which Fortellerhuset has been involved in during the last few years:

Tailor-made to the moment

Taking contact with a school, we hear what kind of classes we will be visiting and get some ideas of things which inspire them, troubles they are facing or subjects they dislike. From this background, together with our own repertoire, and perhaps influenced by the things which are going on around us in society or on the news, we put together a programme. This is what many storytellers like to do most - take the wing of the moment and tell that story that seems right then and there!

Stories without frontiers

Again we are in touch with schools and plan our programme in relation to the cultural background of the kids we are going to meet. After a big session with several classes, we will hold a workshop with one class where they can experiment and play with language and tell their own tales.

The Prince with Big Ears

This is a project on commission from the Hard of Hearing organisation in Norway. The statistics for hearing troubles in young children at kindergarten are alarming, and they asked us to compose a story which could address this. We decided to focus on the pleasure and thrill of the hearing sense, so we discovered a Prince who has intensely good hearing. We have made a story which goes into the ears of the Prince himself, and as he gets a cannon for his birthday we follow him through the drama of hearing loss and out the other side.

The Storytelling Festival

For the last three years Fortellerhuset has run a festival in Oslo. We have invited the best storytellers from Scandinavia to perform (this is possible as the Scandinavian languages are quite similar), and a number of English and South African storytellers. Our aim is to provide storytelling of a high artistic quality in order that our audience is inspired to listen to storytelling and eventually to try themselves. We have also focussed on the complementary function of music with storytelling and have hosted some excellent performances with story and music working together.

In addition we have many other performances and courses of various kinds. We perform for adults at festivals and business events as required. So that's a little background on our organisation which has received funding from all the national arts organisations since we began in 2002.

Performances and courses are also available in English.

'Past and present are related, advice is passed along,
Good words to enlighten the world, instruction infused in amusement'

Vibeke Børdahl discovered this quotation in the storytellers' house of Yangzhou, one of the traditional strongholds of Chinese storytelling (www.shuoshu.org )