Output details

Translating Tales of the Trickster

How can we create interdisciplinary dialogue around the theme of the Trickster, incorporating perspectives from mythology, creative writing, performance, criminology and online cultures?

Origins and Context

Funded by the AHRC, the objective was to create a framework for developing practitioner-led research into transformations of Trickster mythology and narrative form across contemporary practices of writing, performance and lived experience.

Process

The research took place over six months, beginning and ending with interdisciplinary workshops. Soyinka curated a series of Trickster performances (including new works produced through the research) and collaborated with artists to create Trickster visualisations. To share and progressively focus research insights, she presented these resources within workshops and through a prototype, online archive.

Insights

The process of interdisciplinary dialogue around this theme highlighted significant differences between the social-cultural function of Trickster within oral storytelling sub-cultures and mainstream cultures. In oral storytelling circles, Trickster is represented as a complex, poetic and ambiguous character. His social function, beyond the story, is to encourage audiences to explore moral thresholds and to consider values and limits to disruptive action. In mainstream culture, Trickster is most typically represented as a one-dimensional psychopath. The contemporary focus of Trickster as a criminal “passing” for someone else may relate to our dominant networked culture of appearances, in which it is increasingly difficult to separate a “real” person from their online identity/ image. More generally, Trickster appears to hold salience within times of strain, trauma and socio-economic transformation

Dissemination:

The work was disseminated through a range of cultural and creative institutions, including The Pervasive Media Studio, the Tobacco Factory, The George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling and Beyond the Border International Storytelling Festival. The online archive reached international audiences and research findings were presented in a keynote speech at an international conference at the University of Maine in 2013.