4 Nations International Connections
For the past 9 months, Adverse Camber has been meeting regularly with storytelling partners from across the UK and Europe to explore the potential for more joined-up approaches to achieving shared goals.
This project has been funded by the Four Nations International Fund, an initiative led by all four UK nation arts councils, to support in-person, digital or hybrid activity, strengthening UK relationships with Europe and beyond.
Our partners in the project are:
• Armstrong Storytelling Trust in Northern Ireland
• Beyond the Border Wales International Storytelling Festival
• The Village Storytelling Centre in Glasgow, Scotland
• The Federation for European Storytelling (FEST)
Through monthly online meetings, we’ve been sharing our passion for stories, celebrating wins and joining forces on challenges, exploring the topics that we’re all especially keen to address including:
• Strengthening inclusion and diversity across storytelling
• Supporting young storytellers and early career artists
• Enabling minority languages to flourish
• Exploring slow touring models between the UK nations and Europe
• Stronger collaboration with European partners
Our meetings have already generated collaborative projects, such as
• a shared Casglu session, jointly led by Beyond the Border and The Village Storytelling Centre in the run up to Village Stories festival in July 2022
• micro projects in each UK nation on themes of language and identity, with a shared evaluation framework to capture findings
• a proposal that the 4 UK organisations jointly host the 2024 FEST conference in the UK, in 2024. This was voted on ahead of the 2023 conference, which took place in Veszprém, Hungary, attended by three of the partners (one virtually)
We’re excited to continue conversations with our partners and look forward to co-hosting the conference in 2024.
4 Nations
