„Do you like stories?”

Certain features of Éva Fábián's storytelling and pedagogy in the light of a children's program at the Hungarian Heritage House

Abstract

This paper calls attention to some elements of a decades-long storytelling practice we consider effective and of model value in a complex children’s programme run at the Hungarian Heritage House with the title ’Encounter with Folk Tradition’. Faithful to the traditional storytelling technique, the outstanding storyteller, folk singer, educator Fábián Éva tells her stories from memory, with improvisations and interactively, involving the audience, at the same time following the circumstances of revival storytelling and the characteristics of the pedagogical situation, she makes self-reflective gestures. Applying humour, taking the ages and composition of the school groups into considedration, she introduces the audience to the world of the lingo of folk tales and the Bukovina Székely regional dialect, and by ‘breaking the fourth wall’ she leads the children and the accompanying adults back into the now-forgotten story-listener etiquette and forges the audience into an ad hoc community. Besides the magic of her storyteller-human personality, the linguistic and non-verbal indirect and direct ‘messages’ together create a methodology, parts or the whole of which are recommended for every educator in preschools or primary schools or any adult who loves children and stories. In order to place all this into the context of the past two decades, before analysing storytelling and its communication we shall present the development of folk story telling connected to the dance house movement by many threads, the role the Hungarian Heritage House played in this and also a children’s programme of our institute called ‘Encounter with folk tradition’.