The oral folk tale

Scenic intervention model to recover the memory of a community

Abstract

Oral storytelling is an activity that allows us to build common meanings among the members of a specific community. They become able to understand their world through the stories they tell. That strengthens, also, their collective memory. In this paper we acknowledge folk stories as capable of helping reaffirming identity and values of these social groups. The histories that are orally telled can be, also, vehicles for communities’ hopes which have endured violent and traumatic experiences. Nevertheless, contemporary life has exposed communities to excessive information and poverty of memorable stories. We, then, founding ourselves on postulates from theorists as Francisco Garzón Céspedes, Paulo Freire, Walter Benjamin, Slavoj Žižek, Ana Padovani and John Alberto Ardila, among others, we propose an exercise of shared physical encounter of people (convivencia) in which living spoken word could emerge as a way of promoting dialogue, collective memory and imagination among participants of an experience of oral storytelling based in stories built by the community for their own edification.