Adult Visitors to SIBF Enjoy Storytelling Session

SHARJAH 13th November 2015 (WAM)--Between comedy nostalgia and melancholy is a world of stories in which Nemer Salamun lives and from this world he shared stories for adults in a storytelling session held on Thursday at the Sharjah International Book Fair.

The inspiration from his stories comes from every day life. "There are things that happen in life in addition to daily observations. Life is the main source of all my story ideas and today my two young daughters inspire me a lot" said Salamun who is a writer and theatre director from Syria living in Spain.

According to Salamun storytelling is therapeutic. "When my mother died at the start of my career I did a play that spoke about her. I didn't want the audience to cry but to laugh as well. When I spoke about my mother's death on stage people didn't know if they should laugh or cry. It's a kind of therapy" he said.

Salamun said that he is a strong believer in improvisation and that he doesn't memorise his stories word for word. "Memorising is limiting but instead I give my self complete freedom to improvise because you can make mistakes on stage and this is part of the creative process. I deal with audience as if they were family and friends" he explained.

When it comes to telling stories for children he said they need to be in the same age group because having a group of children whose age range from 2 to 12 makes it impossible to cater the storytelling technique to capture everyone's attention. "The children need to also be in small groups" he said.

The stories that cater to the children should have the moral weaved into the plot and not direct.

In Europe Salamun said that the storytelling tradition is part of the children's every day culture but here in the Arab world storytellers are only invited in special occasions festivals or fairs.

"This is part of the culture that we need to give more attention to" he said. When it comes to content both children in Europe and those in the Arab world enjoy the same topics he said.

Salamun said he used to read stories since he was 6 years old and feels that as a tradition stories must continue and must replace part of the time that the child spends using electronic media.