Rachel Donaldson Clarke
Rachel comes from a tradition of storytelling in Scotland. Her studies in German language and literature at the University of Edinburgh took her to Berlin. There she completed a diploma in theatre directing at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, at a time when all the lecturers were familiar with the craft of the GDR. This gave her at least some East German socialisation. She later studied at the Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro and worked for five years with communities and organisations in the valleys and mountains of Laos in Southeast Asia. Since then, her storytelling has combined the personal with the local, regional and global. She has toured with several of her own shows, an entertaining mix of stories from the past, present and future, including myths and true events, as well as live music.
As artistic director of the Storytelling Arena, she is constantly developing new event formats such as STORYFIELD – where stories fuse and create new(s). With people from all over the world who live in Germany, she has created eight event series on contemporary topics in 16 cities in four years. Her latest solo programme, ‘Big Tales – Ballads for our Times’, uses multimedia backdrops.
She is the artistic director of the Storytelling Arena, a non-profit organisation registered in 2019 that began as a storytelling stage in 2015. The Storytelling Arena carries out applied storytelling projects to create a dialogue on the issues of our time through storytelling.
www.storytellingarena.com
