Storytelling Performance of MA English with Digital Humanities students

The event “Storytelling Performance,” organized for MA English with Digital Humanities students at Christ University, Lavasa, is conceived as both an educational and creative platform. It invites students to bring folk stories, songs, or quips from their own communities and reinterpret them through staged, theatrical storytelling. Facilitated by Dr. Sangeeta Jawla, whose interdisciplinary practice spans folklore, performance, and material culture, the event integrates artistic expression with cultural inquiry, highlighting performance as a means of research, communication, and preservation.

Dr. Jawla’s extensive experience working with museums, galleries, and performance spaces informs the pedagogical design of this session, where students are guided to select, analyze, and transform traditional stories into performative acts. Through embodiment, voice, gesture, rhythm, and improvisation, participants explore how oral narratives transcend the written word to become living, dynamic expressions of collective memory and identity. The process emphasizes storytelling not merely as narration but as a multisensory dialogue between performer, story, and audience—one that bridges affect, intellect, and artistry.

Culturally, the event situates itself within India’s vast and diverse oral traditions, where storytelling has long served as a mode of moral reflection, social critique, and communal bonding. In many parts of the country, tales told by potters, weavers, farmers, and bards have carried generational wisdom, humor, and ethical values. By reinterpreting such narratives in contemporary performance, the event reaffirms the vitality of folklore as a living, evolving practice. Students are encouraged to revisit these community stories, translating them into performative language while preserving their cultural texture and emotional depth. The act of performance thus becomes a bridge—linking ancestral voices with present-day imagination.

Within the framework of Digital Humanities, the performance expands the understanding of narrative beyond textual and visual archives to include embodied and ephemeral archives—where gesture, silence, and movement become carriers of knowledge. Students are prompted to think of performance as a form of cultural data, one that can be documented, analyzed, and archived while still remaining fluid and interpretive. This engagement promotes interdisciplinary learning, integrating literary studies, performance theory, and ethnographic observation. It also fosters collaboration and collective creativity, echoing the communal ethos central to oral storytelling.

The cultural significance of the event lies in demonstrating that storytelling is both an artistic and ethical act—an expression of identity, empathy, and social awareness. By re-staging folk narratives within an academic framework, the performance honors traditional forms while opening them to new interpretations and audiences. It emphasizes that folklore is not a static inheritance but a continually transforming dialogue between generations.

Ultimately, “Storytelling Performance” seeks to nurture sensitivity to the interdependence of narrative, embodiment, and culture. It provides students with experiential insight into how stories shape our understanding of the self and the world. By merging scholarship with artistic practice, the event reaffirms storytelling as a living cultural force—preserving heritage, inspiring reflection, and connecting the local with the universal.