Taking a look back through the history of storytelling we talked about how the idea of ‘ownership’ of a story is a relatively new one; stories were collectively written, collected and transmitted as part of a communities oral history without the level of questioning around singular ownership that we have today.

A lot of our discussion centered around permission, and how, when and why you need to seek permission from and consultation with the person or community whose stories you are telling. This led to the question of whether someone can only tell a story which they have direct experience of - something we ultimately disagreed with on the basis that storytelling is empathetically driven, and universals can be found in empathy even when the specifics in the telling are not shared by all.

Great knowledge was shared about participatory projects in which testimony from communities has been collected and then scripted for actors to perform through a writing and rehearsal process that involves those members of the community as consultants throughout.

Other topics discussed were; the ethics of the edit, and the ways in which storytellers can acknowledge the absence of the original storyteller as part of their performance.