A night of Japanese-inspired supernatural storytelling at the Cube

The Crick Crack Club are producers and programmers of “exuberant, intelligent, wild, weird and wonderful” performance storytelling events in Dorset, Oxford, London, Bristol, and all the places in between – through their nomadic story tent, The Fabularium.

Appropriately enough, their monthly nights at The Cube Microplex have become mythic: “Nothing has been the same since the Crick Crack Club started gracing our stage,” said the venue.

On March 10, the Crick Crack Club will be presenting – The Game of Candles – ghost tales from Japan at The Cube, featuring world-class storytellers Tim Ralphs and Sarah Liisa Wilkinson.

So exactly what is this game?

In Edo period Japan, a night-time game of one hundred flickering candles and one hundred supernatural tales became a widespread folk phenomenon – Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai.

After each teller finished their story, a candle would be extinguished, plunging the room, by small degrees, into a darkness filled with ever more hungry ghosts…

In deference to this tradition, Ralphs and Wilkinson will be telling stories of “ravenous flying heads; demon masks that possess the wearer; faceless ghosts; goblin-rats, women made of snow; seductive statues; warrior monks; abandoned farmhouses; haunted bridges; mountaintops and lonely roads” and more.

Scary Ghosts – image: courtesy of Crick Crack Club

And, as the Crick Crack Club illuminates, the power and beauty of storytelling lies in the fact that so much of the work is done by an audience, in their own imaginations.

“The storyteller is: the author/adaptor/composer of the language in which the story is being told; the performer of the story, and the director of both the stage performance and the way the story unfolds in the listener’s imagination,” they say.

“Therefore, whilst the storyteller has to draw on some of the skills of the poet and some of the skills of the actor, storytelling is actually an entirely different art from either of these two. Indeed as a storyteller once said, ‘the thing about being a storyteller, is that you open your mouth and whatever comes out, you have to deal with it’.”

Sarah Liisa Wilkinson – photo: courtesy of Crick Crack Club

Half-English and half-Finnish, Wilkinson is a rising star in UK storytelling scene, and a member of the London-based Embers Collective. She trained with legendary clown Philippe Gaulier in Paris, as well as with renouned storytellers Ben Haggarty and Nell Phoenix.

She has told her stories to audiences in pubs, clubs, festivals, churches, front rooms and all-night sleepovers.

Tim Ralphs describes himself as an ambassador and advocate for storytelling, citing “the need for the craft to appeal to todays’s listeners and tomorrow’s tellers”. Rooted in the oral tradition, he is skilled in weaving language and gesture to enthral a live audience.

Unafraid to be experimental, his reputation has earned him widespread acclaim as an exciting and visceral performer of his art.

Game of Candles – ghost tales from Japan (age recommendation 14+) is at The Cube Microplex, Dove St South, Bristol, BS2 8JD on February 10 at 8pm. Tickets are available from www.headfirstbristol.co.uk. Tickets are also available for the subsequent Crick Crack Club event, Atalanta – Greek Myths unleashed, which is at The Cube on March 10 and will feature performance storytelling from Ben Haggarty.

Main photo: Tim Ralphs, © Wellcome Library

Read more: The Crick Crack Club to host an evening of storytelling and music

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