Scottish International Storytelling Festival: War of the Birds @ Heart of Hawick

The War of the Birds is a collection of famously untold Eastern European Stories.

Unpublished and rarely translated into English, the War of the Birds is a Babushka doll of nested narratives, each exploring class, identity, and place, in the old world where things were darker, colder, and altogether stranger.

Set against a backdrop of Klezmer dancing and evolving ambient soundscapes - these stories take us through lands of strange symbols, to the great grassy plains of the steppe, and deep into the Kamchatka sea.

This is storytelling steeped in the Samovar, smoked by the teamakers, with a deep familiarity and deep strangeness imbued over long winters by our Northern neighbors.In the War of the Birds Traditional Storyteller Mark Borthwick weaves traditional and electronic music together with full-blooded stories of the old world to transport us to the shores of a new one, where stories are currency, and memory is home.

An exploration of postwar migrations, family histories lost to time, and the stories which made us all that we are, a long time ago.