Rachel Donaldson Clarke
Rachel is a storyteller and applied storytelling practitioner from Scotland and Germany who feels at home in both German and
(Scottish) English - and in creating live and online events.
She comes from a storytelling tradition in Scotland. Her studies in German language and literature at Edinburgh University took her to Berlin. There she trained vocationally to become an acting director at the Ernst Busch Academy, with Augusto Boal and his team at the Centre of 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, South-East Asia. Her storytelling links the personal with the local, regional and global. She has toured with several of her own storytelling shows, an entertaining mix of stories from the past, present and future, including myths and true stories (historical, local heroes and heroines, family and personal experiences) as well as live music. Since the pandemic, she has also created digital storytelling events, podcasts and a new genre the Storytelling Short Film.
Inspired by Scottish storyteller Robert Burns, who told his stories in rural communities and in the salons of Edinburgh, she tells stories in a variety of social contexts. She also composes ballads inspired by Burns' ballad Tam O'Shanter. Her motivation is a sense of social solidarity and responsibility. Her father invented bedtime stories and wrote narrative ballads inspired by Burns for professional and social occasions such as retirement parties, births and weddings.
Her cousin Donald Braid wrote his doctoral thesis on the Travellers, Scotland's nomadic people, and published it as a book. Rachel was a teenager at the time, and this sparked her initial interest in storytelling as an art form.
She is a pioneer of new storytelling formats, including short films for storytelling. Her latest programme, ‘Big Tales – Ballads for our Times’, will incorporate multimedia elements.
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 dialogue on the issues of our time through storytelling.
