Passage, May 2010, Stelios Pelasgos
 

“The story-teller has to know how to listen. The story-teller has to know when to keep silent. The story-teller has to know how to turn his audience into a community. He listens to what the story can tell them, he listens to what the others need to listen and then he talks. When he is talking he keeps on listening to them, the whispers, the movements and the pictures that come through their heart. He gives voice to his listeners and he listens to them. And he adjusts his story or sends it away and calls for another one. Storytelling is a traditional form of art and consequently a communal one.”
 

Stelios Pelasgos
 

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Radio Art welcomes for the month May, Stelios Pelasgos, an important artist, who is probably the greatest Greek story-teller, who moves in the fields of literature, body theatre, pedagogics and psychotherapy.

Stelios feeds with faith, silence and love his stories and his fairy tales caring for them like small children and when they become stronger and grow up, they follow him to his journeys, where he performs them to grownups or children, dedicating a great part of his time to help with his art vulnerable groups of people (ex drug addicts, prisoners, people with special needs etc.) 

As a modern story-teller, he is a direct descendent of Homers and Aesop, probably one of last chains of the great folklore tradition of story-telling. Stelios keeps up the fight having as his only weapon his great art of adjusting and preserving this tradition by resisting to the visualization caused by television that is close to tearing everything apart. 

His stories travel his audience and are refined by all the places of the world, from China, India, Persia, and Africa up to Europe and from there to Balkans and when they finally reach us, they offer us an elixir of wisdom and beauty that irrigates our soul unraveling the spinning wheel of our emotions making us better people.

In the page Video, some videos of Stelios Pelasgos narrating some of his stories is played.
 

Lambros Mitropoulos

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A text by Stelios Pelasgos for Radio Art’s Passage
 

A searcher of the abyss
 

I am a professional searcher of the abyss. I have a special diving suit equipped with flicks that lighten up the deepest darkness of nature. Darkness without stars and gleams. Down there bizarre creatures float. Foxes that can talk, heartless giants, lamias and gnomes.
To tell the truth the equipment is not very modern. I have inherited it from my grandmother. My diving suit is very simple, moves slowly, even though I have attached to it highly scientific instruments of psychology and anthropology, pedagogics and theatre. The diving suit is heavy and old. Of at least 15.000 years. But it is the only one that can go so deep down and can hold out thousands of years of existence.
You have surely already understood that I am no colleague of Cousteau. My diving suit is called Mythos and in simpler words fairy-tale. I found it rusty in museums and in books. The shadows behind my grandmother until up to the Blind man, have called to me that it is still working. And they insist that I should constantly wear it.
Either ways I cannot take it off.
 

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“Stelios Pelasgos is the man that created the whole movement of the modern storytelling in Greece and he did that with his triple virtue. On the one side he is a story-teller cultivating his gift as a good craftsman all these years and he does not let it go, on the other side he is deep knower of the traditional storytelling and doesn’t leave a chance passing by without talking, giving lectures and finally him being an animator capable of inspiring other people and making them part of this game.”
 

Apostolos Doxiadis, writer, director, mathematician 2-3-2010
 

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Short CV of Stelios Pelasgos
 

Stelios Pelasgos has studied English literature at the University of Athens. He holds a PhD in Aesthetics awarded by the Department of Pedagogics of the Philosophical School of the University of Athens with the title “The oral narration and the pedagogic evaluation of the Greek folklore literature.”    

Stelios Pelasgos began in our country the revival of the art of the traditional storytelling. While he lived in Athens he was the co-creator of programs of cultural animation with main theme the classical children literature and the Greek folklore fairy-tales, which were attended by more than 5.000 students and teachers of the primary schools of Attica (1986-1991).

He met with the first story-tellers in France at the end of the ‘80s. Looking for small human communities, for silence and for the darkness that the fairy-tales spin, he left Athens in 1990 and he moved at first in Volos and then in Pelion. Since then he dedicated himself to the art of the oral literature and storytelling.

He performs and teaches in workshops on his art by travelling all over Greece and Europe.
Since 2002 he applies his original method to Cyprus with the purpose to prevent the use of drugs by students of primary education, based on storytelling of folklore fairy-tales.

Moreover he used his art to help children with mental and body handicaps. He has performed several times for the support of campaigns of Amnesty International, the organization of international solidarity, One Earth, environmental organizations etc. He is a member of the Greek Circle of Children’s Book and a scientific collaborator of E.I.P.E (in English: Research Foundation of Civilization and Education).

In Europe his storytelling takes place in English, French and Italian.