Together with a band of Indian musicians, I worked in rehearsals to create our version. When I was making a performance based on Ramayana, I read as many versions as I could, from as many countries as possible, then made my own line through the narrative. They are part of living oral traditions, and even today some stories connected to these epics have not been written down. But both epics were, and still are, oral performances. Their versions have become classic texts which have generated other classic texts. In the end, with traditional stories, there is no 'Ur-text', just versions of versions of versions.īoth Ramayana and Shahname can be traced back to collector/poets who shaped the story from a variety of sources and wrote it down. The story threads moved backwards and forwards through time, across linguistic and geographic boundaries, incorporating oral and written influences. Instead I found a tangled mass of threads - of stories leading to stories, leading to stories. I soon found that my research was not a linear thread leading steadily back in one direction to an original 'Ur-text'. When I first started telling traditional stories I had the idea I could find the oldest, purest version of a story. In the case of these two epics the ocean is vast and it is very easy to feel at sea. There are hundreds of versions of Shahname and thousands of versions of Ramayana! Indian tradition calls this the sea of stories, the ocean where all the story rivers gather.
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