The North Macedonia Fellowship Group of the International Association of Chigasaki (IAC) is introducing a Macedonian folktale “the Girl and the Twelve Months” in the Cultural Festival in Chigasaki 2020.
Chigasaki City is the Host Town of the Republic of North Macedonia for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Having watched the Japanese narrative art at the Cultural Festival in Chigasaki 2019, the Chargé d’Affaires ad Interim of the Republic of North Macedonia presented 8 English picture books of Macedonian folktales to Chigasaki City. We inspired by one of the books, and created “the Girl and the Twelve Months” in Japanese. To complete the story, we studied many literatures on the internet, and got many advices from a Macedonian friend as well.
The Bundankyo Committee asked us to participate in the Cultural Festival in Chigasaki 2020 and we decided to introduce our “the Girl and the Twelve Months” with narrative art. We wrote the script, drew and painted the pictures all on our own. Japanese traditional narrative art is usually a solo performance, but this time, we sprit it into roles, parts and tasks among the group members, and we all did the voices or sound effects.
We practiced the narrative art at an assembly room of an apartment house in which a member of the group lives. We always wore masks and plastic face shields during the practices to prevent infection of COVID-19 because we needed to speak the lines out loud. Amid Covid-19 pandemic, the festival committee decided some of the programs to be held online. Moreover, the recording of the performance was postponed because of a state of emergency issued by the government. We went through a lot and we finally recorded the performance at Chigasaki Civic Hall on March 21. You can currently watch the video on YouTube. Don’t miss it!! https://youtu.be/SjL-2KJDw0c
