Bhubaneswar, December 18: The BhuFeSto, the Bhubaneswar Festival of storytelling, will be held from January 14 to 17 on the sidelines of the Hockey World Cup. It is once again being curated by Bakul Foundation as a part of Dot FEST, the City Festival being organised by BDA, BMC and Odisha Tourism.
This was announced by founder of Bakul Foundation and Festival Director of BhuFeSto Sujit Mohapatra at a Curtain Raiser to BhuFeSto organised at the Bakul Library in Satyanagar here on Sunday.
The BhuFeSto-2023 will be held from 2.30 PM to 7.30 PM everyday at four different parks and open spaces in different parts of the city – Buddha Jayanti Park in Chandrasekharpur, Indira Gandhi Park in Unit-2, APJ Abdul Kalam Park near SUM Hospital and Kalabhoomi in Pokhariput.
The idea is that people in the city could go to the nearest park to enjoy the performances. The storytellers would perform in different parks on different days.
When BhuFeSto was proposed by Bakul Foundation before the last Hockey World Cup, the aspiration was to make it the iconic Storytelling festival in India just as the Jaipur Literature Festival is iconic among literature festivals.
The first edition in December 2018 was a grand success with more than 10,000 people enjoying the performances of some of the best storytellers in the world and in India.
“When we organized BhuFeSto in 2018, we had been organising storytelling sessions in Odisha but we were new to the international storytelling circuit,” said Sujit Mohapatra.
After BhuFeSto, particularly during Covid, when Bakul Foundation conducted the very popular virtual storytelling webseries, Storytime @9 and Rabibaar Gapabaar, we were connected with the very best storytellers from around the world and India. We are very happy to announce that almost all the storytellers in our First List of the ones we most wanted to have, confirmed and are going to be performing at BhuFeSto this time.
