DOI: 10.17026/dans-28h-9mzd
title: Anansi Masters - Documentation

description: Anansi Masters - the story continuesThe Anansi Masters project is developed by Vista Far Reaching Visuals (Mr. Jean Hellwig) and partners. It is designed as a public digital platform at http://www.anansimasters.net and opened in 2007. At the website one can find information about the story character of Nanzi (or Anansi or Kweku Ananse), with English and Dutch subtitled video recordings of storytelling in several countries in different languages, educational modules about storytelling for use at schools and academies, and digital issues of the Anansi Masters Journal published since the beginning of the project. All storytelling videos and videos that were made for documentation or marketing purposes are published on Youtube. Since 2012 all films of Anansi Masters were uploaded to Youtube and linked to the Anansi Masters website. Their display is embedded in the website together with the respective metadata that are entered through a custom made content management system (CMS).In March 2012, public storytelling events were organized by Drs. Jean Hellwig (Hellwig Productions AV / Vista Far Reaching Visuals Foundation) on the islands of Curacao and Aruba. Any professional or non-professional storyteller was invited to tell a story in front of the Anansi Masters camera and the available audience. Storytellers were free to choose their story and language. Each storyteller had to agree that the video registration of their story could be made available for open access. Storytellers were asked in front of the camera to answer a few questions about who they are and how they selected the story that they told.The Anansi Masters project started in 2007 with the registration of Kweku Ananse stories in Ghana and The Netherlands. The storytelling events organized on Curacao and Aruba in 2012 were part of the second phase 'Anansi Masters - the story continues'. The project registers contemporary ways of storytelling from an old tradition and aims to stimulate and revitalize the Nanzi storytelling by making the storytelling videos available to a large international audience. In 2008 a dvd in Dutch was released with 22 stories from Ghana and The Netherlands. In 2013 a dvd in English is released with all 32 stories that were recorded on Curaçao and Aruba.The stories of the Anansi tradition originate in Africa and were exported to other parts of the world through slave trade and migration. In Anansi Masters, the similarities and differences between the stories and storytellers, who tell in their own language, can be found. Anansi Masters initiates different activities all over the world where stories from this oral tradition can be found. The founder has the ambition to film as many stories from this tradition as possible in as many countries as possible. Anansi Masters collaborates with writers, theatre makers, filmmakers, researchers, schools and of course with many many storytellers.This dataset contains the documentation, video files, documents and pictures that were made to document the second phase of the Anansi Masters project with the subtitle 'the story continues'. These files were produced to report the process and results to the sponsoring funds and to be used in marketing through Facebook.This dataset contains the following:- report in Dutch with separate appendices- videos with datasheets 0015 - 0022 reflecting some of performances in the media to market the storytelling events- short video impression with datasheet 0023 of a musical performance at the storytelling event in Curacao- a list with names and codes of the recorded stories and storytellersFor each storyteller and their stories a new dataset has been created. Links to these datasets can be found under 'Relations'.