Serap Güven
Storyteller
Serap Güven is a comedian and storyteller of Turkish descent and German nationality. She has lived in Brussels for the last 15 years and since a tender age took a keen interest in epic tales and stories. This passion took her all the way to Kirghizstan as well as Mongolia in order to meet and be inspired by the storytellers of traditional epics.
In 2000, the International Yehudi Menuhin Foundation and the association MUS-E Belgium asked her to undertake an intercultural project to interpret stories from the world for various schools in Brussels. Following this the association City Mine(d) and the project Bruxelles Nous Appartient, in partnership with the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts, asked her to narrate a Turkish story with as backdrop contemporary Brussels life: she adapted the stories of Nasreddin, the omnipresent wise - mad man of Turkish and oriental legend.
In 2004, she creates a storytelling show The adventures of Nasreddin Hodja, with which she won the Prize of the Intercultural Storytelling Festival of Chiny 2004, in Belgium. This show was subsequently performed in different venues in Belgium and Great Britain and presented in several languages, French, Turkish and English.
In 2005, Serap Güven is invited to the prestigious International Storytelling Festival Beyond the Border, in Wales. The same year, the Maison du Conte of Brussels invites her to narrate an extract of her show The adventures of Nasreddin in Turkish.
In 2007, the storytelling company A Bit Crack Storytellers of Newcastle, in England, invite her to narrate her stories in Turkish and English.
She is currently working on the representation of the Kirghiz epic, Manas. The outline of her show relating the birth of the spirit of life and transmission has already been presented at the Storytelling Festival of Chiny in 2007.
She also pursues her work with the MUS-E Belgium association as a storyteller and gives courses of storytelling and theatre for other association and cultural centres in Brussels.
