Resurrecting Dead Fairy Tales: An Online Lecture and Q&A with Folklorist Jack Zipes

In a FREE Facebook Watch online event created for youth audiences, renown folklore and preeminent fairy tale expert Jack Zipes will exhume and examine the importance of little-known tales from the first half of the twentieth century. With the goal of, as he describes it “unburying and reinvigorating dead fairy tales and their creators”, the lecture will bring back to life subversive stories created to oppose the rise of Nazism and other forms of totalitarianism internationally. World events today and their impact on youth make this lecture and conversation sharply relevant. In discussing these works, Zipes hopes to introduce youth to what they might be missing by not paying attention to certain periods of history, such as the early rise of fascism at the beginning of the twentieth century. For example, in Yussuf the Ostrich well-known political caricaturist Emery Kelen tells the story of a young ostrich who helps defeat the Nazis in northern Africa during World War II. In Keedle, the Great, first published in 1940, Deirdre and William Conselman Jr. sought to give Americans hope that the world can overcome dictatorships. To the authors, the title character Keedle represented more than Hitler, but all dictators then and now. The Facebook Watch lecture was filmed in October 2020 at the beautiful Victorian Walter Library- Upson Room at the University of Minneapolis and will conclude with a live, moderated Q&A with Zipes. As Zipes states: “History is doomed to repeat itself. We must preserve the things that make us human, and stand up to forces that would tear our society apart”. Resurrecting Dead Fairy Tales is part of a series of workshops and events leading up to MISCELLANEOUS Productions’ next community-engaged and youth-centred theatre work Plague, a professionally produced hip hop music theatre work, which will explore issues that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring the plague through fairy tales, myths, and animal wonder tales from Indigenous and international cultures. Once a vaccine is developed and distributed, MISCELLANEOUS Productions will work in a long-term, community-engaged collaboration with culturally and socially representative youth to create Plague, to be presented at the Scotiabank Dance Centre in 2022.