Bhubaneswar festival of Storytelling to begin from Jan 14

Bhubaneswar: The Bhubaneswar Festival of Storytelling (BhuFeSto) 2023 will be back again with a bouquet of prominent storytellers from various countries. The iconic festival will be held from 14 to 17 January 2023 on the sidelines of the FIH Men’s Hockey World Cup to be held in Bhubaneswar and Rourkela.

It will be curated by Bakul Foundation as a part of Dot FEST, the City Festival being organized by BDA, BMC and Odisha Tourism.

A curtain raiser to BhuFeSto organized at the Bakul Library in Satyanagar on Sunday.

The festival will be held at four different parks and open spaces in different parts of the city: Buddha Jayanti Park in Chandrasekharpur, Indira Gandhi Park in Unit 2, A P J Abdul Kalam Park near SUM Hospital and Kalabhoomi in Pokhariput.

The first edition of the festival was held in December 2018 and it was a grand success with more than 10,000 people enjoying the performances of some of the best storytellers from India and abroad.

This time, it is going to be even bigger. Sujit Mahapatra, the founder of Bakul Foundation and the Festival Director of BhuFeSto said, “When we organized BhuFeSto in 2018, we had been organizing storytelling sessions in Odisha but we were new to the international storytelling circuit.”

“We are very happy to announce that almost all the storytellers in our first list have confirmed and are going to be performing at BhuFeSto this time,” he shared.

Nupur Agarwal, an internationally acclaimed storyteller, and the Festival Curator, narrated a wonderful story in the Curtain Raiser for the audience to get a glimpse of what the festival had in store. Storyteller Prachi Tara also regaled the audience with a story in Odia.