Part 3 of our LSE Space for Thought Branching Out festival work.

We collaborated with Summer All Year Long, our singing friends to match songs and stories to the themes being explored by the festival.

This section is Oral Tradition and Human Rights. We didn’t have a story for human rights, so SAYL came up with a song that is both Oral Tradition in that it is a traditional folk tune, and uses all the tropes of repetition you might expect from a folk song, and a Human Rights theme as it is also known a The Maid Saved From the Gallows, though we know it by the snappier, The Prickle-eye Bush.

We continued the Oral Tradition theme with Emily Cleaver’s retelling of the Frog Prince, The Frog, which also uses repetition, (purflop, purflop) to rather sinister effect; magnificently read by Will Everett. We finished up with Sophie Morris-Sheppard reading Rebecca Gould’s Speaking in Tongues, about lying, and learning love in a foreign language, which just seemed to fit somehow.