“As you can see it from my family name, I am Russian, but my home country is Estonia and that’s where I was born. My parents came to Estonia during the Soviet times to work in a theatre. They are actors, but I myself never took any acting classes nor studied acting. I loved telling and writing stories. Once my parents gave me a cassette recorder with a microphone, and this is where it all began. I pressed the record button, and would loose myself in telling stories and recording them for hours and hours. I told folk stories that I heard from my family and from the books reproducing them word by word and I also created my own stories. Years passed and I became a storyteller.”
For the last ten years of her life Polina has been doing storytelling in Estonian, Russian and English languages. She performs a lot in Estonia and abroad. By now she recorded three storytelling albums, which are also available in three languages: “Singing Stories”1 (2017), “When We Grow Up” 2 (2018) and “Birds’ Tales” (2019). Her first storytelling album “Singing Stories” was nominated for the annual literary award in Estonia in 2018, and was dedicated to her newly-born daughter. Polina used to teach Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Tallinn University for six years. She used to live in Istanbul and did her most extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey studying the Sufi practices and Turkish music therapy.
Polina refers to her genre of storytelling as the soul-centered. She tells both traditional and modern real-life stories, as well as the stories she wrote herself and the ones she collected during her extensive travels and fieldworks. She combines her storytelling with the music of her rare instruments that she plays, such as birbyne, rebab, setar, kalimba, santur, lyra, hurdy-gurdy, bagpipes, flutes, percussions and many others.
Polina’s debut performance for the world storytelling Cafe: 1st of June 2020:
If you are enjoying this story, feel free to make a donation, everything you pop into the hat below goes directly to Polina :
Polina Tšerkassova
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