Tantara Vato

Tantara Vato loosely translates as "Stone Story" named after one of the materials used in the storytelling activity.

To play Tantara Vato, a girl will usually sit alone with a group of stones and a few cut sprigs of fresh leaves from a tree. Taking one stone in one hand and a leaf in the other, the girl will hit the leaf with the stone against another stone resting on the floor. As the girl hits the leaf between the stones she utters the dialogue from a character in her story. Effectively each stone represents one character from her story, that is speaking to itself or other characters in the story. This activity is not too dissimilar from playing with dolls, but since there are no distinguishable features in figure or adornment involved, the play is very much focused on the dialogue of each character, more akin to a radio play than a puppet theatre.

It appears that the stones cannot speak unless they have a suitable conduit leaf to speak through, and as the leaves become beaten into dust they are discarded upon the slag heap of dialogue.

The fresh pile of leaves represents the total of the dialogue of the story to come, and its beaten counterpart is the measure of how much dialogue has already passed.

There is something poetically finite about this process, where the leaves follow a pre-determined beginning, middle and end, which matches the story being told as they pass through this hour glass of dialogue, transformed from their integral whole to one of expired dust.

This is the external physical representation of the cathartic process that is taking place inside the girl's thoughts and concerns for past, current and future events. The girl has thought very deeply about her story, is re-telling it to gain perspective as the story is uttered aloud, and visualises the fulfilment of her prophecy through the expiration of the spent leaves.

Tantara Vato is a game played solo because the girls are exploring events and emotions that have touched them deeply and require a method to process their experiences. Whilst some people might have psychotherapists to help deal with such emotions, these girls certainly don't have access to such assistance and are unlikely to find a good listener amongst busy farmhands, so they turn to their practice of Tantara Vato to manage their emotions.