Filming The Sunjata Story – Glimpse of a Mande Epic

This article summarizes the research creation activities as part of Singing Storytellers in 2014, and subsequently the development of knowledge dissemination outputs through deep collaboration with scholars and artists. Over the past decade, the field of research creation has brought together academics and practitioners across institutes of higher education, the arts sector, and the creative industry in Canada and internationally. My work as a documentary filmmaker and sound artist has expanded to a curatorial practice that centers community engagement, in no small part due to the connections with artists and scholars, training opportunities, and mentorship from which I benefited during this project while I was a graduate student. While collaborations between the musicians and scholars involved in Singing Storytellers have thrived since and resulted in multiple initiatives, this article reflects on the initial collaboration that brought a novel approach to the Sunjata epic performance accompanied by poetic translation to the public through multimedia. Here, I reflect on the process of filming, editing, and presenting The Sunjata Story – Glimpse of a Mande Epic drawing on methods from visual anthropology and ethnomusicology. I conclude with a consideration of how acts of reciprocity can create more sustainable relationships between artists and scholars – a practice I now incorporate into my own scholarship today.