FROM JACK TO ALICE TO HANSEL
Plenty to see at Children’s Festival
Taking your youngster to the theatre could help make a better child and a better world? Absolutely, says Catherine O’Grady, artistic producer of the Ottawa International Children’s Festival, which celebrates its 30th anniversary May 4-13 at LeBreton Flats Park.
“In theatre (children are) establishing ways of critical thinking, of seeing a show and saying, ‘What was good about that? What wasn’t good about that?’ It’s another level of understanding your world.”
She says it also teaches children to pay attention, to express opinions and be tolerant of others,’ to be confident in their own decisions. “Those are all things we value in our society.”
Laudable goals, and often backed by research like that at the University of Arkansas which shows, for example, that student attendance at high-quality productions enhances not just vocabulary and literary knowledge but also the ability to read others’ emotions.
To help achieve such goals — not to mention ensuring everyone has fun — O’Grady has programmed a lively line-up at this year’s festival. It includes a production of Hansel and Gretel by Denmark’s Gruppe 38 that uses projections on an actor’s gauzy skirt to tell the story (the company two years ago brought us a wonderfully subversive Little Red Riding Hood). Also on board: a couple of world premieres including Wolf Child by Ottawa’s Mi Casa Theatre, originators of the touring hit Countries Shaped Like Stars, as well as musical and acrobatic shows, a puppet-and-person adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and others. Many of the shows are offered in either English or French.
Not that getting audiences out to this cornucopia of creativity is necessarily easy.
“Children’s festival” too easily calls up wrongheaded images of bright-coloured, inflatable play structures and razzmatazz kids’ entertainment, says O’Grady. With no shortage of those things around, why trek to LeBreton Flats?
Also working against children’s theatre festivals: the gutting of arts studies in Ontario schools, which she lays at the doorstep of Mike Harris’ slash-and-burn government of the late 1990s. The product of arts-poor education themselves and working in a system with little cash for “extras,” fewer young teachers today are taking their students to the festival, according to O’Grady (school shows now run at about 60 per cent capacity compared to regularly sold-out performances in the banner years of 2008-2010).
With bullying and youth suicide at frightening levels, that’s not so good, believes O’Grady. Theatre, like other performing arts, celebrates individuality — a bulwark against bullying — and as a shared experience it can foster community — a very good reason for living.
Shared experience helped define a production of the Danish puppet show Goodbye Mr. Muffin that I saw at the 2010 festival.
Teenagers in the audience not only sat rapt during this gentle tale about the decline and demise of a pet guinea pig, but shed tears alongside their much younger seatmates, at whom the show was aimed, when Mr. Muffin exited the world.
The atmosphere at that simple show was nothing less than profound.
If not enough Ottawans — or Canadians, for that matter — see shows like Goodbye Mr. Muffin, the situation is radically different in Europe, O’Grady says. There, a long tradition of respect and support for the arts means productions are “packed to the rafters with kids, and parents are fighting to get tickets.”
Here at home, everything from a flawed education system to shrinking corporate sponsorship means that where there were once five children’s festivals in Ontario there are now just two: the Ottawa event and the WeeFestival in Toronto, a startup aimed at the very young. There are six or seven other children’s festivals in Canada, O’Grady says.
Regardless — and in part no doubt because organizers work for very little money, according to O’Grady — the Ottawa festival, after three decades, continues to program quality productions along with special activities like this year’s Silly People in which children learn circus skills and performances by Junkyard Symphony, who use cast-off items to make music.
“We’re so careful to develop our kids’ math skills and science skills and ensure their language develops,” O’Grady says. “(Theatre) is another part of socialization, so they have the critical tools for being a grown-up as well as just being a direct experience of joy or sadness. … It’s overwhelmingly positive if we can get them there.”