Kids Fest shows power of imagination.
Annual event embraces theatre, dance, music, storytelling
In an age of solitary souls whose thumbs are anatomically attached to cellphones and clickers, and entertainment is a hard-edged 2-D proposition, it’s got to tickle you there’s still a place in the world where penguins play musical chairs. That would be the same place that hippos have insomnia, bushy treetops are little-guy heroes, the violin goes hip-hop, mermaids sing, and frogs hang out and sass the crowd.
That place is nearby, my funstarvsed friends, just up the road in St. Albert on the banks of the mighty Sturgeon. That’s where the 32nd-annual edition of the International Children’s Festival opens Tuesday — at the Arden Theatre, assorted halls, a curling rink, and a whole bunch of tents, not to mention all the green spaces in between.
In the chaotic mixed signals we get from the cosmos in these parts, the one true harbinger of spring — more age-resistant than sidewalk chalk, more powerful than the dandelion — is the Kids Fest.
It’s a five-day tribute to the power of the imagination. Like its predecessors, the 2013 edition embraces theatre, dance, music, storytelling, puppetry, the juggling of flaming objects, and every combination of the above.
Did I mention the spirited performers of Firefly Theatre who manoeuvre themselves into underwater sea creatures while spinning up in the air? Or the storyteller from Vancouver’s Pangaea Arts who pedals through the festival with an exquisite miniature wooden stage on the back of his bike?
The 10 mainstage productions assembled by programmer Caitlin North arrive from across the country, and around the world — Germany, Senegal, Australia, the Netherlands, Surinam, Turkey, Venezuela and the U.S. — for 106 performances. So we can discover what we’ve been missing in live entertainment destined for young audiences.
Take Portland’s Imago Theatre, for example. It’s an unclassifiable company that for 3-1/2 decades has been devising, and endlessly polishing, theatre that puts visual images, lighting effects, original music, masks, text and choreographed dance together in blithely offcentre combinations. They’ve blown minds around the world, including repeated assaults on the showbiz bastions of Broadway. A five-performer Imago ensemble arrives, with luggage that includes formal penguin-wear. The show is the muchtravelled ZooZoo. And on the phone from Imago’s Portland headquarters, co-founder Jerry Mouawad explains that in this vaudeville of creatures, some of the sketches have been honed for years.
“We’ve worked a particular five-minute section, the polar bears, for a decade. … We weren’t satisfied till 2010. We created them first, and put them in rehearsal without knowing their niche in the show, to see what could happen. … It’s easy for us to create creatures; it’s another thing to figure out how they’ll resonate with 99 per cent of the world.”
The “larva-batic” sequence, which “looks like a worm doing acrobatic hand-stands,” dates from the early ’80s.
As for the penguins, they got a tryout in Portland a dozen years ago “to discover their niche in the show.” The audience gave them an F on a survey report card. And then, tada!, Mouawad and co. got the bright idea of musical chairs. It resonated instantly; audiences understood “the way we’re defeated by small things.” It made the penguins stars, worldwide.
“We didn’t know if people in China even played musical chairs,” Mouawad says with a laugh.
“They do, actually.” But, as in Charlie Chaplin and silent film comedy, “it’s a universal situation that reflects the human condition; that’s what we’re looking for.”
Mouawad himself won’t be in the cast this time out. “It’s meant for younger bodies,” he sighs.
“Doing ZooZoo is running five miles. You have to have good knees.”
A company with similar world-travel cred is Australia’s Windmill Theatre.
They’ve been on the road in North America since February with a show whose endearing hero, looking a lot like a small striped haystack with a big nose, comes to the stage from the pages of a much-loved Australian picture book series by Ted Prior. He’s Grug, who bonds particularly with the younger crowd, under seven.
“The six books are very well known in Australia, especially by (nostalgic) parents of about my age,” says 35-yearold Hamish Fletcher, on the phone from Fayetteville, Ark., last week. “They’re visual not wordy.”
Grug, who’s the bushy topknot of the Australian burrawang tree, is “a very shy little guy, naively beautiful,” says Fletcher. “Everyone, every kid, has felt a bit small at times. … He’s the little guy who survives: You don’t have to be the biggest and best to have marvellous adventures. You can still have an experience you can learn from and grow with.”
Windmill, Adelaide-based, isn’t about social messages, says Fletcher. “Sometimes just coming to the theatre is enough of a message.”
Grug and his puppet pals aren’t high-tech, though “there’s some magic from time to time,” and the production is mounted with “full lighting and theatricality,” Fletcher says. “We show what we’re doing; we don’t hide.” The whole experience is designed to be user-friendly. “We start in the audience with the kids, welcoming everybody, asking them what they had for lunch, what they think of SpiderMan. And at the end, the kids can get up on stage, which is cool, and have personal interaction with Grug.”
A dozen years ago, a Quebec theatre school grad named Jean-Philip Joubert founded a company with a name borrowed from a Vladimir Mayakovsky poem. From the start Nuages En Pantalon (clouds in pants) collaborated with choreographers and designers, composers, videographers and projectionists. The Snail’s Shadow, says Joubert, is “our first time with an audience as young as five.”
In its infiltration of the dreams of a silent little girl in a wheelchair and the brother who wants to give his sister a birthday present of a ballerina, he was inspired by his own disabled sister, Joubert says, on the phone from his Quebec City home.
“We’d go to shopping malls, and young children would be completely amazed by Sophie’s difference. … My mother taught me it was normal to have questions; it wasn’t a secret that my sister was different.
“So, you’re curious, of course, and then you accept how she is; you don’t try to change her. … I wanted to talk about this with young children and their parents.” He laughs. “If you say the show is about a disabled child, people don’t realize it’s a funny show, a happy show, that can catch you in the pleasure, the laughter.” Kids appreciate that, Joubert says. It’s adults who say “it was so moving; I cried.”
He says of his company of versatile collaborators that “we’re all theatre artists. But the artist playing the little girl is, by profession, a contemporary dancer.” The silent little girl “has her own language, as the audience and the ballerina learn in the course of the play,” says Joubert, who was a dancer before he studied theatre and has directed everything from modern dramas to Moliere to equestrian circus productions. “She has a physical presence that is strange. … The ballerina and the little boy want to show the girl how to dance. But she is already dancing, from the start. You just have to recognize it.”
Take your inner kid with you, and let the dancing begin.