Anmut

As part of this year's Imaginate Festival there was a fringe event for families at the weekend. 6 short artist-led interventions happened in the Traverse bar and I was one of the artists to present a piece. My piece is called Anmut, which is German for "to have grace". The piece was composed for myself and a female singer, Katy Barry, to perform and it was designed by Kate Temple.

It was great to work with Katy and Kate as both will be involved in my show Ditto later in my residency. Activities like this give us opportunity to experiment and try out ideas of presentation for children. After a slightly shaky start where some children were slightly frightened by the stark intimacy of the piece we realised that by softening the performance style slightly the piece soon became a hit for children, families and some big kids- delegates, artists etc!

There are two collectors. One is a man, The other is a woman. They really like to collect different things. Right now they're into collecting post-it notes, toy animals and favourite words.

Imaginate Festival

The Imaginate Festival! Wow it already seems like it was a long time ago! Our 21st annual festival of children's shows was a great success and it was exciting for me to be an active part of it all this year. I was fortunate to see most of the shows and I also had a couple of great opportunities to talk about my work as artist in residence with Imaginate.

All the shows I saw were great but a few really stand out for me. I loved the Dutch dance show Madcap. Three female dancers performed a very original and comic piece of contemporary dance that was, well, madcap! There was dancing with eggs, some quirky choreography and a really fabulous moment where a storm hit the stage and the whole dance mat filled with "wind" which then rippled as the dancers performed on it. The kids in the audience were quite happy to commentate on the show throughout which never fails to amuse me!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMHg1nECjwQ

Two shows from Germany at North Edinburgh Arts Centre were brilliant. Rawums and Woodbeat were both for infants and were highly original. Rawums explored gravity in a comic yet poetic way by using floating hats, flying houses, floating feathers and falling beanbags. At one particularly great moment the male performer blows the feather of his hand and then tries to do the same withe beanbag - it of course stubbornly stays put. One wee boy in the audience said out loud, "well that was never going to work, it's too heavy." There is a clip of Rawums here if you start the clip at about 5' 14":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-Fdim7nrs4

Woodbeat was a show that did exactly what it said on the tin. It was a rhythmic show where everything was made out of wood. One performer busied himself with lots of exciting wooden percussion instruments while the other man played with lovely wooden puppets or made puppets live on stage out of blocks of wood. I loved at the end of the show when some pathways through the sawdust were created for the infants to enter the performance area and explore.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAho3gDrquQ

Of the Scottish shows on offer I had two stand out favourites. The first was a series of half-hour plays called Sense by Frozen Charlotte theatre company. Each of these piece takes one of the senses as a starting point to explore teenage relationships. The two-handers were presented as a 2-part show and a 3-part show and I found them all to be challenging yet thought-provoking theatre. The writing is really beautiful. Even in Skin, one of the performers describes her self-harm in such a beautiful way that the audience become very empathetic to the character and to the issues surrounding this taboo. The acting was exemplary throughout.

My favourite show of the festival was Cinderella by Shona Reppe. It's a quirky take on the familiar story that had the audience crying with laughter. Cinderella is a puppet, the ugly sister a pair of bejewelled gloves, the father simply a series of footsteps and the Fairy Godmother plaed by Shona hersle. It wa this endless inventiveness that had the audience gripped.
http://www.shonareppepuppets.co.uk/shonareppepuppets/Home.html

Denmark

It's been a busy period so I haven't had a chance to update my blog for a while. Hereafter therefore follows a brief and half-forgotten account of my trip to the Danish Children's Theatre Festival in April. This year the festival was held in the port city of Esbjerg on the west coast. And I'm not even going to mention about the ash cloud-induced trek through Germany on trains to get home three days late!

It was my first time attending the legendary festival and nothing can really prepare you for the scale of it all. There are hundreds of shows on and knowing what to go and see is as tricky as trying to figure out how and when to see the things you do want to see. During the week the performances take place throughout schools and nurseries. You make your own way to see these, which involves negotiating timetables and taxis. My favourite show from this period was Mak Vaerk (Botch Up) by Teater Refleksion. This was a really lovely little box (well cart) of tricks where one female performer told short stories accompanied by lots of magical tricks and gizmos from her cart. There was a hat that had some paper figures dancing around the rim and a very funny dance at the end where the performer came out with 4 legs!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q10Ld_8nP2w

We also got to see the fantastic 2-Dimensional Life Of Her by Fleur-Elise Noble. I had wanted to see this show at this year's New Territories festival in Glasgow but missed it so it was great to see it programmed here. Fleur is Australian and was one of only two international companies to present at the festival. The show is an exciting and original blend of live performance, projection, puppetry and animation - quite hard to describe, and quite hard to forget. Have a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46d8WVIPI5c

I also saw two shows by a very exciting company called Secret Hotel. They were very different performances. The first was called In The Field and was a performance lecture about how we live as human beings, how we are drawn to make connections either with people or geography and how varied our existences on Earth are depending on where we live. The show invloved the audience going for a walk holding hands, making a society out of cardboard houses with magical glowing lights, projections, concepts of time, and soup!
The other performance by this comapny was Fall Fall She Fell, a physical theatre piece about death. The male performer told the audienice about the lives of some people and how they were all connected. The people were represented by glass jars of liquid that had effervescent pellets dropped into them to bring their spirit alive as we heard about thier life. The interesting thing about this show (and actually also for In The Field) was that the company present the show for different age groups: 8+, 13+, and adult. I think this is an interesting way to increse your audience just by making some slight alterations. However perhaps it doesn't always work as the 8 year olds in my performance of FFSF seemed utterly baffled as the adult "artist" crowd laughed knowlingly at the abstract movement and complex themes. Definitely one to ponder over throughout the rest of my residency. Here is the companies website which includes some video clips:
http://secret.tekiela.dk/secret-hotel/?lang=en