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