Preview
CALGARY INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S FESTIVAL
Runs May 24 to 28
Epcor Centre and Olympic Plaza
Who would have thought that the young woman who originated the role of Benita, the S&M prostitute with a penchant for gory urban legends in Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, would one day be presiding over heartwarming tales of frogs and hares and Cinderella as the artistic director of the Calgary International Children’s Festival?
When Kate Newby was named as successor to JoAnne James, the festival’s beloved founding producer, those who only knew her as an actor and director might well have been surprised. After all, in her two-decade career in Calgary and Edmonton, her name has most often been associated with adults-only fare – Human Remains, David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, not to mention starring as the sexually ravenous Maggie in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and directing Crave, a grim play about pedophilia, among other things, by the late Sarah Kane. Newby is, she readily admits, one of the few Canadian actors of her generation with absolutely no children’s theatre credits on her resumé.
"There’s the irony," she says with a smile. "I have never done a children’s theatre show or a tour. I skipped that actor’s rite of passage somehow. My only background is that I’m a parent and that I have a pretty strong knowledge of good theatre. And I think if you produce really good children’s theatre, the adults also see the value of it: good theatre is good theatre."
Although Newby spent three years as the kids’ fest’s publicist, she was still a dark horse candidate to replace James, who stepped down last year after 17 years at the helm. "When JoAnne decided to leave, she approached me and said, ‘Why don’t you apply?’ I really hadn’t thought about it at all," says Newby. "I did apply, just to see what that process was like." The festival’s board had hired a headhunting firm to do an international search. "I thought the chances were really slim," she says. "And lo and behold, I got offered the job."
Newby gives an immediate nod of assent when I mention that James left some big shoes to fill. "JoAnne has built a highly renowned international festival – it’s very well respected worldwide," she points out. It is also one of the biggest children’s festivals in Canada – second only to Vancouver’s – with an average paid attendance of 32,000 for its array of productions, and a total attendance of about 60,000 if you count all the visitors who take in its free activities on the Olympic Plaza. Newby likens running it to staging an entire theatre season in one week. "There are 79 to 81 shows in a five-day period. You have 12 companies coming in."
This year’s fest, running May 24 to 28, is typical of the kind of variety the event has become known for, with acts from France, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, New Zealand, the U.S. and Canada, offering music, puppetry, physical comedy, theatre and storytelling. There are classics (an offbeat Cinderella by the Scottish Shona Reppe Puppets), popular kids’ entertainers (Norman Foote, Tom "Brother of Harry" Chapin), cultural experiences (Caribbean stories from Haitian-Canadian yarn-spinner Joujou Turenne, Maori dance by the People of the Pacific) and lots and lots of plays about animals – from the Hobey Ford Puppets’ Animalia, to the Dutch Theatre Terra’s award-winning musical Frog, to Project: Whooping Crane by Calgary’s Green Fools troupe, just to mention a few.
With artists coming from far and wide, the festival has to be planned more than a year in advance. This year’s, the 19th, was the last one programmed by James. "She left me with planning the 20th anniversary. She’s such a doll," says Newby, laughing. In fact, James, now living in Saskatoon, has been supplying long-distance advice whenever Newby needs it.
Along with programming the 2006 festival (already done, she says) and overseeing the current one, Newby has been busy crafting a three-year plan. She’s keen to build on James’s solid foundation.
"I did a lot of focus on the site this year to see where I can grow the Olympic Plaza and make that a little bit more vibrant. It hasn’t really changed in the past 10 years," she says. She also wants to bring more hands-on activities to the fest. "What I would love to see happen (is) that when (young people) come to the festival they can still see an amazing show, but then they can also take a workshop in percussion, say, or visual arts. So they have the option to experience high-quality work, but at the same time get their hands into it as well."
She’d also like to add a "teen fest" as either an offshoot or component of the main festival. Currently, she says, the audience tends to fall off at the age of 14. "Young people aren’t really interested in coming to the festival after that. I’d like us to offer them something they can relate to." The model she has in mind is the now-defunct teen festival at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre, where teenagers created plays in collaboration with professional artists. "It was unbelievably successful," she recalls.
Newby, originally from Sioux Lookout in northern Ontario, trained at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and made her Calgary acting debut at Alberta Theatre Projects’ 1989 playRites festival, eventually moving here a few years later. She says she was one of those rare kids whose parents actually urged her to get into theatre.
"Performing has never been my passion," she admits. "I went into it because I was such a hyperactive child and my parents threw me into acting classes because they didn’t know what to do with me. It’s always been work to me." Nonetheless, she landed some plum roles in her time onstage, including Roxanne to Brent Carver’s Cyrano in the Robin Phillips-John Murrell Cyrano de Bergerac at the Citadel and the pill-popping heroine in ATP’s controversial staging of the Angels epic.
It took the birth of her son, Aidan, before she realized she’d been missing out on a whole other genre of outstanding theatre.
"When I first came out of theatre school, I was a bit of a snob and, like many people, I thought children’s theatre was just really bad sock puppets and a lower-scale quality of theatre," she confesses. "When my son was about three, we started coming to the festival, and it completely opened my eyes as an artist. Some of the best work I’ve seen has been at this festival. Each year I’d walk away from shows just blown away by the immense creativity of the artists here."
Aidan is now 12 and his mother is proselytizing for superior children’s entertainment.
"One of the challenges for me now, in this job, is to get the word out, to get our attitude away from thinking that theatre for young people is second-class entertainment. It’s not," she insists. "To encourage adults to come to this festival, too, is my mission." |
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