>>PREVIEW
CALGARY INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S FESTIVAL
Opens May 22
Check listings for venues, shows and times
"We tend to segregate our youth from our adults in everything we do."
As the artistic director of the Calgary International Children’s Festival, Kate Newby knows better than anyone that sometimes, children’s theatre takes an unfair rap. And while it’s keenly ironic to see theatre elitists pooh-pooh children’s shows after paying perfectly good money to watch grown men play pretend, it’s still a struggle to be taken seriously.
But seriously: after a season of being cuckolded by goats, having our hard-won overcoats torn from our shoulders and watching as the whole world drains literally down the pisser, isn’t there room for a workshop that crafts butterflies, or a world of colours created before our eyes? Isn’t it about time for theatre that’s a little childish?
Returning for its 21st year, the CICF brings together a collection of staged and outdoor events over four days throughout the Epcor Centre and surrounding area. From puppeteers like Germany’s Puppentheater der Stadt Halle, presenting The Workshop of the Butterflies, to the unique live animation of Erfreuliches Theater Erfurt and their Queen of Colours, the festival is a showcase of performance that doesn’t correspond to its audience members’ size.
Every year, Newby scouts for potential festival acts in six locations throughout North America and the world. This year, she travelled to The Netherlands, Montreal and the lakeside splendour of Cleveland. What she looks for isn’t limited to theatre, even though many of the mainstage shows have theatrical components. Dance, spoken word, music and others are all fair game, with the 2007 program including acts like José-Luis Orozco (De Colores), a nationally renowned Mexican children’s musician and Mambo Fusion Dance, a combination of Argentine percussion and Spanish flamenco first honed with Canada’s own Cirque de Soleil.
And in a festival where the primary audience can’t get through the door without a larger patron holding his or her hand, the festival is also a demonstration of the range available within every performance – from child to adult.
"Obviously I’m looking at the best work, because I think good theatre is good theatre," says Newby. "If it’s really good it appeals to many different ages on different levels. When I get to programming shows for the preschool age, even that can have its own level of metaphor where adults can see a little bit more than what the child is getting."
Finding engaging theatre is no easy task and no less so in theatre for young people. Newby herself first approached the festival as an audience member in 1993 with the assumption that, because its audiences were miniature, the quality of its content would be too. But the CICF isn’t Saturday morning television or Canada’s Treehouse network, as Newby emphatically points out. It’s a festival apart from usual children’s fare, she says, where children aren’t expected to have even their nascent intelligence insulted.
"When I see adult theatre, sometimes I see a lack of imagination or a lack of creativity," she says. "Whereas theatre for young audiences, good theatre, can be so inspirational in their creative implementation and their innovation. It’s pretty inspiring."
As an active actor and director in Calgary’s theatre community, Newby feeds on the creative freedom enjoyed by young people’s theatre, often over its more staid adult counterparts. Even with that fuel, however, the challenge of administering the five-day festival restricts her active participation to a self-imposed limit of two productions a year. This year, she first directed Alberta Theatre Projects’s production of Edward Albee’s decidedly adult The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? before taking the stage herself as a mourning Chekhovian widow in Lunchbox Theatre’s The Bear.
Newby isn’t the only one with an adult side. This year, the CICF will also include its fair share of adult content, with the Mayhem Poets contributing two adult spoken word showcases, one including a bevy of local spoken word poets, in addition to a children’s poetry slam.
"Everything shifts for me, year to year depending on what kinds of companies I’ve brought in," she says. "I also try and tap into a demographic that isn’t necessarily that familiar with us, and to kind of show them that our festival is more than sock puppetry."
Growing the festival’s demographic appeal to include university students and the remaining cynics is an important goal for the festival, but its focus still remains fundamentally on growing audiences. As in: the kind who are still sprouting vertically.
Even if those who think of themselves as too "adult" for children’s theatre don’t always see it, the joy of performance is fundamentally still a childish inkling. Somewhere, sometime, each of us found a place to play, or at least found the joy in watching that play. For Newby, there’s no time like the present, no place like the CICF.
"It is our obligation to provide excellent theatre and dance for young people to see, so that they can appreciate it at a young age," she says. "And appreciate it as they get older."
For more information, visit www.calgarychildfest.org, or call 294-7414. |
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