The Awesome Festival 2016

Once again, the Awesome Festival lived up to its promise of  wonderful enlightenment for their Bright Young Things. These were just some of its highlights:

New Owner (★★★★)
The Last Great Hunt
Created and Performed by Tim Watts and Arielle Gray
Set construction and gadgets by Anthony Watt
Puppet design and construction Chloe Flockart
Music by Rachael Dease
PICA Performance Space
1 – 16 October, 2016

Tim Watts and Arielle Gray, the co-creators and performers of New Owner, are heartstring-tweakers of the first order. Their previous collaborations, The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer and It’s Dark Outside, play to rapt audiences around the world, and this will follow in their footsteps.
New Owner sits perfectly in the timeless tradition of storytelling for children, and the child in all of us.

Read the complete review in The West Australian. 

Big Bad Wolf (★★★★)
By Matthew Whittet
Directed by Rosemary Myers
Designed by Jonathon Oxlade
Sound Design by Harry Covill
Lighting design by Chris Petridis
Preformed by Patrick Graham, Emma J Hawkins and Ellen Steele
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until 8 October

As you’d expect, times have changed around here since the famously gruesome episode involving Granny, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf.
These days there’s a Wolf Alarm System in place, operated by the village’s resident serial over-achiever – and Little Red Riding’s descendant – Heidi Hood (Emma J Hawkins), to keep the current Big Bad Wolf (Patrick Graham) at bay.
Only trouble is, Heidi gets few thanks, and makes no friends, for all her good works. The BBW also finds it hard to make any when everyone and everything assumes he’s eying them up for a one-way dinner date.

Read the complete review in The West Australian.

The Bookbinder (★★★★½)
Written and designed by Ralph McCubbin Howell and Hannah Smith
Trick of The Light
Directed by Hannah Smith
Music by Tane Upjohn Beatson
Performed by Ralph McCubbin Howell
State Library Theatrette

Inside a magic book, a boy goes on a journey to right a wrong, save himself and, perhaps, a world.
It’s a tale told, in all its variety, from the earliest fairy tales to today’s multiplex family magnets, but rarely with the charm, wit and inventiveness of this tiny gem from New Zealand’s Trick of the Light.

Read my review from the 2015 Fringe Festival in The West Australian 

A Mano (By Hand) (★★★½)
El Patio Teatro
Devised, constructed and performed by Julian Saenz-Lopez and Izaskun Fernandez
AGWA Theatrette
Until 8 October

We have no more supple, subtle and sensitive tool than our hands. With theirs, the Spanish artists and performers Julian Saenz-Lopez and Izaskun Fernandez make faces and bodies, tell stories and create emotions in front of our eyes, all from lumps of clay.
The story they tell in A Mano (By Hand) is shrewd, funny, touching but unsentimental, and sad.

Read the complete review in The West Australian.

Sunny Ray and the Magnificent Moon (★★★)
Arena Theatre Company
Written and performed by Clare Bartholomew and Dan Tobias
The West Australian Barn
Until 10 October

When we dumb adults go down in the woods of children’s theatre, we better not go alone. We need guides who really know their stuff.
For me, at the Awesome Festival, it’s Harper, who’s sharp as a tack and young enough to be my grand-daughter (she is).
Overgrown-ups’ main problem, of course, is that we don’t get that fart and poo jokes are the funniest things in the universe. But one of the other traps we can fall into is a consequence of the cultural literacy and sophistication of so much children’s theatre these days. We get to expect shows to deliver as if they were written and performed for us as well as them. But, as Harper shows me, they don’t HAVE to be.

This story – the Sun wants to stay up late and party all night with the Moon and Stars, but they hide whenever she appears, is cute enough, and Bartholomew and Tobias are both energetic and unselfconscious performers. But I’m starting to fidget.
But what would I know? Harper writes all her star ratings in my Awesome programme, and she’s a pretty hard marker (although she did break the rules and gave the fantabulous Madame Lark 5½ stars). Three stars, she wrote. Good fun, well done, she said.
And, in that case, so say all of us.  
 
Read the complete review in The West Australian.

And I can't let Awesome go without mentioning Christine Johnson, the fabulous Madame Lark. She held kids spellbound with her saw-playing, bird-calling, shape-warbling and head-vocalising, and left the gob-smacked adults in her audience hoping to find out where the after-party was. Incredible!

Puppet theatre: Cloud Man (★★★½) and The Secret Life of Suitcases (★★★)

Ailie Cohen and Lewis Hetherington
Awesome Festival
Until October 11
(Recommended for 4+ year-olds)

The work of the Scottish puppeteers Ailie Cohen and Lewis Hetherington is always good, and the simpler it is the better. At its best, it’s magical for all ages.
Cohen and Hetherington are at Awesome with two shows. The first, Cloud Man, a solo performance by Cohen, tells the story of Cloudia’s search for these “very quiet, very shy, very hard to find” creatures who hide from us in the clouds. 
Cohen returned a couple of hours later, with her collaborator Hetherington, in The Secret Life of Suitcases. Larry, a tall, thin, tube of a man, works in an office where he revels in the mundane. That won’t do at all, and a mysterious suitcase arrives to whisk him away to a beautiful, leafy park, on a boat to a desert island and off into space in a rocket.
If I had to choose between them, Cloud Man’s simple charm particularly won me over. The good, better and best news is that it’s not a choice you have to make.          

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Benjamin and Me (★★)

Whiskey + Boots
Written, directed and performed by Mark Storen
Illustrated by Jacinta Larcombe

Blue Room Theatre
Until October 24

You’d be forgiven for imagining that a show called Benjamin and Me about a boy and his dog would be a sweet, whimsical story of friendship and loyalty. Probably sentimental, perhaps a little sad. With an adventure thrown in.
You certainly get the adventure, a breakneck, seesawing tale of flying machines, mind-robbing villains and feline heroines, lost tribes and menacing hyenas, but any whimsy or sentimentality it might have had gets lost beneath the action.
As for the sadness – I can’t go into detail, but there really should be lots – I’m afraid you are left with neither the time nor energy to feel it.
If the kids in the performance I saw were a little quiet and dazed, it’s probably because there was little left for them to do.

Read the complete review in The West Australian 

Theatre: Rain (★★★★)

Drop Bear Theatre
Composed by Edwina Cordingley
Designed by The Seam
Performed by Sarah Lockwood, Carolyn Bechervaise and Zoë Barry
Awesome Festival
Until October 11
(Recommended for babes in arms and crawlers)
 
The audience at Rain didn’t applaud at the end of the show. A couple of them nodded off during it. Quite often they were more interested in each other than the performers. There was a disconcerting amount of hugging and smooching going on.
Mind you, the oldest of them was less than a year old, so all this unusual audience activity was to be expected.
For Brandon, Rosalind, John, Jarrah, George, Zoe the Adventurer and all the other squirming, hugging, napping, gurgling and grinning bubs there, it was the time of their just beginning lives.

Read the complete review in The West Australian and have a sneak peek here:

Theatre: Echolalia

Kallo Collective
Written and performed by Jen McArthur
Awesome Festival
Until October 13
(Recommended for 7+ year-olds)

One of the goals of this year’s Awesome Festival is to be welcoming for children on the autism spectrum. Awesome contains a number of events by autistic people and about autism, among them Echolalia, by the New Zealander Jen McArthur.
Echolalia is a behaviour involving the imitation of words, phrases and, sometimes, whole passages by autistic people, often in language they would not normally use and don’t fully understand.
From the outside looking in, autism is bewildering and often frightening. The great gift of Echolalia is to help us see it from the inside looking out. The result is a work that has the intent and appearance of children’s theatre, but lacks nothing for adult audiences.

Theatre: Fluff - A Story of Lost Toys

Fluff: A Story of Lost Toys
Cre8ion, for the Awesome Festival

Devised and performed by Christine Johnston, Lisa O’Neill and Peter Nelson
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until October 11
(Recommended for 3+ year-olds)
 
You know those vox pops in movie ads where audience members rave about the life-changing experience they’ve just had watching, say, a Judd Apatow bromance?
There’s an equivalent in children’s theatre, but it’s more immediate and genuine.
It happens in the auditorium, and sounds something like this: “What’s he doing?” “That’s not funny.” “It IS funny!” “He’s a silly man.” “How does he do that?” (Squeal. Laughter. More laughter.) “Are they robots?” “Why are they doing that?” (Adult laughter. Baby gurgles.) “How did he get out?”, “YEAH!” “Magic!”
And the clincher (from, I’m guessing, a three-year-old): “This movie is SO funny!”
And that, in a nutshell, is the terrific Fluff: A Story of Lost Toys.

Theatre: Moominpappa at Sea

by Tove Jansson
Adapted and directed by Michael Barlow
Creative consultant Noriko Nishimoto
Designed by Leon Hendroff
Composer Lee Buddle
Performed by Michael Barlow and Bruno Michel
Awesome Festival
Until October 13
(Recommended for 5+ year-olds)

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of the Finnish writer Tove Jansson, Spare Parts Puppet Theatre has adapted her Moominpappa at Sea for the Awesome Festival.
Jansson’s odd, whimsical tales of the Moomin family – Moominpappa, his wife Moominmamma and their son Moomintroll – occupy an imaginative territory also inhabited by the Babar herd and the Wild Things, with a little Nordic peculiarity thrown into the mix.
The Moomins are pale, round, irresistible critters with hippo-like snouts, recreated here with impressive accuracy as 50cm puppets. As manipulated by Michael Barlow (who also adapted and directs the story) they are intrepid, resourceful, optimistic – and a little bit formal.

Theatre: Lily Can't Sleep

By Bridget Boyle and Liz Skitch with David Megarrity
Debase Productions, for the Awesome Festival

Director: Scott Witt

Composer: Brett Collery

Performed by Bridget Boyle and Liz Skitch
Seagull Tent, Perth Cultural Centre
Until October 10
(Recommended for 3 – 8 year-olds)

What do our kids get up to at night?
Little Lily (Liz Skitch) is living in a new house. She starts at a new school in the morning and, unsurprisingly, she’s a little daunted and more than a bit sleepless.
Mum (Bridget Boyle) patiently lets Lily run through the usual stalling manoeuvres – drink, toilet, story, find my favourite cuddly toy – but, eventually, the voice of authority has to prevail: “It’s Go To Sleep Time Now, Lily; Why Don’t You Count Some Sheep?”
So Lily learns of the time-honoured technique imposed by exasperated parents on fidgety children. Mum fetches Lily’s toy sheep from a box, she snuggles up and, despite distractions, gets counting.

Theatre: The Empty City

Produced by: METRO ARTS and The Human Company

Director: David Fenton

Writer/Composer: David Megarrity  

Performed by: Tom Oliver and Bridget Boyle

Illustrator/Designer: Jonathon Oxlade

Animation/Film Maker: Luke Monsour


Sound Production & Additional Music: Bret Collery
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Until October 12
 

Mercifully, the times when you watch children’s theatre and feel you are intruding into someone else’s world are few and far between. At its best (and the Awesome Festival is full of examples), it’s as exciting and stimulating for overgrown-ups like me as it is for kids.

Theatre: Kep Kaatijin

By David Milroy with Derek Nannup
Yirra Yaakin for the Awesome Festival
Directed by Derek Nannup
Performed by Shakara Walley, Ian Wilkes and Amy Smith
Until October 14

The Noongar word kaatijin means "learning", or "knowledge", and there's no doubt Yirra Yaakin, WA's indigenous theatre company, believes teaching its audiences is a critical part of its purpose. Just as impressive is how adept the company is at learning from those audiences.
You see it in the growing impact and enjoyment of their series of Aboriginal stories for adults at the Blue Room. And much the same development is evident in the origin stories they tell for children at the Awesome Festival.
This year's, Kep Kaatijin, has much to recommend it, and promises even more for Indigenous theatre for children in the future.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Boats

By Finegan Kruckemeyer

Terrapin Puppet Theatre, for the Awesome Festival
Director: Frank Newman
Composer : Matthew Fargher
Set and Puppet Design : Greg Methé
Costume Design : Roz Wren

Performed by Quinn Griggs and Brett Rogers

Perth Cultural Centre

Until October 9

Quinn Griggs and Brett Rogers

It’s exciting to be back at Awesome, the arts festival for children (or, as its disarming director, Jenny Simpson, aptly brands them, “bright young things”) that runs through the October school holidays and into the spring term in and around the Perth Cultural Centre.

For me, it began with a real highlight: Boats, a rollicking sailors’ yarn by Tasmania’s Terrapin Puppet Theatre. The show was inadvertently involved in controversy at last year’s Helpmann Awards when our own Barking Gecko’s The Red Tree was mistakenly announced as the winner of the children’s theatre gong at the ceremony instead of it, but there’s no doubt that Boats was a more than worthy winner.

The awesomely prolific children’s playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer’s story is a complete adventure for kids, with shipwrecks and circuses, loves lost and found, mateship, and, above all, the irresistible siren song of the sea.

The telling of the tale, directed by Frank Newman, is just as impressive. The performers, Quinn Griggs and Brett Rogers, create sound effects like cinema’s Foley artists (the twisting of a leather belt become the creaking of a ship in a gale; air escaping from a balloon becomes the cry of sea birds). Its visual effects take shape from things seemingly lying about the stage: a knotted length of rope becomes the gull of good omen that flies over the sailor Jof (Griggs); two china cups become the kindly old fisherman, Okinawa Yukio (“age was a wave washing him overboard”), who leaves his boat to the young seafarer. It’s all wondrously inventive, with the deep humour of sudden imaginative discovery that is the greatest gift of theatre for children.

Rogers is an adept narrator of the play’s aquatic occurrences, as well as playing Jof’s offsider, Nic, his sweetheart, Eliza Turk, and other characters, and Griggs is an absolute marvel. His long, twinkling face (you’ve got to be reminded of the Welsh comic Rob Bryden), expressive voice and tough-as-teak body make him any kid’s first mate.

The bright young things with me were rising four (I cheated – the program advises five and up) and 10. The youngster laughed out loud, opened her eyes wide and got fidgety only towards the end of the show’s 50 minutes; her big brother took it all in shrewdly, leaning over to get me to write “very clever” in my notes.

So it was, and much more besides.   

An edited version of this review appeared in The West Australian 7.10.13

Theatre: The Awesome Festival

Kaput
Tom Flanagan

The Awesome Spiegeltent

Until October 19

Catch the Rain

Ellis and Céire Pearson

The Bird Hide

Until October 15

Dr Brown Brown Brown Brown Brown and his Singing Tiger
Phil Burger and Stuart Bowden
The Awesome Spiegeltent
Until October 15

The Awesome Festival in the Perth Cultural Centre is an eye-opening and exhilarating experience for a far-too-grown-up geezer like me.

I took in Spare Parts’ tender, expressive Hachiko and Yirra Yaakin’s Promethean Noongar fable Kaarla Kaatijin (link here and here to their reviews in The West) before seeing the South African father-daughter team of Ellis and Céire Pearson’s Catch the Rain, a parched morality tale of water, drought and corporate greed.

Tom Flanagan is a hugely talented physical performer, and his Kaput, in the Spiegeltent (now there’s a piece of arts infrastructure that’s paying off in spades), is a hilarious adventure in misadventure and back-to-front logic. As he fell through walls and tangled with ladders, glue buckets and other runaway inanimate objects, Flanagan channels every slapstick genius from Buster Keaton to Los Trios Ringbarkus. (Link here to the complete reviews in The West Australian).

Kids come to Dr Brown's rescue

Dr Brown Brown Brown Brown Brown (Phil Burger) and his Singing Tiger (Stuart Bowden) were a smash at this year's Edinburgh Fringe (link here to a review from that season) and I'm sure they will be here. Burger is a remarkable performer (think Sasha Baron Cohen; even better, think Alan Arkin); bemused, sly and inventive, he sent the kids in the Spiegeltent wild with mischievous delight. Bowden, as his sidekick and foil is every bit as entertaining as he rides the waves of improvised mayhem Burger creates with a huge grin and a tiny ukelele. If this show was the late night feature in the tent at the Fringe it would be a sensation; for kids, and the grown-ups with them, it's nothing short of a mid-day miracle. 

Wolfe Bowart is a native Arizonian who now lives in Perth, and last year’s Awesome Festival gave him a chance to play to his adopted home crowd for the first time.
Bowart returns with Letter's End, just as impressive as his 2011 show, The Man the Sea Saw, but even more fun and engaging for young audiences. It's a freer expression of his performance skills and less of a formal narrative than its predecessor.