The 2010 Taipei Children Arts Festival will create a one-of-the-kind wonderland for the children of Taipei, in wishes to convey the literacy and humanistic concern about “natural ecology,”
For Buchettino, co-produced with Societas Raffaello Sanzio from Italy, the seats in the theatre are replaced by beds, with special sound effects to create a forest-like situation. Under the comforts, the children learn with Buchettino how to face challenges and turn peril into safety. This is a genuine bedside story.
Titeres de Maria Parrato from Spain is staging Ping─The Bird Who Couldn’t Fly. With clowns, masks, puppets and magic-like images of music, it is about how a penguin, aspiring to fly, really understands himself in the quest of his dream.
Tiny Paradises by Aracaladanza, also from Spain, is composed of eleven dance sequences. Utilizing such trivial stuff as newspapers and black rubbish bags, the dancers create a magic dreamland where the children will be surprised over and over again by big-mouth birds walking on balloons, super-huge strawberries and little dancing puppets.
The three ticket-selling domestic shows are the top three winners of the 2009 selection contest of creations and productions for children theatre. Seeing Ten Lessons of Angels, one can learn how to protect one’s beloved. All the fairy-tale heroes get together in The Big Secret to have a great adventure. And the innovative work of Taiwanese opera, The Miser, teaches the children over laughter how to manage money.
To celebrate the opening of the Taipei Children Arts Festival, the outdoor shows are performed animatedly at Dahu Park in Neihu District for four straight days. Midsummer Night's Dream and Taiwanese Culture Show innovate and develop traditional Taiwanese culture, delighting both adults and children. Happy Days bestows everybody in the audience with a blissful mind through traditional Amis music and dance. The rock-n-roll concert of Baby Rock in Wonderland is designed for parents and their children. Come on! Let’s take this chance and cry out our love for each other!
When you dig into the free community artistic shows performed throughout the districts of Taipei city, you get to see innovative shows of traditional performing arts, such as puppet drama and shadow puppet drama, which focus on the "concern of natural ecology.” Ling Fu, the writer of natural literature, is invited specially to write the column on the feature plants of all the communities, providing children with versatile experience of arts. This year, ten quality movies are selected for the Children Film Festival to make the children perceive the mysteries of nature with a casual mind.
Toy Theater Workshop, the DIY workshop most popular with children, is run by The Puppet & Its Double Theater, which is an outstanding Taiwanese company of puppet theatre directing children to direct, act out and handcraft the most special stories in their mind. Kids Fabric Workshop of Nature Silhouette teaches children to create little fabric art works with grass and flowers at the scenic Yangming Mountain, leading them through a designer’s creative process.
The 2010 Children Arts Festival is a beautiful and surprise-packed adventure in wonderland. Through the perceptual guidance of arts, we wish that aesthetic literacy would take root in minds of the children of Taipei, making them the seeds of creativity and love for nature that grow up merrily.
Source and photo courtesy of 2010 Taipei Children Arts Festival (2010臺北兒童藝術節)
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