As artistic director, it's Marnie Perrin's job to make sure Surrey Children's Festival entertains and educates at Bear Creek Park and Surrey Arts Centre, this year from May 26-28. "Hop to It! Get Arts Active" is the theme this time around, with roving performers, Community Spirit Stage entertainers, a festival procession (12:30 p.m. Saturday, May 28) and other colourful and fun attractions on the calendar for three days.
For guidance to the on-stage action at this year's fest (the seventh annual edition), we turned to Perrin for insight into the headliners, all of which are ticketed shows:
Anne Glover's Trickster Show: "She tells stories with string play.? They're bilingual, in French and English. The characters are made of this string she works with, and she interacts with the audience really well, and gives them ideas about how to do it at home with string, too. She mesmerizes the audience. She comes out wearing just plain black, not a big set, and she just starts with these stories. The whole audience just zooms in on her, very engaging, as she tells these stories. It's amazing how she comes up with these characters made of string -just zoom, zoom, zoom, loop, loop, loop and there they are -- a turtle or a dog that walks with a leash across the stage. She's very talented, just great."
Charlotte Diamond: "She last came to the festival in 2008. When she sings, I find she does it in a way that she really looks at people in the audience, so it's as if she's singing to people directly. We all know her songs so well and she sings in such a warmhearted way, so it's like the kids are right there singing with her. She's so warm as a performer and person that when she sings that people need four hugs a day, she really means it?. Her show will be mostly the favourites, and she will bring some new songs, too, so audiences can expect that."
Kunda African Culture, Music and Dance: "It's traditional African drumming and dance, so it's got that big energy, those big sounds. The younger ones will love that, and the older ones will get involved, too, get pulled up on stage to drum and dance with them. It's a group that comes from Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe and Canada -they do have a couple members from this country -and they bring together a show that traces a link back to where they come from, and they talk about that area of the world. It's so high energy, the show."
Be the Circus: "This stars Flying Bob, and the show is just like the title says, a three-ring circus. He juggles, balances chairs, he tightrope-walks and unicycles, all of the above and more, and he brings people on stage to help with his juggling. That one we've billed as an all-ages show, because older kids will find it fascinating to watch how skilled he is, and he's a clown for the younger ones, slapstick."
The Man Who Planted Trees: "It's a show from Scotland, and we're extremely fortunate to have them here this year, a group called Puppet State Theatre Company. They've been touring this show for a couple of years and they're making their way across Canada to major children's festivals, and we happen to be one of the stops along the way. It's a puppet show, quite a serious story about a man who has a tragedy in his life, and he moves to the south of France and starts to plant trees, and over 50 years of planting trees he builds a forest. With that quite somber tale, there's a dog performed by one of the puppeteers, and the dog is the comic relief for the piece. It's funny and charming, an adaptation of Jean Giono's environmental classic, a well-known story?. The message is one of perseverance but also that one person can make a change, believe in what you're doing because that's how it starts, with one seed, one person having a vision."
The Stories of Faces: Horta Van Hoye: "She's a visual artist who comes out on stage, with a few figures out there with her, and she has a giant newsprint roll and she rips off pieces of the paper and sculpts -- right before our eyes, in a matter of minutes -- these beautiful figures, and she does storytelling with them. By the end of the piece, the stage is littered in this beautiful landscape of these figures she's created right there in front of the audience?. She's from Belgium and has been living in Quebec for a few years."