School's out and children everywhere are pestering their parents for something fun to do. Starting next week, the Taipei Children's Arts Festival will break the spell of summertime boredom by providing a month of performances, educational trips and artistic activities for youngsters and like-minded adults to enjoy.
"We hope to provide kids with a multi-faceted artistic adventure," said Taipei City Cultural Affairs Commissioner Liao Hsien-hao (
This is the fifth year the Department of Cultural Affairs has organized the festival and this year the theme is master storyteller Hans Christian Andersen.
Born 200 years ago in Denmark, Andersen wrote such stories as The Ugly Duckling and The Little Mermaid which still inspire the imaginations of children around the world. His tales will come alive through the medium of theater, which, as in summers past, is the most important part of the festival due to its virtue of being more than the sum of its parts.
"It's more than music, it's more than acting, it's more than visual arts," said Liao, "and we hope that through this mixed art form we can expose children at once to all these different genres."
Taiwan's foremost children's theater group, Ifkids (
The first foreign group performing will be Bulgaria's Varna State Puppet Theater, with Thumbelina on July 23. The group was a huge hit with the kids at last year's festival and was invited to come back with an Andersen-themed show.
They chose to present the story of the tiny girl born from a flower, but instead of simply acting out the story from start to finish, the group designed a performance to illustrate the process of inspiration that created Thumbelina.
As Andersen sleeps on one side of the stage, three spirits representing his inspiration bring the story to life with puppets. The play, absent of dialogue, conveys its message of mystery and fantasy with lighting, music and its brilliantly crafted marionettes.
Equally fantastic is the Irish group Big Telly's swimming-pool production of The Little Mermaid. The actors playing mermaids and mermen swim around wearing long, green, single-legged bathing suits and flippers in a pool decked out with seaweed, rocks and a castle. The music and lighting makes this a magical experience not to miss, so get your tickets well in advance. Big Telly's next gig will be Denmark's huge Andersen festival in August and September.
An exciting new contributor to this year's festival is the South Korean group Tuida. "The group's members are all quite young and very creative," said festival organizer Fang Chiung-hua (方瓊華). "They're like an environmental group because they try to reuse materials in creative ways for their props." Tuida will be presenting Sweet Story in a Big Book, which, while not by Anderson, is a fairy tale that captures the imagination and won the Best Performance Award at the International Association of Theater for Children and Young Adults festival in 2004. Each time a page turns in the "big book" on the stage, a new scene appears with new characters, played by both humans and puppets. "You'll be thinking, `Next time the page turns, where will we find ourselves?'" Fang said.
Some indoor performances by local groups to look out for: Ifkids' Three Cat Cookies, based on a picture book of the same name about dealing with loss as a child; Shiny Shoes Children's Theater's Let's Go to the Big Island, about Penghu and environmental protection; and 123 Theater Group's When the Fairy Meets the Devil, which will give kids a taste of traditional Chinese theater.
The festival's approximately 30 performances will be supplemented by various activities designed to get kids interested in art and inspire their creativity. The "art train" is a series of activities at different museums around Taipei designed to keep kids and their parents busy all day. It was created as a solution to the festival's problem of decentralization.
"We don't have a large area in Taipei where we can hold all our activities, but we want people to be able to spend a whole day of fun," said Fang. "Since the performance venues couldn't be moved, we started thinking of fun things to do nearby."
For example, if a family is planning to attending a performance at Tianmu Sports Park in the evening, during the day they can enjoy specially planned activities and exhibitions at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the National Taiwan Science Education Center and the Hong-Ga Museum. Participants will get discounted entry with the "kid's passport," a fat book listing all festival activities that was handed out at elementary schools and can be picked up at CKS Memorial Hall and Zhongxiao Fuxing MRT
stations.
Other fun events include the Parent-Child Dress-Up Festival (Aug. 8) where kids can dress up with their parents and parade around the Xinyi Shin Kong Mitsukoshi, and the Taipei Graffiti Fairy Tales, which will give kids a chance to create art on the walls of museums around town.
Festival notes:
What: 2005 Taipei Children's Art Festival
When: July 16 to Aug. 13
Where: Outdoor performances Da-an
Forest Park, Tianmu Sports Park and
City Hall Square.
Foreign group performances:
Thumbelina -- CPC building of Kuo-kuang Hall (中油國光廳);
The Little Mermaid -- Taipei National University of the Arts swimming pool
(保一總隊游泳池);
Sweet Story in a Big Book -- Social Educational Hall, Wenshan Branch
(社教館文山分館)
Tickets: NT$150 to NT$200 through ERA
ticketing www.ticket.com.tw,
or (02) 2365 6287).
Outdoor performances are free.
Details: For performance and activity
times and venues visit kids.culture.gov.tw,
call (02) 2736 5982 or pick up a schedule
at CKS Memorial Hall or Zhongxiao
Fuxing MRT station
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