THE week-long Edinburgh International Children’s Festival, which finishes today, continues to be a thing of beauty. Brilliantly curated by its director Noel Jordan, the festival impresses both in the consistently high quality of the work it stages and the diversity of its programming.
Including text-based theatre, dance and a variety of performance pieces that combine artistic disciplines, Jordan’s 2022 programme has catered for audiences ranging from babies to young adults in their mid-teens.
This year’s festival has been notable for its showcasing of Scottish productions (including Ellie Griffiths’s glorious Sound Symphony and Daniel Padden’s lovely Whirlygig).
Such a showcase needs to be set in an international context, and this year’s programme boasted a number of pieces from overseas. Fortunately (for children aged three to seven) these included Light!, a wonderfully inventive dance-theatre work by the Tout Petit company of Belgium (which concludes with two performances at The Studio venue on Edinburgh’s Potterrow today).
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Delightful in its ingenuity, this deceptively simple piece involves nothing more than two young dancers, two torches, some stage lights on wheels, a roll of light-absorbing material and a charming electronic soundtrack.
Having led their young audience into the auditorium (by asking them to follow the progress of the light projecting from their torches), the female dancers wait for darkness to descend. They then illuminate their legs and begin to perform a choreography that echoes young children at play.
One jumps, the other jumps, as if copying her. Joyfully, they stomp together, or, playfully, push against each other, back to back or side to side.
All of this is accompanied by a tremendous musical score that ranges from pleasing bleeps and blops (in the piece’s humorous moments) to energetic electronica (to accompany the more dynamic dance sequences). The latter includes, excitingly, the dancers speeding across the stage on the wheeled stage lights.
Audience members can make what they wish of the imagery the show creates. To my eyes, there were moments when the large bulb of one of the stage lights appeared like the head of a giant (evoking Don Quixote jousting with windmills).
The initial, short choreography (which runs to half-an-hour) concludes with the dancers at play in a fascinating fabric that absorbs light (so, for example, the performers have a little girl lie on the material, they then trace around her body with a torch, thereby leaving a temporary, child-shaped outline on the fabric).
The dancers then pull out more rolls of the magic material and a box of torches, and invite their young audience to begin a 20-minute playtime.
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It’s a fabulous way to end a show that is marvellously imaginative, humorous and intriguing, and beautifully performed.
Equally impressive for its performance is Birdboy, an astonishing piece of physical theatre (for audiences aged eight to 15) by Irish company United Fall. Dance-theatre performer Kevin Coquelard gives a high-octane performance as the titular Birdboy, an isolated adolescent who seeks to make sense of the world as he retreats to a beaten up old car that has been abandoned in a forest.
The cleverly constructed, purposely erratic musical soundtrack (which evokes both the themes and the emotions of the boy’s difficult life) is punctuated by passages of recorded speech that articulate the causes of his alienation and loneliness. By turns funny and moving, and always sympathetic, this is a highly original piece about the difficulties so many young people encounter during the often perilous process we call “growing up”.
Brilliant and very distinct stage works from Belgium and Ireland, Light! and Birdboy exemplify the mission of a festival that never ceases to impress.
For tickets for today’s performances of Light!, visit: imaginate.org.uk
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