Festival fun: A bumper harvest of children’s shows is on the way this autumn

At the beginning of September, more than 50 artists from various disciplines gathered at the Ark, the children’s cultural centre in Temple Bar. They came from Scotland and Denmark, Belgium and Thailand. There were delegates from Norway, who hosted the group in their embassy one evening, and, of course, there were artists from Ireland. They were meeting to celebrate the culmination of a three-year Creative Europe collaboration, PUSH+, which aimed to stimulate dialogue and generate new artistic ideas for young audiences. The themes they explored were practical and conceptual: home, failure, different bodies. The modes of exploration encompassed both research and workshops. Several artists created new work as a result of their explorations, some of which was showcased to their peers on the child-centred stage of The Ark.

The intensity of discussion and the evident energy of co-operation at the PUSH+ gathering belied the fact that much of the project took place during the pandemic, when theatres and arts spaces all over Europe were closed. The fact that the closing event took place in Dublin was a cause for celebration, then, but the size of the event and the numbers participating from Ireland was also significant. It is indicative of how much the cultural sector for children in Ireland has grown and been strengthened in the last 10 years.

This can be seen as well in the bumper harvest of work for young audiences being launched this autumn at The Dublin Fringe Festival in September, and the Dublin Theatre Festival, Limerick’s Bualadh Bos Festival and Baboró International Arts Festival for Children in Galway in October, as well as in individual arts venues across the country, which host a wide variety of diverse programming for young audiences this winter. As Aideen Howard, Director and CEO of The Ark, explains: “The fact that [Covid] halted production for many artists means that there is a great range of Irish work emerging simultaneously. That creates an accidentally curated overview of the work that is being made for children in this country at the moment. So we have a real sense right now of who is making work for children, what kind of work they are making. While the ‘great pause’ might not have been good for artists,” she continues, “I cannot think of a single example where the art has suffered. There is a really sophisticated range of work emerging right now.”

From work created by children for an adult audience to Irish-language dramas, from non-verbal dance shows to a series of international collaborations touring the country, the range of subject matter and styles is exciting and energising. All the artists need now is to reconnect with audiences, many of whom will have never been to the theatre before.

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When curating the programme for Baboró, executive artistic director Aislinn Ó hEocha was conscious that the festival would need to attract an audience who “haven’t necessarily been part of the Baboró community before”. The challenge with a children’s audience, Ó hEocha explains, “is that it is constantly refreshing. [Children] naturally ‘age out’ of the work. What might appeal to them one year is not appropriate for them any more, so many of the children we would have had at the festival before [the pandemic] have moved on, and we will need to attract many new families, who won’t have a tradition or context for the festival yet.”

Howard also sees this as a challenge for The Ark’s Theatre for Children programme, which returns as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival this year. “You will have children who have never been to the theatre before,” she says, “but there is an excitement and opportunity there. [Before the pandemic] there was a terrible anxiety about the relevance of theatre; people were trying to justify the place that theatre had in the culture, but what happened during Covid was that we got our answer: that original instinct of being together in real space and real time sharing art is a vital part of who we are.”

Some of the work of audience continuity and development, however, was maintained during the pandemic. Ironically, this took place in an online capacity, as Howard elaborates. “If the pandemic taught us that there isn’t much of an appetite for online theatre among adults, we found the opposite held for our audience. We realised that there is a massive demand for high-quality filmed performances and events in schools, and this is a big change in our practice at The Ark.”

What this means is that the Dublin cultural centre suddenly has a national reach that it never dreamed of. “It has been startling,” she admits. “Last year with one of our shows we reached 10 per cent of the schools population in Ireland, and that was at no charge to the school. We were also able to supplement the experience for teachers with classroom packs, so they felt confident presenting and sharing the work with children. So if we return to the idea of ‘every child has a right to culture’ [as enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child], the challenges of the pandemic actually allowed us to find a way to have that national reach, to talk about the idea of ‘every child’ and ‘all children’ with integrity.”

Ó hEocha says that Baboró experienced a similar appetite for digital engagement during the two-year Covid period, and last year, for the festival’s 25th birthday, they pioneered a hybrid festival approach, which included the audio series Don’t Forget to Wash Your Hands, by Maisie Lee, a documentary that recorded children’s experiences of the pandemic. Broadcast on Galway Bay FM, as well as online, it allowed the Festival to reach a different kind of audience despite the Covid limitations. (The series has just been nominated for an IMRO award in the Music, Arts and Culture category.) This year, their programme acknowledges that outreach success by maintaining a digital strand, which includes a new audio series, The Little Robber Girl. Available to podcast through the national RTÉjr platform, it will be accompanied by a series of storyboarding and audio workshops, also delivered online. As Ó hEocha puts it: “we are a festival for Galway, but we can complement this by moving out beyond the borders now.”

Both Howard and Ó hEocha stress the important role that festivals and cultural organisations for children play in reaching out beyond a youth audience too. As Howard puts it, “part of our job [at The Ark] is to give the child an opportunity for their voice to be heard, not just by other children, but by adults too.” With this in mind, The Ark produced its first live show at the Dublin Fringe Festival this year. Lookout, created by Andy Field and Becky Darlington in collaboration with The Ark Children’s Council, staged a one-on-one conversation between the generations, in which children shared their thoughts about the future of the city with adult audience members.

Meanwhile, for Baboró's Tiny Mutiny/An Ceannairc Beag Bídeach, which will be performed in Galway on October 15th and 22nd, two youth ensembles from Galway City and Council are working with local artists to stage a boisterous protest, advocating for the need for a dedicated children’s cultural space in the city, and displaying ideas for what that might look like. That future, as the children involved both with Baboró and The Ark see it, is bright and joyful and full of promise.

The Theatre for Children programme runs at The Ark from September 28-October 16 as part of Dublin Theatre Festival

Bualadh Bos runs at the Belltable and Lime Tree Theatre, Limerick from October 1-14

Baboró International Arts Festival for Children runs from October 15-23

Kids’ choice: what’s on around the country

Chalk About

The stage becomes a giant blackboard in this interactive dance piece from Curious Seed, Scotland. Oct 8-9, The Ark; Oct 13, Lime Tree Theatre, Limerick; Oct 18-21, Black Box Theatre, Galway

Grand Soft Day

A joyful celebration of bad weather from bilingual Branar. Sep 28-Oct 2, The Ark; Oct 6, Linenhall Arts Centre; Oct 9-10, Belltable, Limerick; Oct 14-15, Roscommon Arts Centre; Oct 19-23, O’Donoghue Centre, Galway.

I Wish I Was a Mountain

Live music and storytelling from Toby Thompson animate this classic fairytale. Oct 7-8, Belltable, Limerick; Oct 12, Hawk’s Well Theatre, Sligo; Oct 14-16, The Ark; Oct 26, Riverbank Arts Centre