Brilliant silliness, a postman and fairies light up Galway

The Baboró festival is succeeding in getting children hooked on the arts and using their imaginations, writes Lorna Siggins.

There's a delightful moment in My Uncle Arly, the quite brilliantly silly Edward Lear escapade staged at last week's Baboró International Children's Arts Festival in Galway, when three of the main characters have become young siblings at a table.

Spruced up neat but fidgeting with anticipation, the trio have been primed by their dad to be at their best behaviour for a very important visitor - Mr Lear, artist, writer and traveller extraordinaire. The trio try, but inevitably things start to go wrong.

"Stop behaving like children!" their father roars in exasperation, one plate of soup having already ended up in the guest's lap. "But we are children," his charges bleat. At this point, the father leaps on the table, incandescent. He jumps up and down repeatedly, and roars - as only a tantrum-throwing toddler can. And if there are any perfect parents in the audience at this point, they're the ones whose faces might crack if they dare to risk a smile.

There were laughs a-plenty at Baboró this year, not least during the opening night co-production by the British-based Hoipolloi and Tiebreak Theatre companies. Lear's tales of the Jumblies, the Pelican Chorus, the Dong with the Luminous Nose, the Pobble who had no Toes, combined with the story of his own life, "led us to use the idea of leaving somewhere to never return as the central narrative," My Uncle Arly co-author Shon Dale-Jones states.

Throw in continuous improvisation of the text by actors, musician and the multi-talented designer Stefanie Muller - who manages to play two dozen parts in addition to the day job - and you have 70 minutes of nonsensical exuberance.

Based on one of Lear's many trips through Europe while working as an artist during the mid-19th century, it relies on a simple set of coat stands, tea-chests and trunks as it moves from an English train station to a French ferry port to an over-zealous Italian bureaucrat's office and beyond.

All the while, there are mad mutters about setting sail in a sieve and sitting on the wall hearing the biscuit buffalo call, interspersed with wonderful wordplay (pizzas from Pisa), vignettes from the Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, meals of moth soup, and a riotous demonstration of the workings of a floppery stick.

A stick of another kind helped to save the baby who almost became a changeling in An Gabha agus a Ghasúir, the debut production of Connemara's newly-formed Fíbín Teo.

Directed by Rod Goodall of Footsbarn and Macnas, the story (as Gaeilge) of fairies up to no good relied on brilliant puppetry and a beautifully designed set, along with the musical and narrative talents of Nuala Ní Chanainn. It was complemented at the Black Box Theatre by Laura O'Callaghan's beautifully sculpted installation and story, entitled The Dog Who Wanted to Fly.

The crafty Teater Patrasket of Denmark relied on basics, using little more than a couple of skirts doubling up as curtains and shawls and their own vivid facial expressions to tell that old favourite, Snow White. The intimate setting of NUI Galway's Bank of Ireland Theatre lent itself to a lusty response from the school children present who plied the Danish couple with questions afterwards, along with several demands for a full reprise.

One of the most magical shows during a week of myth and mirth was Vélo Théâtre of France's Enveloppes et déballages in An Taibhdhearc - billed as the story of "a dinosaur, an egg and one very exhausted prehistoric bird in need of a holiday". In the production, a postman on his bicycle, loaded with packages of various shapes and sizes, sees mysterious smoke emerging from the largest of the boxes. The poor official succumbs to temptation and opens his cargo.

As he does, he unfolds a series of tiny landscapes, occupied by tiny birds and reptiles, visited by several minuscule mountain-climbing explorers, and all handmade by the artist himself, Charlot Lemoine. Lemoine and colleague Tanja Castaing describe their plays as "scientific poems, to be discovered with a spyglass or astronomical telescope", and also an imagination. "Use it," Lemoine advised his young audience in An Taibhdhearc, pointing to his temple, when several present wondered about the contents of the unopened cardboard containers.

And Baboró's director, Lali Morris, lined up much more for this year's programme, including South African Pedro Espi-Sanchis's The Magic Lekolilo Bird, Junior Galway Youth Theatre's Shoe Shop Swindle, Nico Brown's Seashore Show, and the British company, Flying Gorillas. They took their South American bombos, cymbals, flute, trombone and western Samoan Fa'ataupati Slap dance around various schools in Galway before landing back in the Town Hall Theatre.

The dancing, acting, music-making cast used plastic buckets and boxes, fluorescent tubing and their own bodies as percussion instruments during the hour of rhythm, which alternated between order and chaos. The performance was preceded by a workshop involving about 30 children, who had some of the best fun when they took to the stage for the final nonsense song and dance. Not quite so much fun for some very weary members of the audience up in the balcony who had to endure a 20-minute delay in the show's starting time.

Always working on a limited budget, Baboró has been constantly evolving and changing during its short life and this year was no exception. For the first time, it had its own art trail, involving the work of students from the Rosedale and Fairlands schools run by the Brothers of Charity in Renmore and Newcastle, Co Galway, respectively. More than 50 students with special needs from the two schools participated in the project, which was co-ordinated by art teacher Holly Mullarkey.

Some of the artists were unable to hold a brush, but used rushes and other instruments for their abstract expressions. Each painting was accompanied by a panel with a photograph of and narrative about the individual artist. Sadly, two of the participants, Alan Burke and Sorcha Finan, didn't get to see their finished work as they died earlier this year.

Morris was keen to develop the outreach element of Baboró's programme, which she began last year in partnership with several of Galway's resident artists. This year, Jeff Raz from the Julia Morgan Institute in Berkeley, California - an affiliate of the Lincoln Centre Institute of New York - flew in for the week. His remit was to work with three visual artists, five drama teachers, up to 25 teachers and youth facilitators and any available children on activities related to the festival shows.

The initiative is an opportunity to extend Baboró's influence beyond one week of fun and mayhem, by "leaving something behind for the teachers to work with and carry through," Morris explains. And no better show to work with than the absurd My Uncle Arly. Fiona McDonagh, a drama teacher with Cups and Crows Educational Theatre Company, was familiar with the Lincoln Centre Institute methodology and had incorporated it into her class plans. She found working with Raz invaluable in terms of developing her approach: "It encourages a very strong line of inquiry among children, both at pre-engagement and post-engagement stages, and gives them a far better understanding of the creative process," McDonagh explains.

Just one of Baboró's bookings, Nico Brown's Seashore Show, crosses the border into Co Mayo this week for the Roolaboola Children's Arts Festival, which opened yesterday at the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar. The continued survival and development of both children's festivals, against the financial odds, is testament to the commitment of individuals who believe, as Philip Pullman of the Guardian stated in an article last March, that art is vital for children's sustenance.

"The difficulty with persuading grown-up people about this," Pullman wrote, "is that if you deprive children of shelter and kindness and food and drink and exercise, they die visibly; whereas if you deprive them of art and music and story and theatre, they perish on the inside, and it doesn't show."

Roolaboola

Barnstorm Theatre Company's new production, Martha, two productions from Blue Boat Theatre, entitled School 4:Dreams and Journey to the Centre of the Earth, contemporary dance, stories, song and a film day form part of the Roolaboola Children's Arts Festival programme which opened yesterday in the Linenhall in Castlebar, Co Mayo.

The week-long programme includes traditional stories and song with John Campbell and Len Graham, an introduction to blues and jazz by Barbara Martin, and the climax is a night-time grand parade at 7 p.m. on Friday.

Roolaboola has 27 different workshops, including painting, puppet-making, plaster casting, clowning and work in drama, dance and music, throughout thise week until and including Bank Holiday Monday, October 25th. Tel: 094-9028886.

There will also be one performance of Hoipolloi and Tiebreak Theatre's co-production of My Uncle Arly in An Grianán Theatre, Letterkenny, Co Donegal, on Monday, October 25th at 7p.m. Tel: 074-9120777