The Wiggles, Hi5, and Peppa Pig have their place. Often, it’s a very welcoming, mum-needs-a-break-for-five-minutes kind of place. But sometimes it’s nice to do something a little different. Introduce the kids to some ‘high culture’, so to speak. Or at the very least, go to a show that’s not all technicolour-bouncy-shouty-ness that leaves us excavating our handbag for painkillers. Enter, the brand new ACT 3i Festival for Children; a breath of fresh air in the Singapore children’s entertainment landscape. Bravo!
Designed for kids aged between two and twelve years, this festival is going to pack a (gentle) punch in May and June. ACT 3 International is dedicated to going off the beaten track just a little, to bring non-mainstream work to the kids and parents of Singapore. Artistic Director Ruby Lim-Yang personally hits the road, visiting festivals around the world to collect the best possible productions to present back home. As a result, the schedule is jam-packed full of high quality theatre performances from local companies as well as the far-reaching corners of Italy, Sweden, Argentina, the U.K., and Canada. There’s also a carefully curated visual arts program, and workshops for educators and parents to help with creative parenting and child development through the creative process. Sign us up!
So what makes this festival different? It’s perhaps a little more thought-provoking, a little more crafted, and a little more interesting than your everyday children’s entertainment. It’s a tongue-in-cheek adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the festival opener with an all-Singapore cast. Hurrah!). It’s an orchestra that makes “lovely music about love with love for lovely people”. And it’s a Roald Dahl-inspired drop-off workshop that uses storytelling, improvisation and even gelato-making to teach the values of kindness and the importance of eating in moderation.
Parents of super-small people – those aged around two years – will be happy to hear there’s even a performance designed especially for them. Marmalade, by Claire Parsons Co from Sweden, is a beautifully tactile performance that blends poetic movements with circus-based actions such as juggling. The characters view the world through the five senses as they invite the audience to feel, taste, and think about what marmalade can be.
Not ones to waste an opportunity, ACT 3i Festival organisers are also making use of the visiting artists and practitioners to run workshops – or ‘Conviviality Sessions’ – for parents and kids where the focus is creative play and different types of theatre such as puppetry, improvisation, and rhythm. The artists from the festival productions will lead these sharing-and-learning sessions, so the whole family can benefit from the expertise of those in the creative know.
The ACT 3i Festival runs from 24 May to 5 June at the Drama Centre, National Library Building.
This post is sponsored by ACT 3 International.