Stage Door News
Stage Door News
Award-winning musician Steven Chmilar underscores fiery grassroots storytelling in Snack Music, where Real People (the audience) share their personal True Stories. Professional animators replay the audience’s stories using phantasmagorical puppetry. Snack Music will premiere at the Next Stage Theatre Festival January 7th to 18th, 2015, located at the Factory Theatre. Audiences are asked to bring their best (or worst) true stories, anecdotes, or confessions, or simply come to hear the candor of others. “Who are you living next to in this anonymous metropolis?” asks Snack Music puppeteer Ingrid Hansen, “It’s time to find out.”
Storytelling and puppetry are, of course, among the oldest forms of entertainment. Live storytelling slams, with an emphasis on vulnerability and confession, have arisen and spread across North America in the past 15 years or so — a period that also saw the ascension of reality TV, tell-all memoirs, and share-all social media.
Puppeteer Andrew Young’s story is that he discovered his yen for puppetry through his frustration with reading. “I’m dyslexic, so working with a script I have to read a sentence three or four times to get it,” says Young. “Cold reading scripts in front of others is terrifying for me – there’s this ingrained idea of not wanting to look foolish. However, working physically with puppetry or dance I’m able to understand the story much faster than If I was to read it off a page.” Good puppetry, Young says, creates an electric visual language far more universal than a written text. “If theatre was just about the words then you would go read a book.”
In the age of staying in to binge-watch Netflix in one’s pajamas, live storytelling events like Snack Music entice folks to leave their homes and meet other humans face-to-face. “We’re the instant gratification generation,” says Young, “we’re addicted to our screens. We can get whatever we want when we want it, and if we don’t we get frustrated . . . we’re all going to die alone, unable to communicate with another human being.”
Puppeteer Ingrid Hansen offers an antidote: “Live storytelling gives me a personal window into someone else’s experience. I feel more alive, and less alone. Each night will be a new experiment. If it’s done right, we will all leave feeling a little less afraid of each other.” Also, there are free snacks.
Snack Music is created by SNAFU as part of the Next Stage Theatre Festival: twelve days of the best indie theatre in Canada.
Featuring puppeteers Ingrid Hansen & Andrew G Young, and musician Steven Chmilar (co-created by Hansen, Young, & Chmilar, with Guest Director Ginette Mohr.)
Snack Music
Opens January 7th and runs to January 18th, 2015
VENUE: Factory Theatre at 125 Bathurst Street (at Adelaide)
Tickets $10 available online at fringetoronto.com, or by phone: 416-966-1062
Videos, photos, detailed performance dates and more at www.snafudance.com
Photo: John Avery and Cameron McPhail in #UncleJohn at tThe Banff Centre. ©2014 Brent Calis.
2014-12-06
Toronto: "Snack Music" at next stage Festival shows you your life story in puppet form