Jungle Shimmy is a unique music and dance adventure through India, Iran, Turkey & Egypt. Children are introduced to exotic instruments, age-old rhythms and traditional dances through familiar Nursery Rhymes, fun props, puppet friends, ancient fairytales and magic.
Jungle Shimmy offers a cultural experience for young learners. They discover unusual instruments like Tef, Darbouka, Ghungroo & Zill and sing familiar Nursery Rhymes in Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, Greek and English. Clap and play rhythms like Masmoodi, Ayoub, Karatchi & Ciftitelli & learn traditional dances from Asia & the Middle East.
There is also a Fit For Life emphasis using dance to allow children to experience and appreciate their own body and understand how to stay fit for life. Authentic Bellydance movements like belly pops, hip drops & spinal rolls open up an exciting new vocabulary of movement that in turn encourages balance, coordination, spatial awareness, creative expression & self confidence.
Each Jungle Shimmy session is woven together by age-old folk tales, interesting facts, games, magic, puppetry & learning fun.
Jungle Shimmy by Magic Oasis, 2015. Images by Jo Chapman.
Asanti Dance Theatre, are back! Following two highly successful Education & Families tours, A Taste of Africa are again offering their highly popular incursion package – A Taste of Africa. This performance and workshop package is an energetic and inspiring taster of African culture that has been specifically designed for Victorian schools in line with the Victorian Essential Learning Standards and more recently with the AusVels. A Taste of Africa is a world class dynamic performance and workshop package which allows students to witness and participate in dance, drumming and village activities across an exciting two hour arts experience. Touring during Cultural Diversity Week, this program offers your students the opportunity to explore African culture at its best!
A Taste of Africa by Asanti Dance Theatre. Images by Asanti.
This gorgeous family show is set in the lost mail room, a strange, dusty 'nowhere land’ where homeless parcels and undeliverable letters live. A simple but ingenious set of cardboard boxes sets the scene. There is a highly-strung mail room dweller, intent on keeping his boxes in order, and a free-spirited new arrival whose sense of adventure will leave you gasping for breath. The discovery of a strange parcel throws the oddly delightful duo into a quandary. How will they deal with this unexpected development?
Bubblewrap and Boxes by Asking for Trouble. Images supplied.
Hachiko and his master, Professor Ueno, have a daily routine: every morning the pair travel to Shibuya train station and every evening Hachiko waits on the platform to meet his master.
One day, the Professor does not return from work but that doesn’t stop faithful Hachiko…
For the next nine years, he returns to the train station at the precise time the train is due.
His conviction that he will once again meet his master inspires other commuters, creating neighbours from strangers. Friends rally around Hachiko during his vigil and celebrate his life and memory when his remarkable journey ends.
This moving true story will delight your students with its celebration of the remarkable joy an animal can bring to our lives. The themes of resilience and loyalty are enhanced with a message of how change is normal and can be a valuable part of life. The production is humorous and playful with cartoon sensibilities combining inventive use of paper, cardboard boxes and unfolding worlds.
Hachiko by Spare Parts Puppet Theatre. Images supplied.
Adam and Atticus Brown have known each other since… forever. Since they sat in a belly together and waited to be born. And twins are all supposed to be the same… but they never are.
When they wake in the morning, Adam’s hair is nice and ready for the day, but Atticus’ looks flat and stupid. When they catch the bus to school, Adam sits up the back with the older kids, and Atticus carries the books. When Atticus goes to say something clever to a girl, Adam always says it first, and better.
And when they stand in the sun together, even though they’re just the same height, even though they have been for every minute of their lives, Adam always seems to cast the longest shadow. But Atticus has a plan to change all that...
This journey into the lives of two brothers with dramatically different approaches to life and its challenges, is performed with ingenuity and imagination by one of Tasmania’s most experienced actors and devised by one of Australia’s foremost writers for young people, Finegan Kruckemeyer.
The Boy with the Longest Shadow by Tasmanian Theatre Company. Images supplied.
The awkward first date... Romeo has the hots for Juliet.
Juliet thinks Romeo is kind of cute.
All he wants is to impress the girl of his dreams and with a romantic dinner for two, a rose and a few love poems up his sleeve – it’s foolproof, isn’t it? The night takes a bizarre, hilarious twist when an uninvited character crashes the date, sending the star-crossed lovers on a whirlwind journey of epic proportions and interesting encounters. If you enjoyed shake & stir’s Shake Up!, you will love Tragic Magic – a fantastic introduction to Shakespeare that will engage your students and leave them hungry for more!
Image supplied
When an eccentric misfit meets a strange world of contraptions, everything turns into a challenging and surprising discovery.
Did you ever wonder how a vacuum cleaner and ironing board can help a man with his hat? Or how a broom finds itself making up part of a band? Or how eggs can walk or records play without a record player?
These and other world mysteries are revealed in a quirky and heart-warming story of a search for finding one’s place. Squaring the Wheel brings together circus skills, puppetry, magic, wacky mechanisms, unexpected music and audience participation in a set full of delightfully impractical metal and wooden contraptions.
Images by David Wyatt
Wilbur and Wilma Wilde, a slapsticky, brother/sister, Victorian-era, storytelling duo, wheel their cabinet of curiosity on stage and announce that it’s story time. They’re telling the story of Sally Saber, who loves the idea of an adventure, but is too afraid to actually start one. One day, stuck inside her clinical, white home, Sally draws a picture on the wall. She transforms the entire hallway into a wild jungle. When her parents discover what she’s done, she’s sent to her room where she decides tonight is the night for adventure.
The lights go off and a strange thing occurs. Sally’s whole house begins to transform and dissolve into an illustration – a fusion of her neighbourhood and a tiger’s jungle. Throughout her journey Sally encounters lots of creatures – household objects that have come alive – and rescues her poor old inside-out teddy. Sally finally confronts the tricky, sleeping horses, calling on help from the audience to solve their riddle.
Sleeping Horses Lie is lyrical, energetic and enchanting and speaks to the power of imagination and the discovery of our hidden potential.
Sleeping Horses Lie by Terrapin Puppet Theatre 2014. Images supplied.
Spike is the story of a young echidna who hatches from his egg, only to find he is in the wrong nest. He has no spikes yet, he doesn’t know who he is and doesn’t know where he belongs. One by one, he finds himself in the nest of a crocodile, an emu, a lyrebird and a pelican. He is in danger. He feels frightened, rejected, alone. He meets a young girl playing by herself in the bush because she is bullied by other children. She is shy, clumsy and awkward, but she helps him discover where he belongs. Spike finds his place in the world in a way that parallels her own story.
Told through the artform of contemporary shadow theatre, Spike is a dynamic interactive experience. It is entertaining and fun, as well as being a catalyst for a discussion about bullying, difference and belonging. It offers students tools for overcoming these barriers. It also highlights the remarkable biology of Australian animals, especially the echidna, one of the only egg-laying mammals in the world.
Performed by Jenny Ellis
Written by Jenny Ellis & Anne Brooksbank
Directed by Jacob Williams & Clare Batholomew
Puppetry Mentoring by Richard Bradshaw
Spike by Little Wing Puppets 2014. Images supplied.
A place where the world of fairytales meets the world of board games, where one must play to discover what the rules are - but beware the Queen, for it is with her that all power resides. With the pomp and ceremony of ridiculous rituals and eccentric dance, characters from an over-sized chessboard come to life to conduct an interactive game, where no one knows what the rules are, and not everyone’s a winner.
The Curious Game is a predominantly non-verbal performance that uses archetypal characters. Using symbols and gesture, The Curious Game challenges the audience to become participants and interpret the Queen’s signs without discussion, but by thinking laterally and acting physically.
The Curious Game is physical, visually engaging and highly interactive. Each performance is a unique experience influenced by the participating students and their ability to be creative and trust their own instincts.
Performed and devised by Carolyn Hanna, Nick Papas, Penny Baron.
The Curious Game by Born in a Taxi. Images supplied.
Paper Planet is a world filled with tall, strange cardboard trees. Children enter this quiet and delicate space with wonder and, using simple materials of paper, cardboard and tape, begin to populate the world with animals, plants and products of their imaginations to hang from the branches and nestle among the roots.
Paper Planet is an ever-growing installation that involves the whole school – a constantly evolving artistic work created live by award winning Polyglot Theatre artists and student participants. The towering trees are set up in the morning in the shared space at the school, and over the course of the day, the world becomes intricate and full of life, as students of all ages and their teachers engage in the creative process. A live soundscape, affected and added to by children in the moment, transports everyone further into the fantasy world.
Moving beyond audience participation, Paper Planet is experiential, tangible and wholly immersive. The work encourages creativity, confidence in personal choices, skill development and imaginative play, and demonstrates the ease in which simple materials can be transformed.
Polyglot is excited to tour Paper Planet as a full day residency that results in a shared artwork the whole school have created. This is an opportunity for teachers to build upon the skills and techniques this project illuminates and use the examples in the teacher’s kit to enhance their curriculum. Paper Planet evokes strong responses from children of all ages and becomes a vibrant play space where drama, technique, sound and craft are part of a rich and involving experience.
It is simple creativity at its most appealing, following children’s desire‐lines and inventive capabilities.
Paper Planet by Polyglot Theatre. Images by Sarah Walker 2013.
Performed with puppetry, Short Pants No Holes is a series of interactive stories created with children. Barking Spider Visual Theatre creates theatre with the audience – using the children’s offers and ideas - through interactive improvisation and puppetry. Stories grow with the children’s input: children’s imaginations leap and soar as their ideas fly. No idea is too big or too small. The critical factor is that children have to work together in the storytelling.
In Short Pants No Holes the puppets and the stories are hands-on and inclusive and everyone has the opportunity to create. Through interactive theatre, children learn the essential ingredients to traditional story-telling and object puppetry. The show uses two forms of puppetry, Bunraku and Object Puppetry, and every child has the opportunity to play with and operate an object puppet as part of the show. At Short Pants No Holes the carrots are complementary – but BYO imagination.
Short Pants No Holes is an action-packed celebration of imagination, and an experience in creative cooperation that is incredibly fun!
Short Pants No Holes by Barking Spider Visual Theatre. Images by Sarah Walker.
