making a new puppet show

Birdbone Theatre is in studio striking the papier-mache flint stones and praying for the spark of a new, spectacular work of puppet theatre to agree to take form.

In this work we are driven to consider colour and dream-inducing composiiton by the beautiful prints and collages of Slovak illustrator Viera Bombova. While this show could never be an hommage, it certainly is lifted by the breath her pictures release into the world.

Birdbone Theatre is 13 years old, so naturally the puppeteers and show makers have aged some, and their imaginations too, a little leathered and pounded flat by the demands of the times. So we pray, in making this show let our minds split like ripe fruit and flower with impossible colour, to in the least, honour so beautiful of a World in all her glory. Let in the colours, let dreaming twist open the dry torn-paper of rationalizations worn thin. Let them make fertile ground for stories. Meaty stories. The ones that nourish.

Bear’s Garden picks up where the folk tale left off. Twice Bear has been tricked in his home in the Wild. Now the Peasant, who has eaten by theft, needs the help of messengers from above and beyond to leave the confines of impossibility and be dreamt into another story.

Given the situation, we have decided to formally center young people in this work, not because our other shows were excluding of them, but because their willingness to be enraptured by Mystery, and their instinct for Story, can help their older people see other things.

We are humbled and ever grateful for the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council, which makes the early creation of this work possible, and which will also make it possible for us to offer a free children’s puppet theatre making workshop at the Elgin Library October 18th and 19th.

Bear’s Garden company is Aleksandra Bragoszewska, Alison Gowan and Ekaterina. We are grateful to our sponsors and partners in the work: Ontario Arts Council, Maitland Tower, Rideau Lakes Public Library, and CFRC 101.9fm Queen’s Radio.