Blue Sky Theatre Turns Ten

By Glyn & Mary Edwards
September 2009

“When you need lighting just ring me on the mobile, I’ll be on the allotment just down the road”.
This was some recent helpful advice from a village hall technician on a Rural Touring Circuit and contrasted somewhat with the following week’s get-in at a regional playhouse where three techies were on hand to offload the van and focus the lights whilst we fetched a wake-up cappuccino from a nearby Café Nero. Whilst touring is fun, some dates are more fun than others and the ones offering the least fun don’t figure on our tour lists for long.
As Blue Sky Theatre we’ve been touring work for under-fives for a decade now. We play the small scale touring circuit plus middle scale theatres that restrict seating to the stalls. We also visit in schools and village halls and have a micro version of each production that can visit libraries.
We’ve been fortunate in attracting ACE funding for each production and – frankly – without this we’d not have had the luxury of commissioning sets and music, of contracting freelance performers, or of travelling to venues where overnight accommodation was crucial. We can even get paid for the time it takes to create the puppets and devise the script. That’s proved a huge boon (although we haven’t worked out how to get paid for the time it takes to write the funding applications. We’re working on it though.)
We used to tour a new show each year, but this gradually became an eighteen month cycle as each funding-assisted tour had another six months life on a strictly commercial basis after the official end of the tour. We describe our work as ‘musical storytelling with puppets’ and have chosen to draw our source material mainly from the world traditions of folk tale of which Brer Rabbit and Anansi Spider are the most familiar names. Their cousin Ajapa the Tortoise from West Africa has also proved a big favourite. For very young children - who adore the concept of ‘playing tricks’ - stories in which a small and defenceless character outwits larger, more powerful and threatening characters are a useful lesson that brains count for more than brawn. They also provide endless scope for humour which is a key to engaging the attention of this age range – and an often disrespected artistic component.
We’ve had some splendid testimonials from venues (and the odd brickbat or indifference) but it’s the children whose feedback we value most. Who else would spontaneously tell you (as did one nursery child “That was lovely, I’ll dream about it tonight in my head”.
Our productions have always included live music as well as authentic recordings. We are just finishing a tour of The Sun Has Got His Hat On with support from the Trinidad & Tobago High Commission, a production which interprets some traditional Caribbean tales in the context of carnival arts. That gave us scope to have The Sun Has Got His Hat On (a familiar melody to most nursery age children) specially recorded to a reggae beat, as a soca carnival anthem and – with sitar – in the genre known as ‘chutney’ created in Trinidad through a crossover between the music of the East Indian descended and African descended populations. It’s all provided a great musical mix to accompany the shadow and table-top puppetry which tell the stories. Live drumming and other simple percussion are also featured for that all-important clap along, sway along bounce along factor that we favour.
Following the tour we link up with performing arts charity The Fedora Group in their first funded project from ACE SE in which themes from our production are developed into Animal Carnival! – where the traditional theme of the Carnival of the Animals is given a Notting Hill Carnival make-over. It’s an outreach project to schools in partnership with Nuffield Theatre, Southampton, New Theatre Royal Portsmouth and The Hawth Theatre, Crawley. And then for 2010 we’ll start the next phase of the company’s work by taking Brer Rabbit for a spin in One, Two Hullaballoo – stories you can join in too.
Whilst all this is exhilarating, there’s a point at which paperwork, form-filling, artspeak, feedback forms, performance criteria and bureaucratic nonsense can become unbearable (can you believe a local authority contract with a clause requiring us to guarantee compliance with the European Human Rights Act?). That’s why we spent the summer wearing our other hat and busking with Punch and Judy on Worthing Beach. The Box Office takings are substantially less –but some enjoyments are beyond price.

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