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WORD TO LEARN: CONTORTIONIST – A PERFORMER WHO BENDS HIS OR HER BODY IN INTERESTING & UNCOMMON WAYS. I.E. VISHA LOO.

Hey Kids, Visha Loo is a local contortionist here in Calgary. Contortion is a pretty neat and rare art form to practice. But in this SimpleFunVideo Visha shares some simple tricks to help you become an everyday contortionist!

Our Public Tickets are on sale now. Tell everybody that you know. And go to this link immediately! http://www.calgarychildfest.org/info/public_tickets.php (share the link with everyone–Go see shows with friends. Our great sponsors help us make tickets to world-class, international theatre only $13.99 each! That makes it way easier to see all your favourite shows.)

Kids, you come to the Calgary International Children’s Festival every May to see great plays, and we keep telling you about amazing plays happening in YYC all year long. But what if all that play-watching makes you want to try play-making?

Well, YOU CAN!

And who better to share hints on how to do it than Mark Hopkins?

He’s the co-artistic director of Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre, a huge voice in Calgary’s arts/theatre/community scenes, he hosts massive parties meant to introduce everybody in Calgary to each other, and HE’S BEEN WRITING PLAYS FOR AS LONG AS HE CAN REMEMBER.

Have some Simple Fun with Mark Hopkins and Playwriting.

http://www.swallowabicycle.com/
https://twitter.com/swallowabicycle
http://www.facebook.com/swallowabicycle

Kids, Chef Cam owns a whole bunch of great restaurants in Calgary (probably some of your parents’ favourites–Muse, Winebar Kensington, AKA, Brasserie Kensington…) and makes such great food that his Executive Chef at Muse is competing RIGHT NOW on Top Chef Canada. (Cheer for Xavier Lacaze!)
This week in Simple Fun Chef Cam is bringing you a fun way to play with an all-time favourite food: PIZZA!

A lovely sentiment was sent to us from our friends at TYA Ireland and the associated network of Theatre for Young Audiences (ASSITEJ) to help us relish the spirit of World Theatre for Children & Young Audiences / Take Your Child to the Theatre Day . It is a poem written by award-winning French-Canadian Playwright and co-founder of Montreal’s Le Carrousel Theatre Company, Suzanne Lebeau.

Dear friends,

I love the theatre.

I love the magic of this art where we are all together

in the same room, and yet unique….

Everyone has his story,

barefoot or luxury sandals

in the cold of the poles or the heat of the tropics.

Each according to his mood,

his family, his tastes, the colour of his skin, his problems, his dreams.

 

I loved the theatre even more

when the actress that I was came to meet young audiences.

I realised just how fine the line is between fiction and reality.

Who is telling the truth, if truth exists?

Who is lying?

Who speaks better and more tenderly from man to man ….

Reality or fiction?

 

The temptation is great to believe that reality is truth

and that fiction lies.

Why then would a slap in the face,

a simple slap on stage, have upset me so

the other day

while

yesterday I watched, unmoved, live images of war on television

telling me that tomorrow there would be a bigger catastrophe

more serious

more fraught.

 

Why?

The question is fantastic – and inexhaustible.

It is this mystery which makes the theatre so precious and so rare.

All of you sitting there – waiting for the lights to come on …

Tell me, where is the truth, if truth exists?

Tell me, where are the lies, if lies exist?

 

With all my warmest wishes,

 

Suzanne Lebeau (playwright)

How Theatre for Young people could Save the world

by Lauren Gunderson

March 20th is World Theater for Children and Young People Day. Some of you might be thinking, “Oh lord, why do we need a day to celebrate actors being silly, wearing bright colors and singing obnoxiously at squirming kiddos and bored parents?”

But if you think that’s what Theatre for Young People is, you’re missing out on truly powerful, hilarious, bold, engaging, surprising theater that might just save the world.

Around the world artists are creating a new stripe of Theatre for Young People that combines the elegance of dance, the innovation of devised theater, the freshness of new plays, the magnetism of puppetry and the inciting energy of new musicals. Kids have access to more and more mature theatrical visions premiering from Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center to Atlanta’s Synchronicity Theatre to San Francisco’s Handful Players to Ireland to Adelaide to Kosovo to Cape Town.

Windmill Theatre’s Wizard of Oz. Jude Henshall. Photo by Tony Lewis.These plays range from re-imagined fairy tales and adaptations of favorite books to brand-new plays and electric new musicals about everything from physics to bullying to The American Civil War.

But how could theater, especially theater for young people, really matter in a world as fraught and disparity-scattered as ours?

The Amazing Adventures of Dr. Wonderful (And Her Dog!) at The Kennedy Center, Oct 2011Not to sound overly grand (too late), but so much of the toxicity in this world comes from a collective draining of empathy. We don’t understand each other, and we don’t want to. But theater invites us — no, forces us — to empathize.

As my friend Bill English of San Francisco’s SF Playhouse says, theater is like a gym for empathy. It’s where we can go to build up the muscles of compassion, to practice listening and understanding and engaging with people that are not just like ourselves. We practice sitting down, paying attention and learning from other people’s actions. We practice caring.

Kids need this kind of practice even more than adults do. This is going to be their planet and they’ve got more time to apply that empathy and make a difference. Buddhist roshi Joan Halifax challenges us to actively and specifically teach children (and vote for presidents with) empathy. Why not take your child to the theater to do just that.

In fact “Take A Child to the Theatre Today” is the campaign theme of The International Association of Theaters for Young Audiences for the next three years.

If you take a child to the theater, not only will they practice empathy, they might also laugh uproariously, or come home singing about science, or want to know more about history, or tell you what happened at school today, or spend all dinner discussing music, or learn how to handle conflict, or start becoming future patrons of the arts.

On March 20th, take a child to the theater. Take them all the time. And don’t “sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.” Lean forward, engage and start changing the world for the better.

From Center For Children’s Theatre Development’s production of Madeleine’s War in Kosovo

We were thrilled to receive the “Parent’s Choice: Best Festival” award from the readers of Calgary’s Child Magazine this week. This was our 15th year as winners, because you guys voted us as the Best Festival in town! A great big thank you goes out to all of our supporters for your votes and continued encouragement. 

Our Executive Director, David Anderson and Marketing Manager, Sho Sengupta were on hand at the luncheon to receive our award. It was a great time. We got to celebrate with all of the other businesses and services that support parents and families in Calgary. We’re very proud to be part of this community and look forward to inspiring and engaging Calgary families for many years to come.

Kids, have you ever wanted to learn how to JUGGLE?

Well, you are in luck! This week in Simple Fun, our Guest Star, Terry Rock, shares how to make juggling balls, teaches how to juggle, and even has a great trick for you at the end. After watching the video you might think that he’s a professional juggler, but, no, he insists that he is not. What he actually does for work IS juggling–but he doesn’t juggle balls, he juggles……ideas. That’s really difficult (because ideas are hard to hold in your hands), but Terry does a great job of it. He’s a pretty special guy in Calgary. As the head of Calgary Arts Development, he spends his time making sure that plays, art galleries and even festivals like the Calgary International Children’s Festival have all of the resources and support they need to become absolutely awesome. 

You might notice from the Simple Fun Video that Terry’s not originally from Calgary (we don’t know how we let that Roughriders comment slip by). He’s actually from Melfort, Saskatchewan. He grew up there playing hockey, loving it every time his teams had a match-up against their rival town, Kindersley (where our first Simple Fun Video Star, Cory Wilson, is from). Terry was huge into hockey. He still loves the sport so much that when he went to university he wrote his final paper all about hockey. And the professors at the university liked that paper so much that they made him a Doctor. Now, keep in mind, he’s not a Medical Doctor, so he can’t fix you up when you’re sick (though we do hear he makes a pretty mean chicken noodle soup) but he is a Doctor of Management. And that means that Terry has a pretty good background for doing amazing things for the arts community in Calgary.

So how did a hockey boy from Saskatchewan become President and CEO of the Calgary Arts Development Authority? Well, the simple answer is, he helped to start it. You might think that doesn’t make sense; why would a hockey boy start an arts organization? I mean, we all know that “sports aren’t arts”…right? Well, for the most part, that might be true. But just because you enjoy one doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the other; and it especially doesn’t mean that you can’t learn something from one and apply it to the other.

Terry, in fact, loves live…anything! Concerts. Theatre. Hockey. You’re as likely to catch him at a Flames game as you are to see him at Theatre Junction. And that is because Terry is interested in something called “culture“. We’ve defined “culture” before, but we’ll go over it again here:

All of the people who form a certain group, whether that group is a city, a country, or even a classroom, develop a “culture” among them. You can get an idea of what the culture is by reading things the group members have written or looking at the artwork they have created, even the types of songs they sing and the religious beliefs they might have. Essentially, culture is the overall picture we get when we look at everything a group says, makes, and does.

Now that we know what culture is, we’ve got to look at what culture does. An easy way to figure that out is to think of it this way: if cities have cultures what does culture do for the city? Calgary is a city. And, as a city, Calgary has lots of city-like things. We have lots of buildings downtown, and big roads like Deerfoot and Crowchild. But, would Calgary still be a city if nobody lived here? No. To have a city you need people, and they have to be doing things. Roads and buildings are only created so that people can easily share the things they say, make and do.  So, ultimately, a city is a place that is built to make it easy for people to share culture.

When we interviewed Terry, he told us that his ultimate dream is to “city build”, which is exactly what it sounds like: if he were a superhero, his power would be to build cities. But as a regular person, how does Terry build cities? Well, if a city is built on culture, what better way to build cities than to help form the things that help people say, make and do? So that’s exactly what Terry does with Calgary Arts Development. And that’s pretty heroic if you ask us.

Calgary Arts Development, or, CADA, works to make Calgary a place where it is easy to make culture grow by enabling talented people to do their jobs better and then helping to promote their art. They say “arts [is] the key driver of the long term success of our city.” So, the lesson you can take away from this is that if you want to help make Calgary an even better city, get involved in its culture. If you need ideas, a great place to start is CADA’s culture website: CalgaryCulture.com. It has lots of listings about great things you can be a part of all over Calgary. You could do like Terry’s own kids and go to performances that have all of their favourite interests covered: dance, drumming, martial arts. Or, like Terry’s eldest son, you could become part of the show. Simon is a storyteller with Calgary Young People’s Theatre, and even performs with us at the Children’s Festival. Wouldn’t that be fun?!

How does CADA create the conditions that help culture grow? Terry applied what he knew from hockey.

When Terry was focusing his doctorate studies at the University of Texas on hockey, he was actually learning about a lot of different things that were at play in a culture. He was looking at how teams trade players, which players they keep, and how they create their very own culture on and around the team. He was interested because the type of culture that a team has helps to determine how likely they are to win games. It’s really interesting stuff because there is no magic formula. He had to think about the players, the managers, the team owners, and the fans and the buildings that they play in–even where they travel for games. So, when Terry graduated, he had a lot of cool knowledge about how people interact in a culture to become successful at achieving their goals. Now that’s knowledge you can apply to a lot of things. It worked in his favour. After Terry left the University of Texas he got snapped up to be a professor at the University of Calgary. He was thrilled! …Not only to have a great teaching job, but to be in a city with a professional hockey team, the Calgary Flames.

He worked as a professor for three years and then moved onto his dream job, city building.

Terry built programs with a couple of different groups that advised the municipal government of Calgary on how to design policies that were good for artists. Eventually that grew into what we know as the Calgary Arts Development Authority. Since its start in 2005 it has reached out from the municipal government of the City of Calgary into the arts community to help build culture. And it has done really well. Thanks in large part to CADA, the Canadian government named Calgary the Cultural Capital of Canada for 2012! Isn’t that awesome?!

See, learning how to juggle balls can help you learn how to juggle lots of different things in your life. Keep practicing!

Grown-ups…

Terry is the President and CEO of CADA (Calgary Arts Development Authority). Since its inception in 2005, CADA has acted as Calgary’s first ever municipally owned arts organization dedicated to promoting, investing in and developing the arts culture in Calgary. It holds at the core of its organization that arts will be central to the long-term development and success of Calgary as a whole.

Bred out of the 2004 Civic Arts Policy, the Authority has been instrumental in the bids to bring a wealth of notable projects to our town, including the 2008 Juno Awards, Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, and the 2012 Cultural Capital naming. The re-development of the East Village, the construction of the National Music Centre, and the transformation of the King Edward School into an artists’ hub are all part of CADA’s intrepid vision for the city of Calgary.

If you would like a whirlwind tour of the great minds collaborating throughout Calgary, we encourage you to partake in Calgary Culture‘s PechaKucha Nights. They are part of an internationally syndicated series of highly charged lectures in which speakers are given only six minutes and forty seconds to express their viewpoint and experience on a topic. In that time they must present twenty slides, each advancing automatically every twenty seconds. The night always turns into a juggernaut of ideas. CADA has been hosting this series since 2009, in which time audiences have seen the likes of such Simple Fun Video Stars as Mike Morrison, Steve Nagy (Kids’ Fest’s Social Media Coordinator) and Cory Wilson (our Development & Community Outreach Manager at the Fest). It is a great time.

A wee bit more about Terry…

Terry is a husband and father of three. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Marketing from the University of Saskatchewan and a Ph.D. focused on Strategic Management from the University of Texas. He and his family enjoy traveling throughout the world with a firm rule of only one bag a piece. Stamps from Costa Rica, Germany, the Ukraine and Poland cover their passports.

Words to Learn

For Kids:

advise: when you give somebody suggestions for how they can do something in the best way possible, you are “advising” them.

CEO: short for “chief executive officer”. That is a lot of big words that are used as a title for the person who is the leader of certain types of businesses. Their job is to be in charge of managing and organizing the work and workers in that company to make it function in the best way possible.

culture: different groups of people go about their daily lives in slightly different ways. Depending on where and how they grew up, they speak different languages, eat different food, play different games, and tell / believe different types of stories about where their people came from and what is most important to them. ‘Culture’ is a word we use to talk about all of the things that one group does and believes. There are lots of different ‘cultures’ in the world and so many things to learn from every one of them.

develop: to help something to grow. “Development” means the process of helping something to grow. Calgary Arts “Development” works to help Calgary’s arts and culture grow, or, “develop”.

enable: to give something or someone the ability to do something. When you “enable” something you make that thing possible.

management: the types of steps that you have to take or the plans that you have to put in place to organize a group of people and the work they are doing. When you “manage” people you control what they are doing so that you can work towards a goal together.

municipal: anything relating to a city or town and its government. The Government of Calgary is our “municipal” government.

president: a person who is elected in a vote to be the leader of a company, an organization or even the government of certain countries. This is different than a CEO because the responsibilities and process for becoming the president vs. CEO are not quite the same.

resource: a supply of money, materials, ideas or people that can be used or help a person or group of people to make something.

For Grown-ups:

?! (Interrobang): correctly shown as an imposition of the question mark and exclamation mark over one another — ‽ — the “interrobang” is a non-standard punctuation mark used to combine the function of the two independent symbols. It is as if to forcefully ask a question.

Calgary Arts Development (CADA): an arms-length municipal authority charged with promoting, cultivating and investing in Calgary’s arts community in order to propel city-wide economic and cultural growth with a focus on public and artistic impact. http://calgaryartsdevelopment.com/

Calgary Culture.com: Calgary Arts Development’s online hub for information regarding Calgary’s lively arts and culture scene. The website provides free event listings, a weekly newsletter about YYC arts, and a nifty calendar that is great for helping to plan your next trip out on the town (great for tourists too). Find out what is new and interesting in your own backyard: http://calgaryculture.com/

Calgary Young People’s Theatre: co-founded by our own Festival Programmer, Brian Dorscht, CYPT has been providing Calgary’s youth with fantastic opportunities to participate in great theatre since 1992. Please get involved: http://www.cypt.ca/

Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame: on Canada Day 2011, the brand new and incredibly interactive and mind-blowing and engaging and eye-popping and beautiful and…okay, we’ll stop…Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame opened at WinSport’s Canada Olympic Park. Thanks to efforts by the city government and organizations like Calgary Arts Development, Calgary is quickly attracting a number of national institutions. After the excitement of CSHoF, we at Kids’ Fest are eagerly awaiting the opening of the National Music Center at the old King Eddy Hotel. If you haven’t yet, give yourself a wonderful treat and visit the Sports Hall. http://www.sportshall.ca/

King Edward School: championed by Calgary Arts Development and the Calgary Foundation, this disused historic school is in the process of being transformed into a mixed-platform arts space. It is intended to act as an incubator for artists and organizations working to propagate artistic advancement in Calgary to collaborate to an end of prosperous innovation and cultural dynamism. Get involved in the incredible transformation: http://transformkingedward.ca/

National Music Centre Canada: presently in development, this national institution will fill 135 000 square feet in Calgary’s East Village (spanning the site of the historic King Eddy Hotel) with recording studios, artist-in-residence programs, live musical events, interactive exhibits and a plethora of other exciting programs. We could explain it further, but this will get you more psyched: http://www.nmc.ca/

PechaKucha: derived from the Japanese phrase for chitchat, PechaKucha is the name given to an originally Japanese presentation methodology in which speakers are given strict time limits. They must present only twenty slides, each automatically advancing at twenty second intervals. This makes for lively multi-speaker nights that have become very popular worldwide. Calgary Arts Development hosts a PechaKucha Night (PKN) every few months in which speakers tackle issues regarding specific themes. The next PKN is on May 28 following CADA’s Report to the Community. It will be held at the Grand Theatre. For info and (free) tickets: http://www.calgaryculture.com/pkn

Theatre Junction: located in the century-old Grand Theatre, Theatre Junction is Calgary’s stewing pot for contemporary performance art. Bringing in and creating some of the most astounding theatre pieces the world has to offer, TJ has carved a well-received niche in the international theatre community. It is headed by Artistic Director, Mark Lawes. Grown-ups, find your next theatre outing here: http://www.theatrejunction.com/

For more Kids and Grown-up-friendly reading practice, including other “Words to Learn”, keep clicking through our blog posts. We guarantee you’ll learn a word or two, and you might even be inspired to get out and see some of the great performances that are going on around Calgary right now!