The grandmother speaks from the belly of the beast in Boca Del Lupo’s contemporary take on Little Red Riding Hood.
She remarks on how scary wolves look from the outside but how empty the wolf is on the inside.
“And what it must be like to be a wolf and have everybody be afraid of you,” said Boca Del Lupo’s artistic producer, Jay Dodge.
The reimagined fairytale, called Big Bad, will premiere at the Vancouver International Children’s Festival, May 26 to 31.
Boca Del Lupo’s artistic director Sherry J Yoon and Dodge consulted with a child psychologist and students in Grades 1 to 4 in the making of this multimedia production that was commissioned for the festival.
“Empathy is a big part of dealing with danger and fear, understanding where the other person is coming from, and it’s really funny,” Dodge said.
The grandmother, played by award-winning playwright and actor Lucia Frangione, refers to Wikipedia while she’s in the wolf’s belly and notes wolves don’t actually eat people.
“The more you know, the less there is to be afraid of,” Dodge said.
A movie-like segment of the production features a woodsman, a “bumbling boob” according to Dodge, who uses a selfie stick and live feed akin to Skype or Facetime to take the audience on a journey outside the theatre.
The mother character will get audiences involved in helping her craft a monster with paper and live video.
What danger looks like today isn’t as simple as it perhaps was when Charles Perrault penned Little Red Riding Hood, which was published in 1697.
“Wolves don’t look like wolves so much anymore, when you think about Internet predators,” Dodge said.
He and Yoon wanted to explore the tension between keeping your child safe without making them afraid of the world in the show, which is meant to appeal to audiences of all ages.
Big Bad’s creators hope the fun and engaging performance will provide parents, teachers and kids with a vocabulary to refer back to in discussions about safety and potential dangers.
Boca Del Lupo combines its fearlessness in telling stories with technological sophistication, as it did drawing on real-life accounts of conflict photographers with PHOTOG., its know-how in creating all-ages productions as it has done at Stanley Park and beneath the Burrard Street Bridge, and its love of collaboration to create Big Bad.
“We get a lot of energy out of working with people from different disciplines,” Dodge said. “That’s what keeps it surprising and delightful both for us in the creation process but also I think it translates to the audience as well, it takes it to the stage.”
Mara Gottler, co-founder of and costume designer for Bard on the Beach, fashioned the costumes for Big Bad, and craft artist Valerie Thai helped Boca Del Lupo design the monster-making segment.
Boca Del Lupo also presents a Micro Performance Series that supports the creation and development of new works by local, national and international artists working across disciplines in intimate and small-scale forms at the Anderson Street Space on Granville Island. The next installment, May 28 to 30, is I Think I Can, an interactive model railway installation by Terrapin Puppet Theatre from Australia.
Big Bad will run at the Granville Island Revue Stage. For more information, see childrensfestival.ca or bocadellupo.com.
