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Edinburgh Reporter
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Reporter
Another successful Children's Festival is over
The Edinburgh International Children's Festival has just finished and has already been declared a major success. The festival was attended by 17,000 people which is an 11% increase from last year, with 87% of all tickets sold, and it will be back next year from 30 May to 7 June 2026. The event began with a packed Family Day at the National Museum of Scotland which was free to attend and which 7,460 people attended. This was followed by a week of shows attended by 3,615 pupils from 41 schools including nursery, primary and secondary schools. Festival Director Noel Jordan, said: 'From uplifting productions celebrating the diversity of our global sector and centred around the perspective and viewpoint of the child, to incredible industry panel discussions and provocations, what a fantastic week this has been. As my final Festival I could not have been prouder. With such an incredible and dedicated team behind it I am sure the Festival will continue to go from strength to strength. Thank you to all our audiences, funders, supporters and performers who make this festival such a joyous experience.' The shows included work from 7 different countries and the premiere of new commission Tongue Twister created and performed by Scottish artist Greg Sinclair and commissioned in partnership with Aberdeen Performing Arts. The show which features Greg attempting to say tongue twisters in as many different languages as possible, delighted its audiences with its language antics and gorgeous costumes. 'That was the bestest show in the world!' (child). Tongue Twister is touring to the Light the Blue Festival this weekend in Aberdeen. The Festival also enjoyed a run of the 2024 'must-see' Fringe show The Show for Young Men performed by Robbie Synge and young performer Alfie exploring topical ideas around masculinity and male friendship, and finished on a high with 6 sell-out performances of Double You, a raucous and high energy circus production from Belgium hosted in Portobello Town Hall. As well as families and schools, the Festival welcomed over 310 delegates from festivals and arts organisations in 30 different countries including Australia, Hungary, Thailand and Norway also attended the Festival. The delegate programme provided a platform for programmers, producers and artists to see and discuss high-quality work, share work in progress and network with peers from all over the world. In addition to the delegates who attended in person, 56 more attended the digital delegate programme online. The much-anticipated new commission the Unlikely Friendship of Feather Boy and Tentacle Girl which unfortunately was cancelled at the last minute due to a performer injury, plans to open in August for this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe as part of the Made in Scotland Showcase. The Edinburgh International Children's Festival will return in 2026 from 30 May to 7 June under new direction, following Noel Jordan's announcement earlier this year that after 10 successful years at the helm, he will be standing down and returning to Australia in November. Imaginate Family Day_National Museum of Scotland_24th May 2025 Counterflows_6 April 2025 Counterflows_6 April 2025 Imaginate Family Day_National Museum of Scotland_24th May 2025 Counterflows_6 April 2025 Counterflows_6 April 2025 Counterflows_6 April 2025 Imaginate Family Day_National Museum of Scotland_24th May 2025 Counterflows_6 April 2025 Young audiences from infancy to S1 at Edinburgh International Children's Festival. Young audiences from infancy to S1 at Edinburgh International Children's Festival. Young audiences from infancy to S1 at Edinburgh International Children's Festival. Young audiences from infancy to S1 at Edinburgh International Children's Festival. Like this: Like Related
Scotsman
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Theatre reviews: Tongue Twister Shades of Shadows Saria Callas
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Tongue Twister, North Edinburgh Arts Centre ★★★★ Grown Ups, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★ Shades of Shadows, The Studio, Edinburgh ★★★★ Saria Callas, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★ It's Children's Festival time; and at the sparkling new North Edinburgh Arts Centre, one of Scotland's leading makers of theatre for children, Greg Sinclair, is rolling out his latest show Tongue Twister. It's a remarkable show at many levels, both because it uses and reflects on language in ways that international theatre for children often tends to avoid, and because of the lavish, surreal energy of its visual and physical response to that verbal content. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Tongue Twister | Imaginate Sinclair begins by telling us that he has been fascinated by tongue twisters ever since since his grandad taught him to say 'She sells sea shells on the sea shore"; and on designer Karen Tennant's luminous stage - backed by two huge sun-like circles in which words occasionally appear - he runs through a series of wild and hilarious visual variations on the theme, rolling around the stage in great frothy layers of sea-blue and white fabric. He goes on to to introduce tongue twisters in a dozen different languages, from Japanese and Swahili to Gaelic, riffing merrily, for example, on images suggested by the French tongue-twister 'dans ta tente ta tante t'attend'. In the end, what Sinclair and his team create is a glorious 50 minute tribute to that wonderful, universal, playful moment when human beings pause in the grown-up business of dealing with the content of language, and begin to amuse themselves by toying with the forms of it. And Tongue Twister not only celebrates that moment, but explodes it into whole episodes of visual and verbal silliness, as wild and surreal as they are funny, and joyfully human. Grown Ups | Imaginate If Greg Sinclair is a children's theatre maker who works by effectively becoming a child for the length of the show, I was also struck by two EICF shows, this week, which invited children to laugh (which they did, most heartily) at the sight of adults making a complete hash of being grown up. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Grown Ups, by the Compagnie Barbarie and Bronks of Belgium, is a slightly overlong but brilliantly staged piece pf slapstick about a team of four grown women failing to cope with a series of mysterious water leaks onto the stage. Shades of Shadows at The Studio, meanwhile - by Tangram Collective of France and Germany - is an exceptionally beautiful and clever shadow-play piece about two women trying to sit down for a cup of tea together, that had the children in the audience chortling with pleasure, for a blissful 45 minutes. Shades of Shadows | Florian Feisel And out beyond the children's festival, this week's Play, Pie and Pint drama came as a harsh reminder of how repressive societies can simply forbid essential forms of play and creativity, including those as basic as singing and dancing. In Sara Amini's powerful but awkwardly structured monologue, Saria Callas, she plays an Iranian woman brought up under the repressive rules of the Islamic Republic, yet as rebellious as any teenage girl, and desperate to become a singer. As an adult, and a single mother in London, she finds that her beloved son has inherited her love of performance, and - like her - wants the freedom to express himself as he is, whatever the cost. And although Saria's story takes a while to reach this crisis-point, there's no doubting the tremendous strength and charisma of Amini's performance, as a woman not only inspired by the greatest singers of both Iranian and European culture, but fully capable of making the same kind of impact on an audience, given half a chance.
