Baking Time: An international collaboration between Presentation House Theatre and U.K.’s Oily Cart Theatre, Nov. 25 – Dec. 11. For more information and showtimes visit phtheatre.org.
Flour flies as the actors on the Presentation House stage juggle baking, puppeteering and singing all at once in an interactive show for children, Baking Time.
Characters Bun and Bap lead the audience on an adventure while the smell of baking bread fills the theatre from the on-stage oven. The premise of the piece is based around what to do while waiting for the treats to come out of the oven, so together they make a story about a little loaf of bread, Loafy, and a journey she goes on.
The kids get to feel baking ingredients, find buried utensils, and pass Loafy around, helping her travel through forests, oceans, and floury snowstorms. Director Kim Selody says “military precision” is required to keep the show rolling as little helping hands from the audience join actor Leslie Dos Remedios on stage for a full sensory experience.
“The interesting part is that we don’t start really rehearsing until we get our audience. The junior bakers, when they show up… they’re like other characters in the play,” Selody says.
“Baking is quite precise in terms of how long things bake for, mixing the ingredients, preparing, it’s got its own rhythm to it and its own timing. This has a trajectory which works pretty precise, so the involvement is more helping out, helping us get things and find things on the set and helping participate in the playing section while we’re waiting for the bread to bake.”
The secret for guiding the junior bakers through the story is all about language, says Selody, who has one strict rule: never say no. Like any improvisational performance, the actors have to roll with what they’re given and keep the story going.
“It’s a little scary as an actor because all of a sudden you have this wildcard character in the show and you ask for a wooden spoon, they might bring you a plastic bowl! So how do you negotiate that without having to say no? I feel like if we do our job right we won’t have to say no,” says Dos Remedios.
In rehearsals, most of the time was spent figuring out little “game plans” to prepare the actors for any number of scenarios. Selody explains that the most important thing they must keep in mind is confidence and control.
“The one thing that kids do pick up on is when actors or adults are nervous or they don’t quite know what they’re doing. Young children pick up on that and they’ll fill that vacuum,” he says. “We also spend a lot of time talking about what they may do and what to do ... to redirect that energy so it doesn’t go into out of control mayhem, which causes parents and teachers to turn into policemen who then try to police the situation, which is no fun for us.”
And this show is all about keeping things fun and engaging. Sixty to 70 per cent of the show’s audience are adults, according to Selody, so holding the attention of both the children and the parents is a tricky task to balance.
“We often have two adults bringing one child so we have the challenge of making the show interesting and engaging for the adults as well. Because if I’m a three year old and I’m sitting beside my dad and my dad keeps checking his watch and his cellphone, then I begin to pick up the signals and I’m going, ‘I guess this isn’t very interesting,’” he explains. “There’s different techniques ... and we do things that get the child so engaged that the adult is very engaged by watching what their child is doing. They go, ‘Wow, I didn’t know my kid could do that. I didn’t know my kid was allowed to do that.’”
The creators of this interactive show, Oily Cart Theatre from the U.K., also advertise their shows for kids with developmental disabilities of all kinds. The aim of this form of theatre is to get audience members to do something they may have never done before either physically or mentally, which is “remarkable to see” says Selody.
He explains that these performances work well for children with disabilities like poor motor control, attention deficit or autism, because the show is able to adjust to the way their unique minds work.
“Any of those kinds of factors actually end up working really well in our show because the play and the world we create is able to incorporate them directly into the piece. The actors are very used to responding to whatever they’re given, so it becomes very easy for them to be adjusted into the performance and have a very successful time,” he says.
“It’s just like any conversation, or any interaction you have in real life, you’re never quite sure what the other person is going to do,” adds Dos Remedios, who has experience working with children at
Carousel Theatre in Granville Island, but says this level of improvisation and inclusion on stage is new. “It’s a lot of being able to stay very present, in the moment, not anticipating what might happen and going from there, deciding in the moment what happens next.”
As the show opens to the public this weekend, Selody impresses two rules on his actors: to never assume what’s going on in someone’s head and to accept that everyone is uniquely different in the way they think but to value all minds equally.
“When you approach the work that way, when you’ve got somebody who has a disability, then you really don’t know what’s going on inside their head,” he says. “That also allows us to work directly with people in the audience and take them at face value.”
At the end of the performance, as stomachs may be rumbling from smelling the sweet scent of fresh bread, each audience member will get to take home a bun and “a head full of the possibilities that come with hands-on creation.”
