Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 acts to catch at the 2022 Vancouver International Children's Festival

From a deep VR dive to drag dress-up, this year’s fest features shows by leading local and international artists

By Gail Johnson

Ginalina.

Parents Are Still a Drag.

Vancouver International Children’s Festival runs May 31 to June 5 at Granville Island and May 31 to June 12 online.

SURE, THE VANCOUVER International Children’s Festival is all about the kids, but we know that adults love it just as much as younger humans do. There are nearly 80 shows scheduled this year, running the gamut from theatre and dance to puppetry, circus, and storytelling. Here’s a small sampling of highlights to catch.

#1

Parents Are Still a Drag

In-person

Local drag queens Peach Cobblah and Isolde N. Barron are back after this Zee Zee Theatre show had a knockout debut at the 2019 fest. The piece has been revamped, but at its heart are still fun, inclusivity, and a whole lot of rainbow colour. It’s all to celebrate diversity through songs, humour, and play. Audience members even have a chance to become part of the dress-up extravaganza.

Underwater Archeologist.

#2

Underwater Archeologist 

In-person

Boca del Lupo takes you far into the future deep below the ocean’s surface in Underwater Archeologist.

You won’t get wet, but the immersive show will plunge you into an underwater bunker, where two people have been hiding for six decades. Jay Dodge, Boca del Lupo’s artistic producer, uses hope, humour, and irony in the new, live performance and virtual-reality scuba-diving adventure that explores climate change, the future, and what we can do right now to help save the planet. 

Anjalica Solomon,

#3

Future Music

In-person

Here’s your chance to hear some of the rising stars of the local music scene.

The Vancouver International Children’s Festival Society and Rup Sidhu created and produced the inaugural FM: Future Music Mentorship Program in partnership with ArtStarts in Schools, Apparatus, and the Sarah McLachlan School of Music. Now, six of the QT+BIPOC artists who took part in the 2021 FM program will share new songs and stories drawn from their own lives and designed to entertain and inspire. The featured artists are FIND MUTYA, Jeremy Cruz, Missy D, Anjalica Solomon, Will Clements, and Kimmortal.

Ginalina.

#4

Ginalina

In-person

The three-time Juno-nominated artist is an indie- and family-folk musician and creator of children’s books who performs in English, Mandarin, and French. The throughline in her work is a celebration of family, nature, and community. Ginalina has several appearances at the 2022 fest.

First, she’ll lead the June 4 Forgotten Folk Songs Workshop, along with Jirong Huang on erhu and Sarah Yusha Tan on guzheng, guests from the Vancouver Chinese Music Ensemble. Together, they will share Mò Lì Huā (“Jasmine Flower”), a treasured 18th-century Chinese folk tune.

On June 5, Ginalina offers a Relaxed Performance and also heads the The Wild and Wonderful West Coast Workshop, exploring some of the flying, swimming, running, and crawling creatures that call our backyards home.

The Girl Who Forgot to Sing Badly. Photo by Patrick Redmond

#5

The Girl Who Forgot to Sing Badly

Online

Based in Dublin, Ireland, Theatre Lovett offers up this hilarious one-hander to the fest’s virtual programming. The company’s joint artistic director, Louis Lovett, plays multiple characters in a suspenseful story that goes like this: “Peggy O’Hegarty and her parents are packers. They squeeze fruit into tins, foxes into boxes, even bikes into brown paper bags. And then one day, work stops working, and the jobs stop jobbing and Peggy steps outside to find that winter has arrived…and everyone in her city has vanished!... As Peggy desperately tries to save the day, we learn about love, loss, the reassurance of goats and that we should all have the courage to sing gloriously on or off-key!”

That action unfolds through the transformation of the set’s large crate, which holds props and entire universes.

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