QPAC’s Out of the Box Festival is known as one of the world’s leading festivals for children 0-8, sometimes referred to as the ‘early learning’ audience. Tnee and I were delighted to bring a brand new show to the festival, especially for tiny tots. We presented Baby Loves Music & Movement as “Lissa and Nee Nee”, who are basically cuter, more colourful, all-dancing, all-singing version of ourselves. The show played a season of eight shows over the 6 day festival and every day the Eeni, Meenie, Miny Moh marquee was packed with mini faces and their maxi counterparts singing and dancing to our fun adventure by the Brisbane River.
Tnee and I had an exciting, intensive creative/rehearsal period prior to the show’s debut, working out which songs and feels were best for this very special audience. One of the advantages of this age audinece is that you know when you are not engaging because they will literally walk away (unlike us polite adults!) if you cease to be entertaining. The show ended up being centered around an adventure on the river and we included a mix of original music, fun jazz tunes and well-loved nursery rhymes. We also experimented with rear projection, shadow puppets, hand puppets and kazoos. It all went down a treat and we had a fabulous time as did our mega-packed audiences every day.
It has to be said that Ella Bella was a model daughter, accomanying us to almost every show as a “stage hand” (actually, more often than not we had to wrest props from her moments before the show!). She sat with various friends and family members who had come to do “on-site” baby sitting during the shows and gave a gerat performance of 20 month old show ettiquette, doing actions and finishing the words of songs!
There is sure to be more on the horizon for “Lissa and Nee Nee”, so stay tuned!