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| Christine Johnson as Baba Yaga. Photo: Rob McDougall |
Baba Yaga. Co-Creators Christine Johnson. Rosemary Myers, Shona Reppe.
Directed by Rosemary Myers. Sound
designer/composer Peter Nelson. Animator. Chris Edser. Dramaturg Julianne O’Brien.
Technical designer Chris Petridis.
Lighting designer Richard Vabre Movement consultant Carol Wellman Kelly. Design
realizer Ailsa Paterson Costume designer/maker Selene Cochrane. Co-commissioned
by Imaginate and Windmill Theatre Company. in association with Adelaide
Festival. Queens Theatre. Tuesday February 26 – Wednesday March 6.2019
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
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| Baba Yaga. Photo: Rob McDougall |
Windmill Theatre Company is
Australia’s leading Children’s Theatre Company and it is easy to see why. The
company’s Adelaide Festival production of Baba
Yaga is a visual and aural delight, imaginative, inventive, enchanting and
totally captivating. A fabulous fusion
of live performance, animation and installation combine to create a fantasy
world of strange characters, pop up jungles of plants and animals and a
superbly synchronized soundscape.
Slavic folklore describes Baba
Yaga as a supernatural and ferocious looking woman who lives deep in the wood.
Others translate Baba Yaga as a witch. In Windmill’s version, co-creators
Christine Johnson, who also plays the title role, director Rosemary Myers and award
winning artist Shone Reppe concentrate on the notion of a weird and mystical
woman with strange powers and eccentric foibles. Johnson, well-known as the
youngest of the three Kransky Sisters, brilliantly inhabits the quirky
eccentricity of Baba Yaga. The play is set in the grey Poultry Apartments with
its weird assortment of bizarre pop-up guests. Meek and mild Vaselina
(Elizabeth Hay) is the obliging receptionist, charged with keeping the rules
and obediently following the orders of the demanding residents. Enter, to the
boisterous music of Russian folk song the newest resident, the colourful, and
intimidating Baba Yaga. In an instant, Vaselina’s orderly, controlled and
prohibitive world is turned upside down by cacophonous sounds from the new
resident’s apartment, now overgrown with unusual plants, and occupied by a cat
with no respect for rules.
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| Elizabeth Hay as Vaselina. Photo: Sia Duff |
Vaselina, the poor girl who was responsible
for the death of her class’s pet mouse at school, who was always told to be
quiet when she tried to sing or who loved ice skating but was afraid that she
might lose her fingers in a fall, is powerless to assert herself in the
presence of the non compliant Baba Yaga.
Baba Yaga, hungering for
delicious flesh curbs her cannibalistic tendencies to take Vaselina on a
wonderful, thrilling and surprising voyage of discovery into the stratosphere
and beyond, across icy peaks and through luscious jungle. In a digital
landscape of fascinating animation, and distinctive soundscapes the magical
power of transformation and self discovery transports the meek and mild
Vaselina into the exuberant and playful creator
of her true potential. No longer is Vaselina, greased down by stupid
rules, humiliating judgements and confined expectations. She is free to dance,
to sing, to skate and soarand live the dream.
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| Elizabrth Hay and Christine Johnson in Baba Yaga Photo Sia Duff, |
Like every good story, Baba Yaga’s
moral is crystal clear. In Windmill’s bewitching production. Johnson and Hay
are delightful to watch, exhilarating in the joy of their performance. As the
animation swirled before me, jungles grew, fearsome residents’ faces twitched
and grimaced, the white cat snarled and the hungry caterpillar sidled by I
imagined the play as a fascinating pop-up book on every young child’s bookcase,
filling their minds with magical imaginings and the dreams of what they have the
power to be.
Windmill’s success dwells in the
realm of the imagination of today’s child. Baba
Yaga is the theatre of the visual invention, describing in images the
wonderment of the heart and the mind.
This is no proscription of response but a powerful force to expand one’s
imaginings and for that Windmill rightfully takes its place as the Baba Yaga of
transformed Chidlren’s Theatre and its new and exciting pathways to the child’s
imagination.
