Drama Beat
This year‘s Hootenanny is making art out of junk for July.
The popular local devised theatre family production of Hootenanny returns to Galt Gardens all July beginning on Canada Day, then Saturday morning.
“The Junk Show” features Ahona Sanyal and Quinn Larder play Rusty and Dusty, two junk collectors who have some fun with rubbish, sorting junk into piles labelled “No Good” and “So Good,” but get lost in their imaginations playing with their finds.
“Rusty and Dusty are two junk collectors who make friends and learn that everyone and everything has value,” Sanyal summarized.
“We make puppets out of the junk, we go into medieval times, underwater and into space,” continued Sanyal, who is excited to be part of Hootenanny again. She was part of last year’s Hootenanny— “The Risky, Yet Rewarding Adventure of Pearl and Dot.” They had to take the year before that off because of Covid.
Director Nicola Elson, who also works at the University of Lethbridge, didn’t have as much time to dedicate to it due to the strike and Covid affecting operations at the university.
“Usually I like to devise a skeleton of a script and work off that, but I wasn’t able to do that this year, so this is truly devised theatre,” Elson said, adding they let the junk inspire the story.
“ They dialogue doesn’t really matter as much for theatre for young audiences. It’s more about physical acting and colour,” she said, noting she visited an art junkyard called Bin Diver near Irricana , outside of Calgary and collected an array of items like bicycle wheels, old mops, motorcycle helmets, watering cans, clocks, fans and lamp shades to use.
