The fifth annual Thousand Faces Festival is approaching and it promises to be a diverse mix of art, music, dance, story telling and theatre.
Set to take place in and around Alberta Avenue Community Centre, the June 17 to 19 festival aims to take audiences on an engaging mythical journey with each performance.
The festival is split into two programs. Mythic Family Jewels, the program for young audiences, begins at 1 p.m. on June 18 and 19. The children’s program includes a storytelling session by Tololwa Mollel, with stories from around the world and his native continent of Africa.
“He’s extremely good with his audience, especially with the little ones, and reading the audience. He comes from a tradition where the storyteller is the most important person in the village,” said artistic director Mark Henderson about Mollel.
Children will also have the opportunity to see and try hoop dancing, paint their dreams and heroes with the guidance of a professional artist, watch mythical dancing and a mythological puppet play on one day and witness Hercules and Alcestis cheat Death on the other. Free ice cream will also be available during the children’s program.
A Mythic String of Pearls is intended for adult audiences. It begins at 7:30 p.m. on June 17 and 18. Many of the shows in the adult program include themes of mavericks and gender bending.
Naren Ganesan will perform the Indian dance Vibhava in the evening program. The performance will take audiences through the evolution of the dance. Another highlight of the festival is a one-woman show from the Troglodyte Theatre called Prophesies. It tells the story of the Trojan War through the voices of four women of Troy. What Henderson calls “the silliest play ever written,” will also be featured. It takes Shakespeare’s works to create a “twisted and silly” blend of tragedy and comedy. St. Albert Children’s Theatre alumnus Luc Tellier will perform in the production of Shakespeare’s Silliest Stuff.
These short shows will be woven with others throughout the evening to create a constant stream of mythic adventures.
The spark that flared Henderson’s interest in myth and quests was his fascination of Star Wars. He said George Lucas turned to Joseph Campbell’s mythology book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, for inspiration while writing Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. Henderson drew from the same book while creating the Thousand Faces Festival.
After three years of long feature performances, Henderson decided to try a different approach for last year’s festival. He took the usual structure of the festival’s garden party fundraisers and applied it to the main event. Now, audiences are taken on actual journeys in and around the community centre. Henderson says the new structure is better for bringing diverse audiences to diverse art. Audience members are also offered culturally diverse foods from around Alberta Avenue while at the festival.
“It’s like an experience that royalty might have had a thousand years ago or so, sitting in the garden, nibbling on your dainties, and then in comes a Cree hoop dancer, and then you get transported off to see a short mythological play, and then you get to hear some tango music to poetry about tango and the raven,” said Henderson.
The festival was created so that audiences could experience content from many different cultures through a variety of artistic disciplines.
“I wanted to create something that would be like a Heritage Days but where we would share the stories of the foundations of our cultures instead of just meat on a stick,” said Henderson.
He says the mythical performances at the festival tell stories about personal improvement and bettering the world.
“I think that’s the thing about the great stories. They make us remember who we are if we’ve forgotten and if we never knew they teach us who we are, who we can be,” said Henderson.
Admission to the festival is by donation. Audience members can come and go as they please during the event.
