Thousand Faces Festival resurrects myths and legends

PREVIEW
Thousand Faces Festival
May 26 and 27
Alberta Avenue Community Centre
9210 – 118 Ave.
Tickets: All events are by donation

One thing all people desire is to understand who we are and how we connect.

Now in its seventh edition, Thousand Faces Festival has since its inception resurrected legends on the origin of our cultures. In the process we discovered a network of connections at our roots.

“This year’s theme is love and water. They run through just about everything in life. Water is where we come from. Water is where we are born. It can drown us. It can save our lives. It can be malevolent. It can be benevolent,” said artistic director Mark Henderson.

Running May 26 and 27 at Alberta Avenue Community Centre, the festival’s afternoon Mythic Family Jewels slot is filled with family friendly theatrical performances, storytelling, dance and painting.

Saturday evening switches to A String of Mythic Pearls, a program for adults and children age nine plus. This artistic banquet features South Asian dance, Norse legends, Oriental drumming, Greek myths, Roman poetry and Indigenous tales.

For Saturday evening only, artistic director Mark Henderson has invited local ethnic restaurants to serve a variety of multicultural foods.

“Saturday night is literally an evening fit for an emperor. It’s an orgy of mythology and food. It’s a three-hour long feasting of dreams and sharing the experience. It’s epic and enchanting,” said Henderson.

Mythic Family Jewels
May 26 and 27

• 1 p.m. Rocko and Nakota: Tales from the Land

Anishinaabe playwright Josh Languedoc writes about a young Indigenous boy who visits his grandfather in the hospital. As the elder shares stories, the young boy rediscovers his culture.

“This play is a rediscovery of my own heritage and the way I have embraced it,” said St. Albert raised Languedoc.

• 2:15 p.m. The Nightingale

Kaybridge Production’s puppet theatre is back with The Nightingale, a production using four triple threat MacEwan University actors and five puppets.

The Emperor of China orders a nightingale with the most beautiful song be brought to him. The Emperor keeps it at court until a mechanical bejeweled bird is given to him.

He loses interest in the real songbird, and it returns to the forest. Eventually the mechanical bird breaks down and the Emperor becomes ill without its soothing song.

“It’s about a man who wants more and more and more. You see how one man can hurt so many,” said director Maralyn Ryan, the founding artistic director of St. Albert Children’s Theatre.

• 3:20 p.m. EPIC

Two master storytellers, Gabby Bernard and Joel David Taylor, set out to read the greatest epic of all time only to discover the book is blank. Everyone steps in to create a story where the audience morphs into legendary heroes and heroines.

4:10 p.m. Usha Gupta

She presents two East Indian classical dances – Vasundhara and a Rajasthani folk dance.

A String of Mythic Pearls
May 26 from 7 to 10 p.m.

Both Usha Gupta and Languedoc’s Rocko and Nakota will be performed on Saturday night.

In a look at Greek mythology, The Sapphic Whore of Olympus tells the story of Medusa’s origins, a tense clash of love, friendship and fury between the snake-haired monster, Athena and Poseidon.

In The Hermaphrodite and the Pouncing Nymph, Henderson reads a Greco-Roman narrative poem. Audiences are also treated to a myth of an Inuit goddess in Sedna and the Sea as well as an adaptation of Norse mythology in The Rocks Hit the Sea.