Youth Series

Presentation

Presented at Montreal’s Botanical Garden, this important series for elementary school children, [Musique, Maestro !] offers a new version of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals with narration and projections by theatre expert Guy Beausoleil.  Music for the theatre by Robert Marcel Lepage, winner of four Gemini awards, is seamlessly integrated into the original music.  Appassionata has presented this program and preparatory workshops with an ecological and artistic bent since fall 2010 and hopes it will soon have reached more than 2,000 students.

Performance Summary

This marvelous tale opens when the parents of our new heroine Zita refuse to allow their daughter to buy a new lizard because she had let the first one die of hunger. Frustrated, she expands her anger by splattering an old fence with paint. Zita takes a closer look at her “work” and finds landscapes and animals in the play of colours and shapes. As if by magic, she finds herself in the middle of a universe populated by colourfully spotted creatures. The multicoloured animals tell Zita that they have lost their world as well as the “fundamental element of life.” Accompanied by a marten, an owl, a leopard, a dog and a great deal of enchanting music, Zita goes off in search of this mysterious element. She visits all of the biosphere’s ecosystems and on her voyage, she observes the great diversity of living things. She also comes to understand how much human existence depends on the health of the environment. The adventure unfolds in 14 enchanting musical scenes that stimulate the children’s imagination through original music, a new text and projections.