А Summer Theatre travelling festival brings families together with art, magic and laughter

The actors prepare a major US tour for the Bulgarian community

published on 4/11/24 7:05 AM

Photo: Facebook /Lyatno teatro

For the fourth year in a row, the travelling summer theater festival "Lyatno teatro" will give children and their parents moments of pure happiness. And to make this day unforgettable in their lives, together they will measure their strength in animation with games, survive a storm of hundreds of balloons, experience a miracle with coming to life paintings, learn in a puppet farm to care for nature, and experience the most important thing in life - love.

Little Theatre Company, the company behind the festival loved by young and old, is already counting down the days to its first performance of the year, firing imaginations with promises of magic, laughter and а sunny mood.

Emil Yordanov

"With our creation in 2013, we set ourselves the task of reaching out to people in small settlements", says Emil Yordanov, director, actor and manager of the company. Otherwise, what makes the festival successful is that it offers a wide range of creative products and people can recognise themselves in them, find something for themselves and enjoy themselves. We have a varied programme of games, workshops, performances, shows - from puppetry to the art of magicians."

Apart from the fact that the Summer Theatre Festival is accessible to all, as tickets are not required, people have the choice to remain passive observers or join in interesting activities and thus reveal their skill or artistic side. In its largest format, it offers a six and a half hour programme, which is performed in collaboration with actors from various theatres - the puppet theatre company "Male-male", "TRIO", individual artists.

"The workshops are designed so that the children can make puppets together with their parents," Emil Yordanov continues his story. Such is our performance "What the old man does is always right" based on the popular fairy tale by Andersen, as well as "Grandpa pulls out a turnip" by the theatre "Male-male". Kole Kitanov's soap bubble show "Balloon as an Elephant" also leaves no one indifferent - including us, although we have seen the show many times.

This is the idea of the whole festival - to be able to win the attention and affection of the parents as well, so that the pleasure that the children experience can be passed on to the whole family and everyone can experience something good together, and culture-related at that."

In just a month, the Summer Theatre festival will begin its national tour, which will not pass by places out of the way of other travelling artists with indifference. It also promises to repeat last year's 24-hour marathon from Gabrovo at the end of the summer, ending the summer theatre season. The festival will then travel to the United States to meet our compatriots in Texas, Nevada, California, and Arizona.

"The program will not be much different, because we would like to show the cultural product we are building in our homeland to our compatriots in the United States and thus make them part of its development", says Emil Yordanov. "And since most of the Summer Theater team are graduates of the puppet school at the National Academy of Theatre and Film Art, and we know that this art is perceived as relatively exotic overseas, we will try to bring some of it to make the children happy. We also intend to bring them a surprise - we'll include a few flashbacks or games in the animation that parents are sure to remember and play with their families after we leave. So our idea is to take some of our culture to our compatriots and make them part of these cultural processes in Bulgaria."

This is not the first time the artists will be abroad with their festival and they are looking forward to yet another meeting with the audience, which, although living in a different social and cultural environment, remains marked by the experience in Bulgaria.

"These meetings are very exciting for us because Bulgarians living outside Bulgaria always have a nostalgic note and are looking for any information about our country", says Emil Yordanov. "The performances we present to them are appreciated on the basis of their merits and they show that they are proud to be part of Bulgarian culture. All in all, we get very touching meetings, and something similar happens in small towns in our country, because people there rarely see such things. In other words, it doesn't matter whether the communities we go to are in or outside Bulgaria. Our mission is one - to reach out to all of them and share with each other, because that's how a nation develops."

Emil Yordanov believes that there should be no Bulgarians who are not reached by Bulgarian culture or whose contact with it is too limited. "We enjoy doing it and we feel the warm attitude of the people because they appreciate our efforts," he adds.

Photos: Facebook /Лятно Театро

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