United Kingdom – Chiara Guidi at bOing! Festival
bOing! Family Arts Festival is a major event organized annually in Canterbury by the Gulbenkian Arts Centre of the University of Kent. It is a weekend full of theatre performances, dance, live music, film screenings and creative workshops for all ages, featuring performers and artists from across the world, and experienced by over 10,000 people each year.
The festival enthusiastically welcomes the Socìetas theatre company’s historic show Buchettino by Chiara Guidi and presents it as an «unusual bedtime story. (…) It is the story of Tom Thumb but unlike any version you may have seen before».
The spectators are invited to come in and get comfortable. But this means to lie in bed! In fact, the setting prepared for Buchettino is a large wooden bedroom with fifty small beds, with sheets and blankets, and everyone lays down in his own to listen to the story told by the Storyteller. She sits in the middle of the room under a glowing light bulb. “Once upon a time...” As her tale unfolds, the sounds of the story whirl around outside the room, where everyone, in the dark, relives with his own senses, but immersed in a common feeling, what is happening in the story.
Created in 1995, Buchettino is a classic piece of childhood theatre. It has been staged also by other Companies in France, Chile, South Korea, Denmark, Spain, Taiwan, Japan, and with a version in Sardinian language (translated by Marcello Fois). It is a show that creates the conditions for listening to the fable and the text has also been published in an audiobook (Orecchio Acerbo Publishing House, illustrations by Simone Massi).
Buchettino is on stage on 26 and 27 August (scheduled at 11:30 am and at 02:30 pm).