A play which is designed to be accessible to all is hitting the Unity Theatre’s stage this December.
The cast of Star of Wonder is international with cast members from the likes of Japan, Portugal and Italy
Cast member Carmen Arquelladas from Spain said: “Star of Wonder is a Christmas show designed to be a relaxed performance for everyone to enjoy.
“It’s not just a children’s show – it’s a family show about five travellers who lost. They overcome their obstacles and they find what they were looking for.”
The show has been designed with everyone in mind in order to create a relaxed environment.
Carmen explained: “We designed this show to be accessible to be relaxed so that people can come and go if they need to. If a child or an adult or a person with disabilities is finding it over whelming they can just leave.
“There’s no restriction, we try to reduce the text to a minimum so there’s almost no text which means that it makes you be more involved and it makes you less worried about if you miss something.”
Carmen explained the physical nature of the show meant it was trying to be fun and appealing to everyone.
She said: “A lot of people that think that going to the theatre means you need to be still and you need seated and focused, but we just wanted to give an interactive and relaxed platform for everybody to just enjoy and have a good time.”
This outlook extended to the set design.
Carmen said: “It was designed with the idea of who was going to be watching, so they were really thoughtful and everything is in a shade of colour that is nice to look at and they are not just like in your face, so its also considered in the relaxed performance.
“We had a designer, Cathy Cross, and I was helping her with some of the design and we also tried to make it fun.
There is a lot of surprises
“The whole idea is that we are under a tent and we use different fabrics and materials and we wanted to have something where we could project some of the constellations where we could show that we are in the middle of the desert and you see all of the stars.
“There is a lot of surprises as well with things that you might not expect so all the design and costumes are involved in this relaxed concept.”
The story of the show sees a group of travellers on a journey following a star, they are faced with many obstacles before finding what they are looking for.
The show is performed mostly in the form of physical theatre.
Carmen said: “It’s mostly physical theatre mixed with clowning. there’s a lot of jester and there’s more expressions in the body, we have also a few projections that has been created with shadow puppetry and a lot of humour and fun.”
She added: “There will be just one line of text but everything else is something that we will be expressing with our bodies without having to use the text so you can just understand you do not need to be focused on the text because we will just be expressing it.”
The show includes a small cast of five people who go on different journeys throughout the story, with the members of the cast playing various characters.
Carmen said: “I am quite proud to say I’m a sheep … baaa! So there are five people in the cast and three of them goes in a different journey after the beginning and two of them go elsewhere and we play different characters.’
“I can quote a child that came up to me after the show and said that I was the best sheep that he has ever seen!”
Throughout the rehearsal process the team made having fun just as important as perfecting their performance.
Carmen said: “We’d have like a warm up where we’d have games, we try to connect with each other and we have a good energy between us to be able to recreate that on the stage because if we are having fun the audience have fun.
“Sometimes there are stressful times because you’re running out of time and you need to have things done but it was a really fun process and to see what we come up with and like having the final product.”
- The show was created by Theatre Porto and Teatro Pomodoro and is at the Unity Theatre from December 17.
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Featured image (c) Tara Moyes