The Question... Ingrid Hansen on Little Orange Man (WildSide)

The High-Octane Danish Girl

by Estelle Rosen

Raised by Danish immigrants in Kelowna, BC and fuelled by a love for talking with strangers, Ingrid Hansen is fascinated with ways of creating temporary communities out of groups of strangers. She has toured Little Orange Man across Canada, designed for the Dora-Award Winning musical Ride the Cyclone, and was a lead puppeteer for the children’s television series Tiga Talk! on APTN. Ms Hansen also does ongoing work with the inmate-run prison theatre company William Head on Stage in Victoria, BC. She loves to teach students of all backgrounds, especially beginners, and has taught theatre workshops for children, adults, actors, dancers, puppeteers, and prison inmates.

CHARPO: The last time we were in touch was about SNAFU Dance Theatre production of Fractured Fables, a play written and performed by prison inmates. At first glance, Little Orange Man (LOM) seems a departure. Yet perhaps not. LOM involves an outcast fighting dark battles, both incorporate fables and puppets. Are there any connections or is this coincidence?

HANSEN: I suppose the main similarity between the two projects is that when we started, we really had no idea what the end result would be. When working on Little Orange Man, at times we threw out huge chunks of material -- entire show’s worth of material -- or evolved the story into something completely different. It’s now the story of Kitt, a high-octane Danish girl whose greatest delight comes from re-enacting her grandfather’s grisly folk tales to young neighbourhood children. Kitt fires up homemade technology to extract and re-enact the audience’s dreams. Through the weird songs, fast-paced humour and shadow puppetry we have the story of an outcast child who entrusts a group of strangers to help fight her darkest battle. 

Bonus Feature: First-Person - Ingrid Hansen of SNAFU Dance Theatre on Fractured Fables

(photo by Gordon Lee)

Inside the Pen
Audiences over 19 experience something utterly new
by Ingrid Hansen

@snafudance

Ingrid Hansen co-founded SNAFU Dance Theatre in 2006 to collaboratively create and perform live theatre, dance theatre, and puppet theatre. Raised by pro-nudity Danish parents and fuelled by a love for talking with strangers, Ingrid is fascinated with ways of creating temporary communities out of groups of strangers.  She tries to push polite Canadian boundaries with great mutual respect and humour.  Her favourite performances are in found spaces.   She has created and performed original work with SNAFU at events curated by Suddenly Dance, The Belfry Theatre, the SummerWorks Festival, ITSAZOO Productions, The Great Canadian Theatre Company, The Vancouver Fringe, Centaur Theatre, The Phoenix Theatre, and the PUSH Festival.  For the past six years, Ms Hansen has built an ongoing collaboration with the inmates at the prison theatre company William Head on Stage, which operates inside a federal prison near Victoria, BC.   She spent four summers performing as a lead puppeteer and voice actor on the children’s television series Tiga Talk on APTN.   She has toured across the country performing her solo show Little Orange Man at Festivals and schools, and worked as a designer on the Dora-Award-Winning Ride the Cyclone with Atomic Vaudeville.   Ingrid loves to teach students of all backgrounds, especially beginners, and has taught theatre workshops for children, adults, actors, dancers, puppeteers, and prison inmates.

Prison Theatre.  The inmates perform for the paying public, inside the prison gymnasium theatre. AND the inmates also build the sets, promote the show, coordinate the box office, act as ushers, concession, stage management and crew for the production. Anyone over the age of 19 may buy a ticket, go through prison security, watch the show, and talk to the inmate actors after the performance. The inmate-run theatre company William Head on Stage (WHoS) has been running for over 30 years inside a minimum-security prison on the west coast of Canada. It has, in the words of one audience member, “the most passionate actors and audience I have ever seen. This program is priceless for the questions it raises and the barriers it takes down.”

I've been working with WHoS off and on for the last six years: teaching, performing, designing, choreographing and directing with the inmates in various shows.  I'm always on the lookout for people I think would be a great fit working out there--and when I met Pete Balkwill at the Banff Puppet Intensive and saw what a passionate, caring and inventive teacher he was, I told him, "You should do a show with WHoS."  I showed him photos from past WHoS projects I had worked on, and he said, "No, WE should do a show with WHoS." 

So we did.