Review: (Victoria) Fractured Fables

Preposterously Good Puppetry
The men of William Head captivate audience with highly original show.
by Morgan McPherson

Well, dear readers, I seem to be saying this with each review I write, but this show is probably one of (if not the best) performances I have seen on stage.  The main difference between this and any other production I have seen over the years? I saw this show on a prison stage.  On Friday night I attended the opening night of Fractured Fables: The Prison Puppet Project, staged by the men of William Head Institution and co-directed by Ingrid Hansen and Peter Balkwill. It was tremendous.

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.