Little Orange Man
enter the SUBCONsCIOUS of a fiery child genius
Show description
Eleven-year-old Kitt is troubled by a recurring dream. With no adults left in her world she can trust, she places an ad on Craigslist inviting a group of strangers into her subconscious dreamscape to help fight her darkest battle. One part Inception, one part Pixar’s movie 'Up,' and featuring SNAFU’s signature puppetry, Little Orange Man has been called “Magical and touching…A MUST-SEE” by the Ottawa Citizen.
Kitt’s greatest delight comes from reenacting her grandfather’s grisly danish fairytales to young neighborhood kindergartners, which soon gets her into trouble with the adults of the world. But in Kitt’s world, stories produce reality. Stories come from everywhere: suitcases, shadow puppetry, songs, and bits of leftover food she saved from lunch. There is light and darkness. Humour and pathos. English and Danish. Attention Deficit. It’s an experience rated E for Everyone, which critics have said is “like something you would expect to see in a Wes Andersen film.”
70 minutes, no intermission
Shadow puppetry & dark Danish fables.
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2010-Present
Little Orange Man has delighted had over 100 performances in more than 15 communities across Canada, presented by:
The Evergreen Cultural Centre, Coquitlam, BC
The ACT Arts Centre, Maple Ridge, BC
PUSH Festival PushOFF Showcase, Vancouver BC
Off-CINARS Showcase, Montreal QC
The Great Canadian Theatre Centre’s Undercurrents Festival, Ottawa ON
University of British Columbia’s Theatre 26 Series, Kelowna BC
Centaur Theatre’s Wildside Festival, Montreal QC
Centaur Theatre’s Children’s Series, Montreal QC
International Festival of Animated Objects, Calgary AB
Theatre SASA’s Arcadia Showcase, Toronto ON
Hectik Theatre's Season, Regina SK
Puppets for Peace Festival, Victoria BC
Gabriola Island Festival, Gabriola BC
Ta Da! Festival, Wakefield ON
Mainline Theatre, Montreal QC
North American Tour to International Fringe Festivals in
Edmonton, Calgary, Victoria, Vancouver, Ottawa, Winnipeg, & Montreal
HELD OVER - Edmonton Fringe, 2016
HELD OVER - Vancouver Fringe, 2012
Featured at the World Fringe Congress, Montreal QC
Performed behind bars for the inmates at William Head Prison, Victoria BC
WINNER
Edmonton Fringe HOLD OVER Award - Edmonton 2016
Centaur Best Production: English Theatre Award – Montreal 2013
Most Outstanding Overall Production – Ottawa 2012
Pick-of-the-Fringe Hold Over – Vancouver 2011
Volunteer’s Choice Award – Vancouver 2011
Vancouver Playhouse Award – 2011
Pick-of-the-Fringe – Victoria 2011
PRESS
“Little Orange Man is the very peak of creativity. The storytelling devices are darkly dazzling …with a tender and delicate finish. ★★★★★”
“HALF THE TIME I WAS BAWLING, THE OTHER HALF I WAS LAUGHING OUT LOUD. Hansen’s manipulation of food puppets is so lifelike that you find it hard to believe they aren’t alive.”
“A charming combination of inspiration and technique. . . The artists create an unpretentiously surreal landscape in which the contents of Kitt’s lunch box—lettuce, celery, an apple, and slices of bread—become some of the puppets she uses to tell her story. . . Its final moments left me in a puddle of tears.”
“Visually stunning, superbly performed and incredibly inventive ... at once haunting and hilarious, Little Orange Man offers both heart and thought. An enchanting, fantastical theatre dream.”
“. . .Sheer joyous magic to behold. I flew a few thousand miles to be at this Festival. If I’d known how good this show was gonna be, I would have been happy to walk. Little Orange Man is the kind of inventive, affecting, heartfelt and unique storytelling that you normally only dream about.”
“Remarkable feats of puppetry.”
Credits
Directed & Co-Created by
Kathleen Greenfield
Performed & Co-Created by
Ingrid Hansen
Thank yous
SNAFU gratefully acknowledges support for Little Orange Man's fall 2014 production in Regina, Saskatchewan hosted by Hectik Theatre, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Little Orange Man was first workshopped with the generous support of Intrepid Theatre as a YOU Show series in 2010. Thank you to all the festival volunteers, friends, hosts, administrators and artists who have supported us along the way.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Kathleen Greenfield
Director & Co-Creator
About KathleenKathleen is the Co-Artistic Director of SNAFU. She is dedicated to collective creation, the development of new work and community involvement. Her interests and experience are in site-specific outdoor performance, puppetry, folk stories, women’s stories, youth, alternative education practices, and community activism. She holds a BFA in Theatre from the University of Victoria, has studied at the Banff Puppet Theatre Intensive in 2012, and continues to research organizations that unite social activism and the arts. In 2013, she joined SNAFU Dance Theatre as Co-Artistic Director. She has directed the premiere productions of many new works including Little Orange Man (SNAFU), Kitt & Jane (SNAFU-Belfry Spark Festival), The Shoes (Humble Wonder Theatre-Belfry Incubator Project) and Bullfrog Lullaby (head through painting). She has also participated as performer, creator, artist liaison and organizer of Bike Ride 2010, Haunted 2009, Bike Ride 2009, Schoolhouse Rocks 2009, and Schoolhouse Rocks 2008 with Theatre SKAM as member of the Homegrown Initiative. When she is not busy making plays, Kathleen makes weird dolls and hoards old technologies.
Ingrid Hansen
Co-Creator & Performer
About IngridIngrid co-founded SNAFU in 2006. Raised by gregarious Danish immigrants, Ingrid loves talking to strangers. The grandfather in Little Orange Man is loosely inspired by her own Bedstefar (Danish Grandfather.) She has created and performed original work with SNAFU at events curated by The Belfry Theatre, the Next Stage Festival, the Gabriola Theatre Festival, the SummerWorks Festival, The Great Canadian Theatre Centre, The Centaur Theatre, the PUSH Festival, and others. Outside of SNAFU, she has performed with Corpus Theatre, Story Theatre, Theatre Direct, The Quickening, Theatre SKAM, Shakespeare in the Ruff, Architect Theatre, Atomic Vaudeville, and Suddenly Dance Theatre. For the past seven years, Ingrid 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.