Posted June 19, 2025

Behind the Scenes – WeeFestival

Lynda, for people who may not know about the WeeFestival, can you give us an overview?

WeeFestival is an annual international festival dedicated to the presentation of theatre and performance for the very young. What we mean by “very young” is zero to six years old. Those boundaries are stretching and blurring a little as we start to imagine very young audiences alongside what others would call extraordinary audiences or excluded audiences. When we start to look in that way, then we’re talking zero to eight years old for school groups. We’re looking at elders; we’re looking at children with developmental disabilities, with autism and so on. And in these areas, age is not really the appropriate way to define the audience.

But we start with this idea of “very young” and those would be pre-school audiences from birth to Grade One, who are traditionally underserved and under acknowledged as legitimate audiences. We curate a program from the international movement, the very interesting pioneering theatres working in Europe and UK, and as well as artists and companies from Quebec and—more and more through our own instigation and support—artists from right around the corner and across this country.

How many years has the festival been running?

Last year we celebrated our tenth year of existence. This is our eleventh year of operating. We began as a biennial festival; 2014, 2016, and 2018 were the first three editions, and then we moved to an annual event in 2019. And, with the exception of the 2020 festival, which was cancelled, we have held an edition every year. 2021 was an entirely digital program that was targeted at kindergarten to Grade Two students. We reached 17,000 students with a program called “A Play a Day.” Children all tuned in at the same time to watch a well-filmed, well-executed performance, and then met the artists and then engaged in an afternoon of different arts responses. We were proud about that.

Can you tell us more about why and how you became interested in work for the very young?

I’ve always been interested in new approaches happening in the field of theatre for young audiences in general, coming out of Europe, out of the UK, out of Scandinavia. I’d always kept quite attuned to those developments, and I started to learn about these projects for the very young, which arose from a large investment from the European Union back in 2000. There was a cycle of research and creation that was happening with companies like Starcatchers in Scotland and Helios Theatre in Germany. And at Theatre Direct, we had already been exposed to the international context with our own touring shows for four- to twelve-year-olds, shows like Beneath the Banyan Tree. (That play went to the UK and toured northern England in 2009.) I honestly don’t remember the exact moment, but I did start to research early years as an audience, as a participant. When Theatre Direct moved to our new home at Wychwood Barns and we started our community drama school, I took up a project called The Firefly. We were mentored by Linda Carson from BC, and we started spending a lot of time in kindergartens as I was developing a community drama curriculum for three- to five-year-olds. At the same time, because we had this new home, I was interested in starting to present international work. I hadn’t quite connected the dots, because I don’t think I had really seen true theatre and performance for early years at that point. I just knew that this was a trend that was happening in Europe and Quebec.

But then I went to a festival in Darlington called the TakeOff Festival, and I saw a performance from Helios Theatre for two- to five-year-olds. And it was an absolutely transformative experience! I had never seen anything so beautifully created as a performance-based installation work. No text at all, music, object puppetry, all used to convey a story. And it really, really rocked my world!

My background is mostly in performance-based work, interdisciplinary work as well as the development of new theatre by marginalized voices. For very young audiences, I was especially interested in non-text-based work, because I also recognized that our audiences come from so many different contexts, language-wise, developmentally, and otherwise. And I felt that by working in a more physical, visual, associative realm, that we’d be able to speak more directly to young audiences. Everything kind of clicked into place with that particular show. It’s radical, it’s post-dramatic in its format; it’s challenging traditional hierarchies for artists. It’s challenging expected behaviours of audiences. It’s blurring the fourth wall. It was the kind of theatre I wanted to make.

So I came back from that experience and started to work on the idea of a festival for early years. From there it was a series of interesting challenges, but along the way we found some real champions, including our funders at the Department of Canadian Heritage. At that time, the expectation around festivals was a huge reliance on sponsorship and revenue generation. And when I knocked on their door, I said, “Toronto hasn’t had a festival since the demise of the Milk Festival in 2005. It’s time for an international festival. We’re going to start it. But I just want to be super-clear. There’s no real revenue.” And they responded with, “Oh, okay. Well, tell us more.” They got on board, and they’ve been a key partner ever since.

Our first edition was in 2014, and of course, it featured those pioneering companies: Teatro La Baracca in Italy, Helios Theatre in Germany, and we also brought in the amazing Théâtre des Confettis in Quebec that was doing some extraordinary work. (They continue to do that.) So that’s the long, complicated origin story!

The shows in the WeeFestival are an eclectic mix—they feature theatrical styles from around the world, different languages, puppets, dance, music, mime. In many cases, BIPOC voices and artists are centred. Can you tell us more about how shows are chosen?

We really are looking at a range of different styles and performance approaches and so on. Often I look for works that incorporate multiple styles and disciplines. Really, I’m trying to bring a range of aesthetic experiences and different themes into the festival. This work is not really about arts education as much as it’s about an aesthetic education for young children: exposing very young children to a range of complex and sophisticated art forms. Theatre is a perfect gathering place of all the pure arts.

I like work that is physical, that is well-designed and well-researched. I’m always trying to find something for babies and something for preschoolers and something for kindergarteners, because in an age range of zero to six, there are so many different developmental phases within that audience. Of course, work can speak to everybody, but even in the work for babies, there’s work that’s specifically for four months to twelve months. and then there’s work for zero to twenty-four months. That’s a very different type of vibe than the work for preschoolers or the work for kindergarteners.

I adore puppetry; I’ve always loved puppetry. And there are some fantastic puppetry works. So much of this work is non-text-based and that’s great because it can transcend every linguistic and cultural barrier. We don’t have to worry about translation, per se. It’s the universality of early childhood, because every child is really the same from zero to three. And then, as Andrea Busetti from La Baracca says, then they start to become contaminated with their own cultural biases or enriched with their own cultural traditions. But there’s a universal baby, and then from there it changes.

Dance? Yes! Dance, theatre, puppetry, circus, to a certain extent. But circus in that kind of pure sense; it’s not Big Top Circus, it’s that physical performance rooted in circus. We commissioned and supported the development of TWEET TWEET! which is a piece by the company Femmes de Feu that is entirely a circus-based performance that’s toured and toured and toured since it premiered in 2018.

And of course, at every single edition, we’re committed to ensuring that our unique context here in Canada is acknowledged. There is always work by Indigenous artists, and there’s always work that reflects our own Black, Indigenous and Persons of Colour here in Canada. And that’s an ongoing effort because that’s at the heart of our commissioning, our Seedling Projects, because the European scene does not have a tremendous cultural diversity. In Canada, TYA is not often the first choice of vocational focus for an artist of colour. And so you can imagine, making work for babies is certainly not! Through our Seedling Program, we’re trying to invite more and more artists from different cultural contexts into this beautiful early-years world.

It’s interesting to hear how some of the most radical work in the country is being done for babies!

Yeah. Because they rock and roll! They get it. They just don’t have the words to tell it. they don’t have the words to offer. But boy oh boy, they can appreciate super punk rock work! We just finished this piece, Cooo, a commission of the festival. It’s performed by Xin Wang, who’s an amazing contemporary vocalist, an opera singer, and she’s working with the composition Love Songs (Doves) by Ana Sokolović, an acclaimed Canadian contemporary composer. This is super radical, cutting-edge music and we did the show for babies up to twenty-four months. They just lost their minds! They loved it. The looks on their faces and their physical response to this performance really said everything to us. They get it, they understand complex acoustic pieces—and, you know, they’re babies! A baby’s life isn’t all pastel and lullabies. There’s a lot of very interesting work that’s happening in this area. It just needs more support.

Where do your audiences come from?

Sometimes it’s a mystery where our audiences come from because we spend about $5 on marketing! It’s all word of mouth, word of mouth, word of mouth, word of mouth. And you know, as a mom—I was the same way when my kids were small—when you hear something is good, you’re going to run to it! We’ve cycled through maybe three generations, because we grow a new audience every three to five years. Often they’re sad when they outgrow us. But they tell their friends. We have one mom who has six kids, so she’s been with us for a while and she takes them to everything.

The audience comes from downtown; they come from North York; they come from Etobicoke; they come from Scarborough. They’re willing to make the trip. Although we do try to make sure our venues are placed throughout the city, if we had all the money and all the capacity, we’d be operating on a larger scale in every quadrant of the city. Toronto is not just downtown, Toronto is a huge, huge city. And the boroughs or the suburbs of this city are hugely underserved. But we do our best.

We also have partnerships with local schools, and over the last three years, with the George Brown Early Childhood Education program, first through the Nelson Mandela Childcare Centre in Regent Park and this year with Casa Loma Child Care Centre. And it’s just magnificent because we offer the performances free of charge. But we get significant word-of-mouth from the daycare and from the families who hear about their child’s experience. And then they come back again on the weekend to see a different piece. This year we tested a new work with a performance for forty preschoolers. The infants came to the very first performance of Cooo, the toddlers came to a performance of In Tune and then the parents came on the weekends.

We also engage with the Alliance Française; they are our Francophone partners, and they put the word out, so we always have strong attendance from Francophone and Francophile audiences. We also offer free access for, for example, new moms through the Healthy Beginnings project of the Stop Community Food program, the Christie Refugee Centre, and so on. We really have a diverse mix. And then this year our guest company from Italy, Teatro La Baracca, played in North York at the Columbus Centre. They played in Hamilton, they played for the children in the preschools in North York, and then they played for downtown families. It’s through partnerships we’re able to reach a more diverse audience.

This year’s WeeFestival has just ended. What were some of the highlights for you this time?

Oh, there are so many! But premiering Cooo was really a highlight because it’s been a project that Xin and I have been working with for a while. This idea of bringing this super-weird, radical contemporary vocal music to very young audiences really came together beautifully. It was a beautiful premiere in Hamilton first, and then in Toronto. So we’re really pleased that that was a success.

The guest company, La Baracca, is a cooperative in Bologna. Andrea Buzetti, who is so incredibly generous with his time, led an absolutely inspiring masterclass with sixteen artists. Three of those participants were the artists of Kuné, whom we are working with. That workshop changed them utterly. The next day we went back into process, and it was like something had just sparked and boom—within three hours, we had staged the entire piece!

They understood what we were talking about in terms of creating space for the child’s energy and voice. Andrea really conveyed the idea of being present and not acting or “performing”, but being grounded, present, and true. It was everything that I’ve been hoping for, because every year we have a masterclass, and every year I’m excited by the content, but it’s hard to get artists to come in and participate in this city; it’s hard for them to find the time while they’re busy trying to earn a living and pay the rent.  Anyway, I was really happy with the number of folks that were able to attend. So all of that connected the dots and made me happy that we were creating a full circle of creation, presentation, learning, and reflection.

And the closing performance was special, because this was the first public performance of the new work from Kuné, and it was filled with brand new families I had never met. I had never seen these families before, all little babies and toddlers just having the most fantastic experience. Watching the children arrive and engage and watching the grown-ups’ minds being changed about what good theatre and performance is for very young audiences was amazing.

Lynda, this has been fantastic. Is there anything that you would like to add?

I’ve covered a lot of ground! Earlier we were talking about the benefits of this kind of work. It goes without saying that good theatre, when we’re all together in the room witnessing a powerful piece of theatre, our individual and collective identities are affirmed. We are connected. We become a community in the room, our breathing and our heartbeats come into unison and this is exactly what happens in an audience of very young children. The benefits are obvious, and the impacts are enormous.

We know that the first five years are the most critical, the first 10,000 days. And every single experience, particularly in the first three years, has a profound impact in the long term on a young child. So, you know, witnessing a piece of theatre, laughing at a moment and realizing that you’re laughing with thirty other preschoolers—this is a beautiful message that we’re sending children: that they matter, and they matter so much that we’re taking this time together to make to tell a story that’s been created especially for them. It’s like they’re being honoured, you know? When you see babies engage with this complex work, they look regal. They look like they’re saying, “Oh, you see, this is what I’ve been talking about. This is what I want! I’m so glad you understand me now.” I just don’t have words for it.

The playwright Veronique Coté wrote a piece that we first presented at the 2014 festival called Waves. And she said it best: “Creating theatre for the very young is like having a conversation with the beginning of the world.”