Dinosaur Zoo – Tuesday 8 & Wednesday 9 April 2014, Brighton Dome Concert Hall. 5.30pm (Tues), 11am & 2pm (Wed), £12.50 / £45 (family ticket). Suitable for all the family (ages 3+).
Zoë Brown: I just wanted to find out a little bit about the production company. Are you one of the founding members of Erth?
Dinosaur Zoo: No I’m not a founding member but I’ve been with them for three and a half years or so. They’ve been around for a good twenty years in Australia; they started off as a grass roots company for an environmentally recycled theatre, back in the day they started making weird and wonderful creations out of whatever they could find. Dinosaur Zoo sort of evolved out of doing commission work for museums and things, and then along the way people began to realise ‘well we can make a show out of this ourselves as we’re building the things’ and now it’s snowballed to this extraordinary show that’s playing in three different continents at the moment. It’s pretty nice for Erth to come from such a humble beginning.
ZB: It’s been so successful, I was just looking at your show on the website and you’ve had incredible press reviews all over the world.
DZ: Well it’s very much outside of the box. It’s quite hard to describe and one of the most common things I get when people come see it is ‘I didn’t know what to expect but that wasn’t what I was expecting and that was amazing!’ It’s quite hard to put down. I think there is a very traditional form of theatre in the UK and we don’t necessarily adhere to those parameters. So it’s great fun. As we start the show, and it gets rolling along , people have these moments of realisation of like ‘Oh! this is what’s happening’. It’s good fun and it paves the way for some really exciting children’s theatre here in the UK as well.
ZB: Does the show then change day-to-day as it were, is it quite spontaneous?
DZ: Very much so. I don’t think I could have been on the show for three years if it was the exactly the same every day, day-in day-out. What I absolutely love about it is there is no way you can switch on to autopilot in the show. Once you get kids up on stage with what they believe are real dinosaurs, literally anything could happen I’m constantly kept on my toes. I did a show just half an hour ago and kids were saying things that I’d never come across before in over however many hundred shows I’ve done. It’s great for a repeat audience as well; we get people who’ve seen the show three or four times, we’ve got little dino-groupies chasing us round and they love that every show is a little bit different so it’s good fun.
ZB: Dare I ask now you’ve said that people come to expect the unexpected, but is there a format you stick to?
DZ: I would liken it to a wildlife presentation, you know all those talk shows where they have the lion cub and the reptile snakes and all these sort of things? That’s basically the skeleton of the show and then what we do once we have our creatures out is have our audience interact with them in different ways, and that’s where the fun really begins. So there is a skeleton which is the wildlife presentation, and then there’s the interaction that happens on top of that.
ZB: I noticed that all the dinosaurs are quite unknown dinosaurs. Was that something that you did very deliberately because you could then have fun with the characters and play around with them much more, as well as creating more of a learning experience for those coming to see it?
DZ: I think it may have come from a bit of an egotistical place originally, because they’re all Australian dinosaurs or Australasian dinosaurs, and the creators at Erth are very passionate about promoting Australian stories. I think they got a little bit tired with all these requests for T-Rex’s… that said we do have one in other versions of Dinosaur Zoo, but in the UK we’re are very proud to be bringing Australian dinosaurs and creatures that the UK probably haven’t heard of before. And kids, when you say ‘do you want to see another dinosaur?’ they start to yell out all the same old names, and then get really excited when they find out they’re about to meet something they’ve never heard of before. We do work very closely with palaeontologists, so what we have is hopefully the most up to date research and palaeontological discoveries on stage, which is pretty cool – palaeontological is a good word to try and drop in conversation.
ZB: But it’s great, because kids are always so up on these things.
DZ: Oh man, I’ve met a four year old that can do an A-Z of dinosaur names, it’s incredible.
ZB: So it’s very informative also then?
DZ: Yeah. I loathe to use the word Edu-tainment, but this very much is. The kids don’t even realise how much they’re learning as they absorb it all like a sponge, and the parents also come out saying ‘I learnt something today as well’. So it’s very entertaining but it’s all based on facts, and we teach kids animal handling skills or what to do when you meet a new animal, and to think twice about what things that they’re doing. It all comes from a very sincere place, but we try to be creative with it too.
ZB: I think that’s actually quite rare. Often children’s theatre can be quite formulaic and quite samey, so that’s obvious quite a unique thing that children’s theatre is interactive and it is so kind of appealing in that sense.
DZ: Absolutely. I think our golden rule is that we do not patronise our audience. I think that a lot of children’s theatre does speak just a little bit too low to their audience, even the youngest three year old gets what’s going on. Our dinosaurs are not there to sing and dance and teach you the alphabet, they’re there to act like animals and be dinosaurs, so it’s a great chance for kids to not be talked down to and to really think for themselves. I have a bit of fun with the adults as well so that’s a nice surprise for the parents who come along to see it.
ZB: I was looking at the reviews, and there’s a lot in them about how adults have responded so positively to it. I think that’s the sign of a good children’s show; where you can appeal to both an adult and a young audience.
DZ: Yeah, finding that fine line, it’s finding that fine line where you can pitch a joke that’s there to hit the adults and keep the kids entertained at the same time. Sometimes using a double entendre that goes missed by the younger audience is good, if you like.
ZB: Keep the parents happy.
DZ: Exactly right. But I think parents are used to going to some shows and sitting down and switching off for an hour, whereas with us they go ‘did she just say what I think she said?!’. I love when I get the audience on side, both young and old alike.
ZB: You say you’ve been working with palaeontologists; do you keep the dinosaurs and the puppets true to their original selves, and kind of play that up?
DZ: Yeah. I mean you’ve got your basic carnivore, your herbivore and your insects and we all kind of know how they would behave. But we’ve taken a bit of science and a bit of imagination. For example, one of our small herbivores we know for a fact had relative large brains, and had to function in an environment that was quite adverse. So therefore that dinosaur would have been quite intelligent, but we just interpret that as being a bit cheeky and curious. And our carnivore, he’s a bit boofy [large/heavy] that likes meat and things, but he’s also got a bit of a steely glint in his eyes as well. But the characters are very much also infused by the puppeteers that operate them, so depending on whose operating which puppet I know they’ll have slightly different personalities on that day.
ZB: There’s a nice kind of immediacy in a reaction of the audience you’re working in front of on any given day.
DZ: Oh absolutely, if we have very young audiences the puppeteers know to pull it back, or can even sometimes push it a little further if the audience can handle a little bit more scary or a little bit more cheeky. It’s very alive in that sense. Our dinosaurs or puppets respond to what’s going on in their immediate environment.
ZB: And you’re one of the performers that host it?
DZ: That’s right, I’m kind of the Bindi Irwin/David Attenborough. I’m the human face of the show so I’m there as a conduit between the audience and the animals.
ZB: What is it that you enjoy so much about that role?
DZ: I absolutely love the fact that it’s such a dynamic show, that in every performance there’s the chance that something could happen that I’ve never come across before and I will have to be thinking quick in that moment. So I adore interacting with the kids, and you get certain kids up on stage and they’re brilliant. You couldn’t write the material that these kids come up with on stage sometimes, so I absolutely adore that fact.
ZB: And in terms of the humour, is it very tongue-in-cheek or..?
DZ: Very much. I would say it’s the quintessential tongue-in-cheek Australian humour. I get away with a lot being an Australian girl on stage in front of a British audience; I get away with a bit more then most performers in children’s theatre do. It is very much Australian humour, and we play ourselves out, and play out the Brits and play out the weather, and every now and then I get an opportunity to throw in a good cricket joke as well. So it’s very cheeky, very playful and very dry and I love it that way.
ZB: So could you tell me a little bit about the stars of the show, the different dinosaurs and the characters?
DZ: Absolutely. So we grow in size as we go through the show. So we have a pair of baby Dryasaurus, who are very cute, so we ease the audience in with our little babies. Then we move on to Meganeura, a giant insect from an age much older than dinosaurs, which is different. I think people think of dinosaurs as always existing, but there was a period before there were dinosaurs when extraordinary creatures lived. And then we have our clown of the show, the Leonerasaurus; we’ve got a breeding pair of those, they’re good fun. Then of course we’ve got our big hero puppet, he’s our Australovenator and he’s a very exciting discovery, pretty much Australia’s answer to the T-Rex, so that’s something to throw in the face of all the kids who think that only the T-Rex can be the most exciting dinosaur. So they do range in scale from tiny things that you can hold in your arms to fifteen metre long.
ZB: Wow! How does the one that is fifteen metre long work? Is that mechanical and operated by a number of people?
DZ: We manage to operate it with three people. I shan’t reveal all my secrets for how exactly we get it in, but it is a little bit, shall I say, deflating when the kids come backstage and see it when it’s not part of the show. But it’s very simple technique, and the beauty of our puppetry is that it’s usually very simple. Our puppeteers are visible at all times; we don’t hide the fact that it’s puppetry and in fact talk about it at the beginning of the show. And it’s credit to the makers, of how brilliant their creations are and the kids quickly forget that these aren’t real dinosaurs.
ZB: So it plays absolutely on the children’s fantasy and the absolute all round experience of it.
DZ: Oh absolutely, yeah. And you can just see those moments when, they hear me talking at the start, a bit of introduction, they’re starting to get a little bit bored, then we bring out our babies, you hear this ‘ahh..’ go through the audience and you just know that they’re there with you, despite the fact that three minutes beforehand I told them that they’re puppets. It’s fantastic. The first thing I say after that is ‘do you want to see some dinosaurs’ and they all scream ‘yes!’.
ZB: So the element of surprise..?
DZ: Oh yeah, it’s brilliant. We really muck around with that idea; it’s playing with a fine line, a little bit of pantomime but not too cheesy. We know that British kids have a great understanding of the cues in pantomime, the ‘it’s behind you’ moments, and we muck around with those concepts.
ZB: Are you touring around the UK? You’re coming to Brighton obviously.
DZ: We are yeah. This leg of the tour is finishing up on the 27th, and we’ve just announced that we have a week or so in Manchester, and then we’re going to be playing as part of the Fringe in Edinburgh. So it’s onwards and upwards with the dinosaurs, which is very exciting.
ZB: And how long has the show been touring for itself?
DZ: It’s been in various incarnations, it started off as street theatre in rural regions a good eight or nine years ago, possibly longer. I started off playing very very small street festivals three years ago, but it’s only in the last two years or so that it’s snowballed into this great theatre show.
ZB: And what would you say is the secret to its success?
DZ: I just think it’s something very different, it’s out of the box children’s theatre, and we don’t talk down to our kids so it’s very fun, it’s sort of grown up children’s theatre is how I’d describe it.
ZB: And is there anything you’d like to discuss?
DZ: We’ve almost covered everything, although one request I would make is if people could come up with some good dinosaur jokes that would be great, because I don’t think I can bear hearing ‘D’you-think-he-saurus’ another time.
Dinosaur Zoo – Tuesday 8 & Wednesday 9 April 2014, Brighton Dome Concert Hall. 5.30pm (Tues), 11am & 2pm (Wed), £12.50 / £45 (family ticket). Suitable for all the family (ages 3+).
To book tickets to see Dinosaur Zoo please visit the Brighton Dome website.
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