'Leo’s search for a new home’ is the first theatrical production that was not only open to the public as we saw last Monday afternoon when scores of school children came streaming into Peponi House in Westlands to watch this heartwarming, witty, and fabulously original musical puppet show.
It was also on the official program for the UNEP Climate
Conference which opened the same day as the play, which is part puppet show,
part musical complete with lively music and marvelous dancing fit for children
to come up on stage and join in the performance which they did.
“Several members from the EU (European Union) delegation to
Kenya came to watch the show today,” Leo’s creator and director, Kasia Meszaros
tells BDLife shortly after the 4pm performance. She adds that the EU delegation
to Kenya (EUDK) is helping her produce the production largely because of ‘Leo”
makes such a convincing statement about plastics polluting our oceans. It’s
also a show that is child-friendly, interactive, and focused on capturing the
attention of children with a clearcut message that plastic pollution does
terrible damage threatening the very existence of whole species, but we can all
play our part to end it. In fact, there is a point in the puppets show when one
of the puppeteers invites the children to go out into the auditorium and
collect plastics for recycling. This they do, and clearly love becoming part of
the performance.
One scene that illustrates just how life-threatening
plastics are to the oceans takes place in the operating room of Dr Blade. The
show itself is so fantastic and fresh that one’s not surprised when a shipwreck is unearthed after a huge storm
and Leo meets a multitude of creatures who have made the ship their home. But
then, the scene shifts and the ship opens up into Dr Blade’s clinic. Leo and
his new friends the eels are looking for Mary, their eel sister. They find her
getting her stomach cleared as Dr Blade who pulls out many meters of plastic
that she’d swallowed. Then then there’s a big celebration.
But before any of this takes place, Leo has to be born. The
first scene of the show has a tortoise egg cracking open, and a nameless
tortoise soon-to-be-named Leo emerges and realizes he must find a new home
since his first one, the egg, is gone. Shortly after Leo’s puppet emerges, his
human stand-in Tirath Padam appears. They’ll stay together from then on, but
one is meant to feel the puppet is leading the person holding his stick, not
vice versa. It’s tricky since it’s a puppeteering unlike what most people think
of as a conventional puppet show. But the innovations that Kasia interjects
into her puppetry are more nuanced, daring, and liberating.
Tiram has understood this quality of freedom which he has
been developing since last June when Leo first came on the theatre scene
working with Aperture Africa. Since then, Kasia has made major revisions in her
script, aimed at sending out a stronger, clearer, and more engaging,
interactive message. At the same time, she has streamlined her set, creating
underwater garbage mountains made out actual trash that she collected from
Nairobi’s many junk yards and garbage
pits. So her underwater mountains have everything in them from wheel
plates and side mirrors to an old jiko stove and a rusty old bicycle.
Her oceanic waters, including the turbulent ones that nearly drowned Leo before
he got swept up onto land had his first encounter with a human being. Before
that moment, Leo believed with all the other creatures he had met that humans
were their enemy because they were the worst plastic polluter. It was all their
junk, especially their plastics which were bringing the biggest problems to the
planet, even to the fish in the sea,
But Leo encountered other threats on his journey, like the
sharks who were looking forward to eating Leo for lunch. It was not to be, but
one crocodile came very close to munching Leo head-first. One shark actually
had a good grip on Leo’s head and neck. But
then there was a problem. None of Leo’s new fish friends knew what had
interrupted that one last munch but it gave them a few moments to grab Leo from
the clutches of the toothless shark and save his life.
Those fish who became Leo’s buddies were the crabs, eels,
blowfish swordfish, and even the sharks. These are the creatures that gave Leo
a sense of purpose and identity. They also helped make him feel good, just
being among them, and making him feel like he had finally found his way home.
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