Last night we all jumped in the car after school and raced to Leeds to go and watch the beautifully crafted staging of Little Leap Forward. Adapted from the book, by Guo Yue and Clare Farrow, illustrated by Helen Cann and published by Barefoot Books, it tells the story of events from Yue’s own childhood set against Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China.

A powerful combination of masked actors, puppets and shadow-box/animation, not to mention an atmospheric score and cleverly versatile set, the story is told “only” through mime. We followed Little Leap Forward’s dawning awareness of the importance of freedom, both through the political events unfolding around him and through his love for a songbird captured for him by his best friend. No matter how much Little Leap Forward coaxes and bribes with seeds, the bird cannot sing from within the confines of a cage. A “scary” dream sequence that had Little Brother on the edge of his seat alerts Little Leap Forward to what he has to do and he sets the bird free.

I have to say that this particular performance will be looked back on by us – and probably by the cast – with very mixed feelings. There was a group of children in the audience from a local School for the Deaf, who were entranced – picking up enough of the vibrations of the music to get a feel for it, and able to particpate fully in the action on stage. Wonderful. However, the first three rows were taken up by a youth-group outing and it very soon became evident that the children did not know how to behave in a public, live performance. All the more credit to the production, then, that in the scene when Red Guards arrest Little Leap Forward’s mother (an event related in Guo Yue and Clare Farrow’s book for adults, Music, Food and Love), there was not a sound from the auditorium.

Afterwards, the four actors/puppeteers gave (more…)

Ham and eggs, hugs and kisses, poetry and painting–there are some things that were always meant to be together. This is colorfully, exuberantly, and bilingually pointed out by Everyday Life by Tricia Morrissey and Ding Sang Mak, illustrated by a group of artists from Jinshan, China (ThingsAsian Press).

Following the four seasons through the activities and festivals of a Chinese year, this book is filled with short verses, each one written in English, Chinese characters, and romanized Chinese, complete with tone marks, so those of us who don’t speak Chinese can still attempt to give the music of its sounds a try. Dragons dance, pictures are “sewed into life,” kites swoop, trees are decorated with toys during the harvest festival, and winter is greeted with the Chicken Feather Game–while children “Pile Up a Snowman” with “brown mushroom ears, black olive eyes.”

Each of the joyful, rollicking verses is accompanied by a painting, done in vivid, gleaming colors and filled with people who are so vitally present that they almost seem in motion. Every picture draws the viewer into the scene and into the lives that leap straight from the page to imaginations. They have been created by folk artists, farmers who paint scenes from their daily lives in tempera mixed with chalk, whose work is now exhibited in a Shanghai gallery.

Through art and the use of English and Chinese, this is a book that shrinks global distances by bringing another culture close while introducing the youngest of children to the delight of rhyming, rhythmical words in two languages and the pleasure of exploring paintings. And what could be better than that, after eating a plate of ham and eggs and before receiving bedtime hugs and kisses?