Best of 2011-2012: The Dragons are Singing Tonight

I am a terrible audience member. I analyze the actors’ performances, try to see the inner workings of any theatrical effects or look around at the audience to see how other people are reacting to the show. Yet the reason I do theater and go to theater is to escape. I keep searching for it but only a really great show can bring me there. On that rare occasion, a world is created in that theatrical space that drags me from whatever mental or physical state I happen to have into somewhere new. (Did I mention I went into the early stages labor watching a Christina Ham play?) When I'm lucky, I enter that world and go on a journey, meet new people, creatures, landscapes, and experience magic. I had that experience this past year when I saw TigerLion Arts production of The Dragons Are Singing Tonight at the Southern Theater. I have been following TigerLion’s work for several years, and they never fail to impress. Markell Kiefer and Tyson Forbes have founded a company focused on combining important stories with spectacle. They produced The Buddha Prince about the story of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, a travelling spectacle performed in parks around the country. For their show Kipo they brought in master dancers and musicians from Tibet and paired them with local Tibetan youth to present an energetic, athletic, smile-inducing, and awe-inspiring celebration of Tibetan culture. In 2010 they performed Nature, an outdoor, walking play about the life of Forbes’ great great grandfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. They were able to incorporate the environment of that space incredibly well, using distance, time, and space to illustrate Emerson’s love of the outdoors and create breathtaking visual effects. I was surprised to hear they were doing a show based on a collection of children’s poems about dragons. How did this fit into their history of spiritual, philosophical themes? Would this be another dumbed-down kids show? No chance.

Commitment to excellence

First of all, this show must have been a logistical nightmare to produce. It involved about 30 boys from the Minnesota Boy Choir, three aerialists from Circus Juventas, four actors, several large puppets from Puppet Farm Arts, and a twelve-piece orchestra performing all original music. In the hands of a small theater company with a small fraction of the budget and capacity of such houses as The Childrens’ Theatre Company this could be a train wreck, but The Dragons are Singing Tonight was as polished as any CTC production I’ve seen—and with that scrappy, creative, original, independent theater heart! The boys were adorable, engaged, and well-behaved. I could tell that they fully understood the importance of the show. They also had angelic voices, raw and pure. Chris Lutter-Gardella, local giant-puppet genius, created several amazingly intricate and beautiful dragon puppets of increasing size, and Sky Brooks and Erica Zaffarano made all the props and set pieces, including tons of beautiful lanterns made of papier mache and a dragon claw foot bathtub. While I often find aerial work in theater to be superfluous and disconnected, these aerialists did not distract from the storytelling but incorporated it into the story and world of the show as flying dragons. And performers Elise Langer and Tyson Forbes know how to play. You could see their joyful, playful, and devious spirits as they puppeteered the various versions of Nasty the Dragon. The youthful exuberance of Maxell Chonk Thao and Isabelle Dawis, the two main human characters, was infectious. The simple yet effective live musical score composed by Laurie MacGregor added the extra element that subconsciously pulled at my heartstrings. I could tell that the entire ensemble was committed to telling the story with a generosity of spirit that elevated all its respective components.

Faith in imagination

The whole theme of the show was about believing, about letting go of practical and limiting thinking and opening yourself up to the freedom of fantasy, of play, of joy—which is a simple and particularly poignant idea for the children and adults in the audience alike. This fantastical, heart-felt, and humorous tale was about a nasty little dragon, a boy, and the girl who helped him believe in the dragon’s true potential when it was masked by misbehavior. I know what you may be thinking, “Children’s story stuff. Disney movie stuff.” I was a bit skeptical too. But the production took my jaded soul and made a believer out of me. I was drawn in by the sincerity, the beauty, and the artistry of it all, and by the end of the show—when a 20+ foot dragon actually flew inside the Southern Theater—I wept silent tears of joy, and pride. I was proud because this was art that I love on display at its best, because all those little boys in the show would know the power of this kind of art, and because all the parents and those who work with children in the audience would think about the potentially tragic results that come from placing too much rigor and too many restrictions on their kids instead of believing in them. I felt joy because I experienced the magic of the imagination, let go of my pre-determined plans or expectations and was brought along on a ride atop a mythical being. *You can get a taste of the sheer artistry and magic involved in The Dragon's are Singing Tonight at this year’s Ivey Awards where an excerpt from the show's finale will be performed.