Big Arts Day: Fabulous acts for all the family

The free festival, on Saturday 14 July at Lydiard Park, not only includes musical acts, drama and workshops, but brings a great selection of professional artists ready to entertain you. Combined with a new Children’s Zone, the Big Arts Day is the place to be for families.

Children’s Zone

Tiny the Dinosaur, a life-like Stegosaurus, is expressive, interactive and full of character and charm. Los Kaos use their innovative combination of live sound, facial animatronics and extreme puppetry to bring Tiny to life. Accompanied by a palaeontologist who presents a lively natural history show, the audiences are encouraged to ‘get tactile’. An amazing opportunity to get up close and personal with a dinosaur.

Bread and Butter Theatre: Armed with a trunk full of trunks, swimming caps, goggles, and armbands the Van Dunk Brothers will delight crowds with their award-winning dry-land synchronized swimming display.

Jason Maverick and his high-energy show, set almost entirely to music, combines superb mime and robotics with a huge range of skills.

Makendoo: A drop-in area where children a day can take part in making hats, masks and banners. 

Roll up, roll up, have your 1930s-style seaside snapshot taken with three puppets who have just jumped out of their sepia photograph. Come and see Ida lazying in her deck-chair, Isaac playing with his brand new gramophone, and Alexandre training for the 1932 Olympics. Take the Pose combines puppetry, art performance, photography and new technologies.

Walk about acts

Granny Turismo: When the Grannies arrive on their souped-up shopping trolleys everyone takes notice. 

Artemis: Jerry the Gerbera and Bob the Butterfly have escaped the greenhouse. These colourful, cheeky characters mingle with ease as they flutter and flit.

Artizani: Lobster a la Cart: Giant lobsters take over! A surreal and endearing walkabout; riding in a cart pulled by a human slave the inflatable lobsters are a sight to behold.

Strolling Gardeners: Twin brothers Bob and Tom both love their fruit and veg, but how did one brother grow so tall? The answer lies in the special compost formula. On their travels the boys help the balding to sprout hair, children to bloom and everyone else to a fun filled ‘5 a day’.

Spread the Love explores What is Love? The love is spread by ‘love machines’, performers who are the two-halves of a single heart, using all five senses. Participants peep through a hole in the performer’s heart and watch a short animation about what love is. They hear love songs by listening through the love machine’s gloves. Some participants might touch the fluff, the fur, the sticky, the warm and the ice-cold through feely pockets concealed in the performer’s cloak. For taste there are love hearts that the machine distributes and participants can smell what love is as scents are spayed onto a special Spread the Love card which they take away as a keepsake.

Swank: Sputnicker Sisters: Following a twenty year absence, the former Russian award winning trio make their communist comeback. Gymnastic champions in the 1980s and now undeterred by age and gravity, The Sputknicker Sisters still believe they are at the top of their game. A high octane street show with a revolutionary appeal. Breaking new ground in dance, gymnastics and song, these Soviet sisters are pioneers of their time.