Green Fools Theatre

www.greenfools.com

Established in 1991 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Green Fools Theatre is a non-profit, charitable society that creates, performs, and teaches physical theatre arts focusing on masks, puppets, and stilts for diverse audiences locally and internationally.

Artists are the centre of our Fools' society; we are writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, inventors, singers, actors, acrobats, instructors, puppeteers, and clowns led by Co-Artistic Directors Dean Bareham and Jennie Esdale. We are a magnet for physical theatre artists and offer multiple training, creating and performing opportunities. We have also been a building ground for artists and have fostered the development of other puppetry troupes and performers, including The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, the Calgary Animated Objects Society, and several Cirque du Soliel performers. In addition we develop strong relationships with other sectors, including the Calgary Zoo and International Crane Foundation, the Glenbow Museum, and the Alberta College of Art & Design to research, produce or present our work in traditional or non-traditional theatre venues.

Our diverse programming, including workshops, puppet and mask shows, street theatre, spectacle animation, events, and fundraisers allow artists and audiences to fully explore our art form across a wide spectrum of artistic styles and forms.

With an eye on the past and hands on tradition, Green Fools Theatre also strives to advance our work and our art form by inventing and engineering new puppetry styles and ways of storytelling as well as innovative artistic processes merging content and form to create new world mythology. We utilize a variety of physical theatre, puppet and mask techniques as well as multiple artistic disciplines to tell our original stories, producing puppet shows and physical theatre productions that are literally out of the box. Styles meet the needs of the story; puppets share the stage with actors and masked characters. In a single production we may we also challenge the boundaries of scale from a finger puppet to a giant stilt character. Often, our work explores non- text based storytelling. In our performances we include music and on occasion dance, performance art, video, and animation. Our work is contemporary, handcrafted, original, and collaboratively created.

Green Fools Theatre reaches thousands of audience members each year through performances, community events, festivals, and creative training by extensive local touring, as well as some National and International touring.