Maybe I don't get out enough, but I reckon there are few pleasures in the Irish arts world to match the Ark, the cultural centre for children in Dublin, when it's buzzing with juvenile activity. For 18 days up to last Sunday, The Word Gar- den was a themed festival celebrating language, aimed essentially at primary-school children (and of course their teachers and parents). Its components ranged from letter puzzles in the basement to videos and books scattered around the top-floor workshop space - plus a bit of theatre.
Particularly welcome was the transformation of the whole building into a series of the whole building into a series of hands-on galleries through which families could wander (albeit on a pre-booked schedule and well supervised) at the weekends. Clearly the Ark has been listening to its feedback.
The most lovely of these spaces in the "garden" included "trees" from which lovely children's books could be plucked, and Genevieve Murphy and Jon Kelly's marvellous Poetry Trees - most of these first seen two years ago but none the less lovely for that. These "trees", in a range of astonishing colours and forms appropriate to their "fruit", bear poems: from the Nonsense Tree to the Heaney Tree, they are a pleasure to sample from.
After all that, the three productions in the flower-festooned theatre were a bit of an anticlimax. The problem wasn't a conceptual misfit: though two of the productions came more or less ready-made from abroad, they worked well with the themes of the festival. The disappointment, in two cases anyway, was that the intelligent focus on language and process didn't help make the shows actually theatrical, let alone dramatic.
The exception to the quibble was Word of Mouth - English storyteller Xanthe Gresham, with Sherry Robinson accompanying her, mainly on cello. With a few props, exquisite timing, just enough movement, a few rhythmic repetitions and some audience participation, the duo brought to life stories from various cultures, to beautiful effect.
Scat in the Hat should have made a telling contrast: they're another words-and-music duo, this time Canadian men, playing with comic rhyme and improvisation. Perhaps hampered by an idiomatic gap between beatnik frontman Scat Schrodinger and the young Irish children in the audience I saw, they often failed to spark in spite of lively efforts; ironically, physical comedy got the big laughs.
The sweet Puca Puppets presentation, A is for Aesop, had an extremely uninspiring version of an old tale, of the tortoise and hare, at its centre. Thankfully, puppeteer Helene Hugel eventually came out of the box; she engaged the children far more chatting with them about voice-characterisation and hand movement than with the show.
