Take 400 school kids, add 16 jugglers, hip-hop artists and high-wire trapeze acrobats. Put SSRqem all together for a week in northern Manitoba.
What do you have?
A bunch of artists clowning around to show kids how to feel good about having fun.
Nearly half of the 1,165 students at the Helen Betty Osborne School in Norway House signed up for the week-long workshops on circus arts. And everyone is having fun.
It's a private social program called the International Children's Festival Circus and Magic Partnership, a $120,000 event sponsored by governments, Manitoba Hydro and even Beaver Bus Lines.
It's also a story about what it means to kids to have a travelling troupe of circus artists and other performers take a bus ride 800 kilometres north to see them.
Next week, the troupe's in Winnipeg doing the same thing at Gordon Bell High School.
In Norway House, Grade 5 student Chadwin Scatch is having a ball this week.
The 11-year-old is studying drama and hip hop and he said he loves it. "To have this stuff at the school is pretty exciting," Scatch said in a telephone interview.
Scatch is happy to be in school at 8 a.m. and his parents are even happier because they don't have to coax him to go.
Norway House has a housing crunch. At Scatch's house there are 11 people sharing a two-bedroom apartment. Both his parents work full time, and getting everyone up and out on time takes planning.
School principal Agnes Mowatt said the event is the talk of the Cree First Nation. Parents are dropping by the school to check it out. Norway House residents are trying to get the troupe to perform with the kids in the final show but there's no word on that yet.
While nobody is saying Circus and Magic can reverse the dismally high school drop out rate (50 per cent) among aboriginal kids in Canada, it's a feat to keep kids in school when they're on vacation.
"This type of activity is good. It helps keep kids in school and it'll help them stay connected (to the school), Mowat said.
The festival, now in it's eleventh year, is the brainchild of Neal Rempel. He signs on performers and does logistics. There's a puppeteer from Hollywood and a circus performer is arriving from London, England, for the Winnipeg workshops.
Rempel modeled the program after Clowns Without Borders, an international program that takes circus performers into the Third World to teach kids the art of juggling and walking a tight rope.
"These kids are isolated. Not just geographically but socially, too. They don't get a lot from the world of the arts," Rempel said.
In return, kids get the rush of being applauded.
"Everybody needs that moment... Where they're standing there and everyone is saying they are great," Rempel said.
alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca
Winnipeg Free Press
