The Japanese Garden The CCC (Children Cheering Carpet) Project Compagnia T.P.O. (Italy)

"It’s about theater as a shared experience and I’ve never seen anything quite like it." — Tony Reekie, Director, Bank of Scotland’s Children’s Festival

Take a magical ride on an incredible Japanese garden carpet. For more than two decades, T.P.O. (Teatro d'Piazza o d'Occasione) from Prato, Italy, has distinguished itself as a “visual theater company,” and the Children Cheering Carpet is one of its crowning achievements. Bonsai, stones, water, a Zen garden, and other elements of a Japanese garden appear on the interactive, magic carpet stage. It initially seems like just a big white carpet, but its digital images and sounds respond to the pressure of the feet or body. As the performance begins, a company member tells a story about how the garden was born. Audience members sit around the carpet, and a dancer starts to animate areas of the surface corresponding to five gardens in the original story. Then children in the audience are invited to explore and animate the gardens themselves, experiencing the reconstructed natural environment through their own senses.

The carpet will be available for visitors to see and explore Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday from 2:30-6 PM, Thursday from 2:30-8 PM, and Saturday from 4-8 PM.

For young people ages 4 and up and their families. The audience will be asked to remove their shoes prior to and for the duration of the performance.

The Japanese Garden is presented by ArKtype in association with Crying Out Loud UK and directed by Francesco Gandi and Davide Venturini.