Attendances up by 36% as city revels in most successful Babor—

By Denise McNamara

This year’s Baboró International Arts Festival for Children has been declared the most successful ever in its 14-year history with a much bigger family programme hailed as the reason behind a 36% increase in attendance.

Over the weekend alone, some 9,000 little people and adults – 4,000 of them from outside the city – were drawn to the festival to attend shows held in four venues as well as the exhibitions.

Shows inspired by much-loved stories such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Jack (and the Beanstalk), The Gingerbread Man, Gugalaí Gug! - Beo and The Secret Garden were also believed to have been responsible for the big jump in audience figures.

This year a phenomenal 10,000 school children came to the festival from as far away as Westmeath, Roscommon, Limerick and Clare. A group of 60 pupils from the Aran Islands flew over for the experience for the first time.

Programme Director Lali Morris said it was decided to make the programme more family friendly for 2010, with shows for families up from 19 to 27 this year, many of them staged at weekends and in the early evening to allow working parents to share in the experience.

“We took that decision based on demand. Baboró does a lot of audience feedback every year and they were saying we didn’t have enough on at the weekends. Parents need to have some nice time with their kids after the year we’ve all had and it definitely worked,” she explained.

“In the era we’re in I think the shows from well-known stories were also a big draw. And we brought down the price of a family ticket for four from €30 to €25 and we got good feedback about that from parents who said it made it a lot more affordable.”

One of biggest hits of the festival was the exquisite puppet show, The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle from Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia.

Lali said the show’s director was blown away by the audience reaction, with children breaking out into spontaneous applause at the spectacle.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.