Expect a Hullabaloo! of creativity online this mid-term

Come one, come all, as Hullabaloo! returns online this year to us this mid-term break, jam-packed full of delightfully creative workshops and extraordinarily fun-filled shows – guaranteed to create a wonderful Hoopla in your homes!

Hullabaloo! is back with four fantastic days of discovery, imagination, and curiosity. Enjoy a range of workshops and family performances online. Through dance, music, make and do projects, visual art, and much, much more, Hullabaloo! stimulates curiosity, originality, and confidence so have fun this mid-term break with an amazing array of activities and opportunities!

Now in its 14th year, Hullabaloo! is the County’s only dedicated arts festival for children under 12 years and runs from Wednesday 28 – Saturday 31 October through the Hullabaloo! Festival website and Offaly Libraries online.

Each year, the festival is a-buzz with the many fantastic varieties of fun and inspiring workshops and shows for kids, as they dive into the many amazingly engaging themes on offer.

A lot has changed since the spring of 2020 due to our unpredictable and uncertain Covid times, ultimately making festivals re-invent their programmes to suit online platforms. We are excited to say, that Hullabaloo! has embraced this new way of presenting, for an even MORE fun-filled and amazing interactive and creative experience!

The festival has responded to such an ever-changing social climate with ingenuity, imagination and enthusiasm, determined to bring your children workshops, activities, and entertainment even more accessible and awe-inspiring.

This year we have to do things a little differently by going online, but as always, Hullabaloo! Festival will continue to provide a fun-filled, super-packed programme of delight, helping children discover new ways of artistic engagement, and having fun learning new skills.

This year we have an extra special amount of Zoom workshops, pre-recorded tutorials, and activities to engage and create with including crafting, Zombie dancing, monster drawing, and dramatics, stop motion and Lego animation, photograph taking, making your own SuperHero paper characters, music improvisation games and sing-a-longs, shadow and character puppetry, Sean-Nós and Jazz dancing, paper Dragon and 3D Portrait making, and you can even create your very own brain or random masterpiece, plus much, much more!

Entertainment abounds for the ultimate in online family fun. Unique to this year is Hullabaloo! Festival’s first interactive Zoom show experience Space Eggsplorers, where we join Shelby, one brave egg who needs our help in joining her active mission in search of the Big Space Yolk. We continue with a theme of all things possible as we discover the dazzling puppetry, interactive film, and performance of The Tale of the Incredible Robot Boy as we follow a group of scientist’s vision to build a robot with a real brain – they succeed - and Robot Boy is born.

Come and get lost in the Clouds with an online show ‘Variable Cloudiness’ about a man, a tree, two women, three houses, one broom, clouds, sun and a few bugs, all illustrated with children’s drawings that come alive and bring us into their abstract, but very real world. A show about us, our neighbours, and about the sky which is sometimes... variable!

Lastly, get into the Halloween spirit online with Shadow Puppetry film by Tales from the Shadows called ‘The Youth who Went Forth and Learned How to Shiver.’ Come and join us on a spooky but hilarious journey about someone who did not know how to shudder, who did not know what fear was! Enjoy some dancing skeletons, spooky cats, and some goofy goblins as they come to life in this spellbinding shadow illustrated folk tale.

Visit www.hullabaloofestival.ie or the Birr Theatre Box Office at 05791 22911 for further information and for bookings. Booking is essential for paid in Zoom workshops. Hullaballoo is brought to you this year by a collaborative partnership between Offaly County Council Arts Office, Birr Theatre and Arts Centre, Offaly Library Service and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.