For years, Samantha Whelan Kotkas’s Rocky Mountain Fairy Tales have been enchanting children and families alike, encouraging them to find the magic that exists in hiking the Rocky Mountains.

Although her stories have been performed on stage numerous times, come the end of April, there will have never been a performance of her work quite like this.

Kotkas’s second set of stories, More Rocky Mountain Fairy Tales, is being writ large—and small—in a joint collaboration between the Green Fools Puppet Society and Calgary Pro Musica for a first-of-its-kind puppet and music show in Calgary.

Her stories will be told through miniature puppets and sets created by the Green Fools, and then projected with the magic of television special effects onto the big screen, all set to the musical score written by Tyler Hornby and performed of some of Calgary’s top jazz musicians.

“We’re really going to talk about the Calgary perspective in the Rocky Mountains, so the kids are going to be able to hike these hikes after they hear the stories,” said Kotkas.

She said that the format of having puppeted miniatures projected onto a big screen was a way of giving kids a lot of different ways of interacting with the performance—they can watch the puppeteers working on the small set, or the projected big show, or the jazz quartet, or even Kotkas herself narrating the stories.

“The times we’ve done this show before, we didn’t do puppets at all and so it was me running all around the stage as an actor, just throwing myself as a storyteller. It’s going be so nice that I don’t have to do that,” she said.

“I’ll be represented by a puppet in a smaller costume, and it allows that intimacy with the small sets to happen, but it also allows that immediacy of narration and live music to be present at the same time. People just aren’t doing this. This is really groundbreaking.”

Getting kids outside and enjoying it

The show invites families to be drawn into themes of joyfulness, compassion, caring, and finding one’s purpose all while being set at very real locations in the Rocky Mountains like Crandell Lake, Castle Mountain, and the Paint Pots in Banff National Park.

The magical elements come from Kotkas’s imagined fairies of the mountains, which represent different elements of nature that families are likely to encounter while hiking.

“These are these are places they can actually go and then when you see what [Dean Bareham] has created… they’re going to be looking for that, the next time they go outside. My whole goal with anything I’ve ever created is to try and get people to reconnect with nature,” Kotkas said.

“Showing them this inside, to get them to actually walk outside and be excited, ‘Mom, Mom, look, this is where the fairies live’ or ‘Mom, this is where you can paint your arms and your legs.’ This is the place we can do it, and it gives that impetus to get outside, get connected, which I think it’s exciting.”

She said that after shows, she’s had kids come up to her to say they saw, for real, the fairies in her stories.

“If you give their imagination something else to grasp onto, especially as a parent, you can be talking to them while you’re doing the hike and get them engaged in something completely different, which takes their mind off the fact that they’re getting exercise,” she said.

Magical experience, but one day only

Dean Bareham, Artistic Director for the Green Fools Puppet Society, said that a lot of the work that he and the society have done over the years is based on nature and the exploration of ecological themes.

“We’ve made a lot of puppets for the zoo, and that’s really important to our fundamental principles as a company. I think even with this show, it’s got that ‘any time we can make kids think about nature, the place the smells, the experience, and thinking on that level.'”

Calgarians also likely know Bareham from his work as a puppeteer on Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, which recently completed filming for its second season in the city.

Among the puppeteers for More Rocky Mountain Fairy Tales, he said, were some of his fellow puppeteers from that show.

“They’re going to see us [three puppeteers] in action, they’re going to see the camera operators shooting it, they’re going to see the like mechanics of it, but then there’s this beautiful image they’re going to be able to watch,” Bareham said.

“People will come away with different things. Kids get swept up in the magic of the puppets, but then adults can appreciate it for the music, and anyone that’s slightly techie can appreciate what we’re trying to accomplish here.”

More Rocky Mountain Fairy Tales runs for one day only, on April 28, for two performances at 1 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. at the University of Calgary’s Rozsa Centre.

Crafting time for children based around nature is available before each of the performances, and families can meet the puppeteers and performers in person after each performance.

Tickets are $12 each for children, and $15 for adults, and can be purchased at calgarypromusica.ca.