About

Polyglot Theatre is Australia’s leading creator of experiential, interactive and installation theatre for children aged up to 12 years. Our artists view children as genuine collaborators, facilitating a professionally-led artistic process to create imagined worlds where audiences actively participate in performance through touch, play and encounter. At Polyglot, theatre is child’s play.

In our 32nd year of operation, Polyglot’s program is energetic and explorative. Our work has remarkable longevity and popularity, reaching over 60 000 children annually through extensive touring regionally, nationally and internationally.

Our collaborative creative process provides a professional framework for channelling and engaging with the unique imaginations of children. Our program of artistic works responds to the childhood need for experiences that encourage free artistic expression and an imaginative interpretation of the world. We employ rigour in the thinking around our audiences and our work. Our Feed The Art model of artistic replenishment and appraisal ensures continuing relevance and the highest quality theatre making.

Polyglot is a touring company, playing locally, nationally and internationally, creating challenging work which actively fosters audience connection. We are currently making a new program of highly conceptual, challenging experiential theatre works, which will ignite children’s imaginations everywhere from tiny Australian country towns to the world’s leading arts centres.

SOME RECENT ACHIEVEMENTS IN NUMBERS

• In 2009, Polyglot performed 155 performances of 7 works, 4 community engagement projects, 2 creative developments and 431 workshops, reaching a total of 57, 338 children.
• Polyglot toured overseas three times with three different works; The Big Game to Singapore, Check Out! to China and We Built This City to the USA in 2009. A total of 24 tours travelled 72 days to metropolitan, regional, interstate and overseas locations.
• Muckheap has toured continuously for nine years, with an estimated 80,000 children having seen the work.
• Over 30,000 children have participated in We Built This City in its yearly presentations nationally and internationally.
• Check Out! has played to over 18 000 children since 2007, and in 2009 it undertook a 57 day tour across 4 834 kilometres to 21 Victorian theatres as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and played ten performances touring across China in partnership with the Shanghai International Children’s Festival.
• Headhunter (a collaboration with Ilbijerri Theatre) has been seen by 18,000 people in four states since 2005, has been presented at two world festivals, UNIMA (puppetry) and ASSITEJ (theatre for young people) in 2008, and won Drama Victoria’s Award for Best Performance for Primary School Students 2005.
• High Rise won the VicHealth Award for Community Participation Performance in 2001 and was subsequently presented as a best practise case study for industry analysis.
   

> Watch a video and read Polyglot's Artistic Rationale

> Download our 2009 Annual Report