Flow it, show it.

Hair! It's everywhere! But more of that in a minute.

I had a very theatrical day today. First thing, I had the opportunity to see the wonderful Monkey Baa Theatre production based on the picture book Fox by Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks. (For those of you who aren't familiar with them, Monkey Baa specialises
in children's theatre, adapting children's and young adult books for the
stage. I have now seen three of their productions and they have all
been wonderful.)

This production (a partnership with Siren Theatre Co) takes Margaret's beautiful text and turns it into an opera, performed by a singer-narrator (The Spirit) and three dancers, using costume, puppets and cloth to represent Dog, Magpie and Fox, and their joyful and desperate races across the Australian landscape.

The auditorium at Parramatta Riverside Theatre was well-packed with primary school aged children, and although I sat up the very back, you could just tell they were completely enthralled with the performance—even despite the perhaps challenging score and that it was likely the first time any of them had experienced operatic singing. I sat behind some boys who looked to me to be about Year 5, and they weren't the least bit restless. And the questions asked of the cast the end were mature, insightful, and surprisingly sophisticated. One student asked about the relationship between the narrator Spirit and Magpie—was Spirit meant to be a bird of prey somehow connected to Magpie. And indeed, something very like that had been part of their discussions in developing the piece for performance.

It was such a pleasure to experience this performance—I was teary at the very beginning, seeing the friendship of Dog and Magpie portrayed and knowing what was to come. I was actually working with Margaret at ABC Books when she wrote Fox, and I was privileged to read it in early draft form, so it's a book that I hold very dear for that reason alone—but also because I think it's in the top handful of best picture books every published in this country.

I met with Tim and Eva from Monkey Baa (and their intern Katie) just yesterday to discuss our respective work and we hope to work together on some projects as soon as the spring school holidays. I'm extremely pleased about that! And what lovely folk they are. I was heavily involved in theatre at university (Good heavens! Dramac has a website!) and while it's not my first love it is a great one.

And so to the rest of my day—and hair! (No, not Hair, despite my subject heading, although it's a favourite!)

Although the Western Sydney Young People's Literature Project is a regional project, it is hosted by Blacktown City Council, and so the fabulous staff at the Blacktown Arts Centre are my colleagues. The Arts Centre offers visual and performing arts residencies, and today the two women who had just completed their performing arts residency presented the work they've been working on over the past three weeks. I'm not going to go into too much detail here, as the residency is absolutely the start of the development of the work, and it's not my place to reveal their creative ideas so early on in the piece, but I can say that it is on the theme of hair, and women's (in particular)  relationship to their hair and what our hair has to do with our sense of identity, beauty, culture, race and our personal history.

Gosh, I wish I could say more, because the three ideas presented (and they encompassed not just performance but also writing and visual art) were each in their own way very powerful, but one in particular really resonated with me—it was to do with the idea that our hair is a physical artifact of our lives. (Hair generally grows 1.5 cm per month, so your hair is your history...) So say you found a jumper you hadn't worn in ten years, and it had strands of your hair still on it? That's you, ten years ago. It kind of knocked me sideways (in a really good way) to think of it like that. (Like a lot of women, my personal sense of well-being and presentability is often attached to my hair. You can get away with a LOT if you've had a really good cut and colour. And remember the scandals when Felicity and Buffy cut their hair? Culturally, hair is amazingly powerful. Just consider the politics around African American women—including the First Lady—and their hair.)

Anyway, watching the presentation this afternoon, I started thinking about hair in children's books—and what a lot of it there is! It struck me that the two stories I read at Oxley Park PS's Paint the Town Read reading day, which I blogged about recently, were both about hair. There's the centrality of hair to so many fairy tales—Rapunzel, of course, but how many fairy tale heroines are named for the colour of their hair? (It's no accident that Marina Warner called her classic investigation of the fairy tale From the Beast to the Blonde.) Jo March cuts off her hair—her "one beauty". Pippi Longstocking's pigtail/plaits are a key visual clue to her character.

Come on, surely there's more? I'm not making this up, am I? I kept thinking of the rituals of childhood—of how I loved to "do" my mother's hair; of how, when my dad explained I was going to have my ears pinned back, that it meant that I would be able to push my hair behind my ears. How my eldest sister, as a small child, cut her gollywog's hair, not understanding it would not grow back.

So, come on, have a think—Hair. Kids' books. Your time starts now—comment!

(Of course, if there's nothing else, there's always this!):