Ask Bangkok kids the one stage performance they look forward to watching in a calendar year and most will answer “Disney on Ice”. Ask the more than 1,000 youngsters who attended the 1st Bangkok International Children’s Theatre Festival (BICT Fest) from June 21 to July 3 at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) and the chances are the answers will be very different.

In a sprawling metropolis like Bangkok where the choices for children’s weekend activities tend to be limited to department stores where tutoring centres and music and dance schools are also conveniently located, BICT Fest, organised by Arts on Location and Democrazy Studio, was a welcome addition to our performing arts calendar and met with much enthusiasm. Many performances, local and international, were sold out and some productions needed to add a few extra shows to meet the demand.

Delights and surprises were abundant. At the fourth floor studio, UK’s Theatre Rites, performing in a non-English speaking country for the first time and limiting their spoken language here, ingeniously taught us how to recycle garbage properly by showing us the many different creative ways in which garbage can have a second life. Later on the same afternoon, Indonesia’s Paper Moon not only made use of puppets created by local participants in their week-long workshops but also incorporated, seamlessly, a local puppeteer in “The Old Man’s Books”, showing that regional collaboration is clearly a possible direction for future BICT Fests.

The following weekend, the studio was transformed into a theatre-in-the-round and veteran Japanese contemporary dance artist Kaiji Moriyama proved with his solo performance “Live Bone” that contemporary dance could be understood and enjoyed by children too.

“When All Was Green” by Israel’s Key Theatre was another lesson in environmental conservation, keenly told without words, successfully crossing cultural boundaries, and with a simple set made with used leaves of books..

An international festival wouldn’t be complete without local works and BICT Fest provided an international stage, or at least more exposure, to the storytelling masters Kid Jam for their “Little Cat”, a tuneful retelling of a Japanese tale on death. A week later, also in the kid’s room of BACC library, young members of B-Floor Theatre staged “The Adventure of Yoo Dee”, completely free of political commentary. Although their skills and vision in shadow puppetry and object theatre are still in development, this work was a nice addition to the company’s repertoire. Veteran Chiang Mai all-female shadow puppet troupe The Wandering Moon and Endless Journey Performing Group gave a delightful performance but their 15-minute “Yellow O” was too brief to make any real impact.

My unforgettable BICT experience was attending Portuguese company Companhia de Musica Teatral’s “AliBaBach”, along with many toddlers in arms, most of whom were watching their first stage performance and some of whom responded to and communicated with the two performers in their own language.

In addition to the performances, all foreign companies conducted a variety of workshops, both at BACC and the nearby Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts. Lectures and discussion forums with foreign and local artists and scholars were also held. All these extra activities made BICT a complete festival that left not only fond memories but also provided important knowledge for artists and audiences.

With strong support from foreign cultural partners like the Japan Foundation, the British Council, the Embassy of Israel, the Portuguese Cultural Centre and Fundacao Oriente on top of that offered by the well-equipped city-centre venue, one has to wonder why this new initiative in contemporary arts, which has high potential to continue way into the future, is supported by neither the Ministry of Culture’s Office of Contemporary Art and Culture (OCAC) nor the Thai Health Foundation. The former seems to prefer organise its own one-off festivals; the latter is, otherwise, known for their continuous support for children’s theatre. With more local support, BICT could lower its ticket prices. Current ones for foreign shows, Bt450 for adults and Bt150 for children, might have prevented many families from watching more than one work, or even resulted in dads having to wait for mother and child at a cafe.

The plan is for BICT to be a biannual event, but judging from the audience’s reaction to Bangkok’s first-ever full-scale festival of children’s theatre, it certainly warrants being an annual event.

In the meantime, I’m using some kind of Disney magic to turn my overweight 20-month-old four-legged “son” into a lighter two-legged version, so we can enjoy this quality family time together at the next BICT.