Grimmz Fairy Tales Gets Hip-Hop Refresh at Children's Festival

The timing couldn’t have been grimmer.

It was March 2020, and the Experiential Theater Company’s new show, Grimmz Fairy Tales, had just opened to great houses and glowing reviews. But before they could take it on the road, the pandemic disrupted all live performances for the then-indeterminate future.

“That was how we ended our tour,” recalls Christopher Parks, producing artistic director of Experiential. “But it ended up being great for us in terms of getting this wonderful video footage.”

They used that footage from the initial performances to keep the show alive during the peak of the pandemic, engaging audiences online by sending it out to theatres and schools. And now, they’re back on the road, bringing the live-as-intended version of Grimmz to this year’s International Children’s Festival of the Arts.

It’s a stylish, high-energy work for audiences aged seven and up, taking classic Brothers Grimm stories and revisiting them through a hip-hop lens. It focuses on Jay and Will Grimmz, returning from touring the world to tell the audience about some friends of theirs: people like Snow White, Cinderella and Rapunzel, whose familiar tales are getting a modern spin.

“We were able to take the general conceit of the stories, and bring them to life in a new and fun way,” Parks explains. “I knew I wanted to do something different and interesting with the Grimms tales. And I started getting involved with some friends who were doing hip hop, and I was like, the heightened reality of hip hop is such a wonderful genre. If you could attach that poetry that exists to music to the movement and the heightened reality of fairytales, that would be such a great combination.”

It’s certainly proven an effective one: the show’s earned rave reviews as it’s crossed the continent. Parks notes a recent conversation with a mother in Atlanta that underscored that the show was landing as he’d hoped it would.

“One of the pieces is about social media, and how people get so caught up in their self-worth being based on the number of likes they get,” he says. “[The mother] said, ‘This is a conversation I wanted to have with my daughter, and I never knew how, and now you had it with my daughter, and you had it with me. We were here talking about it together. And I felt so empowered as a mom to be in the room with you as we're all talking these things through.’”

As the name implies, the Experiential Theater Company is looking to offer something that goes beyond the traditional audience-performer dynamic. Parks notes this show isn’t as actively interactive as some of their other works, but still finds moments of connection with the people who come to see it.

“[Audiences] should come to the show with only the expectations of having a great time and meeting new friends—new friends who are on stage and meeting new friends who are sitting next to them,” Parks continues. “It's a wonderful communal event.”

Article written by: Paul Blinov

More information about Grimmz Fairy Tales, and the rest of the International Children’s Festival of the Arts, can be found at childfest.com.

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