STUDIO DAN - HOW'S YOUR BIRD

How Is Your Bird?
Manfred Weissensteiner

How does a contemporary orchestra — an instrumental ensemble like Studio Dan — end up making theater productions for children in the first place? Especially now, when everything is getting tighter anyway. Why spend money on sophisticated contemporary children’s theater with more than two people on stage? Why not simply give old fairy tales a trendy makeover? That gets ratings.

© Karolina Preuschl

And then there’s this: making Zappa accessible to children — audible as music and visible as theater. Sure, I know they enjoy playing his music and that they play it well. I also know that Daniel listened to him a lot in his youth and was, in a way, musically socialized through him.
But ultimately, the whole undertaking feels rather out of time. The world has turned several times since then and somehow arrived somewhere we certainly never expected. The hopes, visions, and ideas for a peaceful, healthy, happy future that were formulated back then have all, in retrospect, failed and revealed themselves to be naive.
And now a hero from the flower-power seventies is being dug up again — for children, no less. It almost seems cynical.

On the other hand: what kind of world are we supposed to show children today? What kind of future?

After all these introductory questions, I would now like to make a case for Studio Dan’s decision to create sophisticated music theater for young audiences — with all the clichés and familiar arguments that already appeared in the forewords of program booklets back in the seventies. But perhaps they have been forgotten, buried beneath the urgency of current debates and replaced by the merely factual.
Precisely now, theater for children and young people that takes them seriously aesthetically and intellectually is not simply a “nice to have,” but a necessity. The reason lies less in theater itself than in the world young people are growing up in today.

Children and teenagers often experience crises simultaneously: climate change, wars, social insecurity, digital overstimulation. Theater has to engage with these realities — not abstractly like the news, but emotionally and tangibly, live. It offers a space where people can process and understand things together instead of standing alone in front of a screen, and at its best, it can provide orientation in a complex world.

In theater, young audiences directly encounter other realities of life. They see characters who doubt, fail, and hope. This experience strengthens empathy — something we desperately need in polarized times. Theater is one of the few places where people practice putting themselves in someone else’s shoes and shifting perspectives.
Many young people today feel more powerless than empowered. Good children’s theater does not only present problems, but also possibilities for action. It conveys the message: you can change something. Agency instead of helplessness.

Quite demanding and rather pathos-filled — but one has to believe in something.

So the next question is: what kind of world should we show them?
Honesty is crucial. That means we must not sugarcoat things. Children notice immediately when adults are pretending. Themes such as fear, injustice, or anxiety about the future can and should appear. But hope must remain tangible.

Not as a kitschy happy ending, but as an attitude: people find solutions, community is possible, change happens when someone begins. Theater may show that the world is complicated — and still shapeable.
And what kind of future?

Perhaps the more important question is not: what future do we show? but rather: what attitude toward the future do we convey?
Curiosity instead of fear, the courage to ask questions, diversity as normality, overwhelm and failure as part of development — and contradiction and rebellion as strengths.

And so we move from the general to the specific. To the question of why Studio Dan chose Zappa as the basis for a children’s program.
If the parameters mentioned above define contemporary, honest theater for young audiences, then the Zappa framework on which How Is Your Bird? is based is actually a stroke of luck.

© Nikola Milatovic

Because there they are: the surprisingly fertile points of connection. The wild mix of genres, the playful approach to music and form, the joy of experimentation, the unexpected ruptures and turns — all of this is particularly well suited to children, because they are free of rigid categories and often accept shifts in style more naturally than adults do. Zappa’s grotesque humor, his absurd characters, and exaggerated situations fit as well. Added to this is rhythm, which can be translated into physicality, movement, and even language. Zappa’s collage-like works intersect with modern children’s theater, which often moves away from classical linear storytelling and instead works through images and associations.

So what at first glance may seem like an odd combination — Frank Zappa and children’s theater — ultimately makes sense, is fun, and offers hope for tomorrow.

So in the end: a kitschy happy ending after all.
See for yourself — ideally accompanied by a young person — from May 28 to 31 at Dschungel Wien.