New Victory Arts Break: Song of the North

New Victory Arts Break videos and activities are designed to have your family ready and raring for showtime before you even leave home. Here’s how to use them! All set? Then let’s get creative together and prep your kid for Song of the North with the activities below.

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New Victory Arts Break videos are filmed at the New Victory Theater. We acknowledge that New Victory resides on the seized homeland of the Lenape people and the intertribal territory of many First Nations. We celebrate and pay deep respect to all Indigenous peoples, past, present and future, and we encourage you to learn more about these vibrant communities.

Did You Know?

Offering lessons of love, forgiveness and unity, the story of Manijeh and Bijan from the Shahnameh—the thousand-year-old Persian Book of Kings—comes to life in Song of the North through grand shadow puppetry and projection.

• Song of the North may look like a movie, but it’s a live show performed by 9 actors operating 483 handmade puppets against 208 different animated backgrounds!
• The Shahnameh, the epic poem that the story is drawn from, preserves centuries of Persian history and legend from pre-Islamic Iran.
• The creator of the show, Iranian-American artist Hamid Rahmanian, has also created a pair of colorful pop-up books and a new translation of the entire Shahnameh!

Try It Out!

Shadow puppetry is fun and easy to explore at home. Among the different sizes of shadow puppets used in the show, the performers also wear large shadow masks to become life-size shadow versions of their characters. Follow along with Siobhan and create your own larger-than-life shadow character!

1. Choose a story you and your kid both love and identify a character from that story to bring to life. Get your kid thinking about this character with some questions:

• What does this character look like?
• Where are they from and where are they going?
• What do they have to say?
• What are some of their favorite things?

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2. Find a piece of cardboard bigger than your head and draw an outline of the profile of your character’s face—one eye, a nose, a mouth, hair—and then work together to cut out your outline.

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3. Find a flashlight and a dark room. One person can hold the mask outline up to their face while the other plays with the flashlight angle to cast shadows of both the mask and body of the puppeteer—a life-sized character!

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4. Bring your character to life! It’s up to the flashlight operator to create the character’s voice while the puppeteer moves. Experiment with matching the voice to the character’s movement and vice versa. The goal is to make your audience believe that the character is real!

Talk About It!

As you make your way to the theater, get your kid in a Song of the North mindset with some show-themed conversation starters! Ask them:

• What are some stories that you’ve heard or read that are connected to your culture?
• How do you take care of the people you love?
• When someone does you wrong, what does it take for you to forgive them?

The fun doesn’t have to stop here! Follow along with New Victory Teaching Artists in a few Arts Break videos and activities from the archive, highlighting both puppetry and cultural storytelling.

Play with light and colorful household objects to create a shadow environment with Sam Jay Gold. Fun fact: Sam is one of the performers in Song of the North!

Use household objects to design a Bunraku-style puppet with Curt James.

Interview a loved one and honor their heritage with ChelseaDee Harrison.