Creative spark brings friendship to life

Love of music brings a friendship to life in a new heart-warming play composed by Robbie Perry and Annie June Callaghan. 

Sleeper Creeper is a children’s musical adventure, which follows an eccentric inventor who uses his talent to quench his yearning for companionship by playing Frankenstein with bits of junk he finds in skips.
In the halflight of Townhall Cavan rehearsals Robbie clambers behind a drumset and knocks out a funky beat, parts of which are harnessed to a plastic skeleton hitched to a clothes line. Each time Robbie hits the bassdrum, the skeleton dances and spasms in rythym, but sadly the lonely genius only manages to generate the illusion of life in his mechanical patchwork buddies.
“It only goes so far,” explains Robbie, as downcast as his character. “As soon as I stop, it stops, and that’s no good to me.”
Bored but undeterred, the inventor (who is a nice guy despite the name 'Creeper’) wheels his shopping trolley to a skip and finds just the right junk to create Annie.
“I try machines and things to try to bring her to life, but it doesn’t work and in my sorrow I start playing music and bang! - it actually happens and she (Sleeper) comes to life and it’s like dealing with a whole new person - a youngster, a baby - going through all the stages of development.”
Annie takes over: “It’s abstract but it’s very heartfelt. There’s no dialogue, it’s about movement and visuals and we’re hoping that it might ignite a wee bit of curiosity within the children, because of the pace of the show. Some of the music is quite meditative, and it’s really soothing.
“We go off to the moon at one stage, so it’s very playful,” says Annie June, plonking a plastic five litre water drum over her head as a makeshift space helmet while Robbie starts playing a tune channeled from the cosmos on some kind of electronic vibraphone.
All of the devices and props used in Sleeper Creeper, for example an old overhead projector, are displayed for the audience to see, and Annie explains that by using a loop station they can generate all the music in the show whilst acting.
“It’s got to be all us doing it otherwise it’s cheating,” insists Robbie. “We can’t cheat because conceptually it’s about showing the kids our process of creating fantasy.
“We’re revealing the mystery but you don’t destroy the magic,” he adds.
It’s a case of art mimicking life as the pair have sparked a creative friendship over the last year through their love of music which they intend to pursue. Annie’s determined to record her previous solo work and then concentrate on their musical partnership. Their choc-a-bloc schedule also includes a musical workshop project with schools showing children how to make music from their surrounds. But in the immediate future they are concentrating on 'Sleeper Creeper’, a family friendly collaboration with director Philip Doherty.
'Sleeper Creeper’ is running at Townhall Cavan Arts Space on December 9-11 at 7pm, with additional 3.30pm shows on December 10 and 11. The show is approximately 45 minutes in length. For ticket bookings: townhallcavan.yapsody.com