I had the honor of collaborating with a great bilingual theater show for kids: Tyna – Sparx for Kids. It’s a very colorful, live show with Tyna and her sisters Vero, Yosi and Caro performing music, magic and games for children and encourages audience participation.


My initial task appeared simple: Design and build a house for one of the characters, Tyna’s old grumpy neighbor Enriqueto, masterfully played by Carlos Espejel. However, there was a twist to this project. The house had to be extremely light and durable enough to be packed and withstand multiple shipments.

The first component for this house, a portable puppet stage frame, was an amazing find. This nifty aluminum structure could be set up within a minute, and has the capability to collapse down to a small backpack for transportation.

The next challenge was to develop the skin for this structure. After considering printed or painted fabric for a long time, I decided to go for the more traditional three dimensional theater set. I knew that had to forget about using wood and so theater flats were ruled out to make shipping as easy as possible. At the end I decided to build the houses’ panels with foam and gator board.

The collapsible structure was technically designed for a fabric skin, so I had to connect the rigid panels with velcro to introduce some flexibility to the system.





After many hours (about 15 boards, 8 cans of paint, and 2 rolls of Velcro later), I was able to pack this house in a small box, and ship it 2-day to the historical Kimo Theater in Albuquerque. On the day of the show, the house was setup and ready to shine within an hour.





I would definitely do this again, although I’m not sure if I would recommend foam boards for anything that requires shipping, everything else worked great.
And best of all, Enriqueto loves his house!