A local group of children’s entertainers is getting back together for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic started to perform a live-streamed concert from the Port Theatre.
On May 15, Gabriola Island’s Kerplunks, in collaboration with the Port Theatre and TheatreOne, present Upstream with the Kerplunks. Bassist Dinah Desrochers, who goes by Dinah D, said this the first time she and her three band mates – multi-instrumentalist Jojo Hallett, drummer Phil Wipper and guitarist Aaron Cadwaladr – are performing together in more than a year.
“It’s just a really exciting opportunity for the four Kerplunks to be in one room,” she said.
Although the concert will be broadcast without an audience present, Desrochers said the Kerplunks have experience performing for television cameras. She said they’ve had to plan out the show to account for the lack of in-person viewers and will be visualizing their audience instead. Desrochers said they’ll be playing audience favourites as well as the songs the band enjoys the most.
“We have a lot of fish and water-based songs, so we’ll be playing some of those in the show to sort of go with the ‘stream’ concept, the less metaphorical stream,” she said.
While the group hasn’t been performing over the past year, Desrochers said the Kerplunks have been writing for their next album remotely over Zoom. She said they are currently in pre-production and hope to record and release the album next year.
“We’ve all been living really remotely and growing gardens and such this last year so I have a feeling that this new album will be even more rurally inspired I think than even our other stuff has been,” Desrochers said. “Even more garden content and even more nature because there’s been just such an opportunity to get out into nature this last year and we’ve all really taken advantage of that.”
WHAT’S ON … TheatreOne and the Port Theatre present Upstream with the Kerplunks live-streamed from the Port Theatre on Saturday, May 15 at 2:30 p.m. Tickets $11.50, available here.
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