How on earth do you keep a bunch of toddlers and babies quiet for more than half an hour? (Well, as quiet as toddlers and babies can be.) Club Origami seems to have the answer. This origami-based children’s show – yes, there is such a thing – was Sydney Dance Company’s school holiday outreach to the five-and-under set. It’s now over, but I’m told the company hopes to take it to places other than Sydney at some point.

Club Origami takes the Japanese art of origami as an impulse for movement. It’s as simple as that. The show began in the foyer. The two dancers (Ryuichi Fujumura and Reina Takeuchi at the show I saw; creators Makiko Aoyama, Robert Howat and Takeshi Matsumoto performed during the first week of the season) folded simple objects from squares of paper and then – wordlessly – invited the children present to make something of their own or simply play with the paper. There was no wrong answer. The results were gathered up and the audience went into the show proper.

The “wordless” part was central. Club Origami is an exceptionally quiet, gentle work quite unlike most children’s theatre. It slows life down. It doesn’t ask for interjections or squeals of delight, although there was time for the latter at the end. For most of the show interaction was via low-key dance, facial expression and gesture and the absence of loud noise and revving up seemed to work. 

For the duration of Club Origami most of the youngsters were attentive (doubtless the attending parents, grandparents and carers played a role here) and responsive to displays of origami birds, animals and other recognisable objects which were then mimicked in movement by Fujumura and Takeuchi to the sweet sound of the xylophone in the hands of Salina Myat.

Not surprisingly the lively final 15 minutes or so of the show, which lasts about 50 minutes in total, were a big hit with the target audience. The performers donned colourful, shaggy suits, turned into an unthreatening monster and then it was time for the littlies to dash on to the stage and start making a right old mess with a huge mound of torn paper.

My grandson turned five the day before the performance we saw and was one of the older children there. He dashed about gleefully in the paper storm but would have liked to see more of how objects were made and a little more time at the beginning to do it himself. 

Asked later what she liked, my two-year-old granddaughter remembered the dancers moving like penguins and enjoyed what she called the fireflies – glowing globes floated around the darkened room by the performers. They were indeed very pretty.