Kid Koala’s high-concept project ‘The Storyville Mosquito’ is at the Bluma Appel Theatre

There are people who dream, there are people who get things done and there are people who get their dreams done. Kid Koala gets his dreams done.

One could argue, yes, that getting his dreams — at least the musical dreams he hears in his head — done in real time, night after night, is exactly what the truly singular, so-far-beyond-mere-turntablism Montreal “turntablist” born Eric San has been doing since he first started artfully slashing, scarring, stretching and sampling other people’s records together into unimaginably unusual-yet-musical forms as a scratch DJ and abstract hip-hop producer of no small international repute during the mid-1990s. But even Koala himself probably never dared really dream that he’d eventually be jet-setting around the world with an army of lovable insects and robots at his beck and call. Let alone a string trio.

Kid Koala’s latest high-concept project, a live “theatrical cinema experience” dubbed “The Storyville Mosquito,” makes its Toronto premiere Oct. 20 at the Bluma Appel Theatre and runs for five performances – including two extra kid-friendly matinees on Saturday and Sunday — before belatedly resuming a world tour that was supposed to begin three years ago.

“Our world premiere was at Place des Arts in Montreal in late November and December just before the pandemic, in 2019, and we had a whole world tour planned, confirmed shows and everything,” said San, 47, from a studio in his hometown. “That tour seems to be starting now. Luckily, a lot of the presenters didn’t fully cancel, they just postponed it until now. So this is our tour.”

San and his large entourage of puppeteers, camera operators, musicians and assorted technical wizards took the long wait to bring “The Storyville Mosquito” to stage and screen — simultaneously, live and in real time night after night — in stride. After all, the entire project has been brewing for nearly 20 years.

San, who’s always done the whimsical illustrations for his musical projects himself and has a pair of well-received graphic novels (with musical accompaniment included) to his credit, first started sketching the mosquito at the centre of the story back in 2003 or 2004 to amuse himself on tour.

He told his friend and frequent collaborator Louisa Schabas, who’d done the lighting and shading for his 2003 graphic novel “Nufonia Must Fall” — which concerned a robot trying to write love songs — about the character developing in his head and one day, out of the blue, she gave him a catalytic present.

“It was a box about eight inches cubed and I opened it and it was this little maquette, a little scale model, of a little cabin bedroom — it was beautiful, it was all handmade — and I said ‘What am I looking at?’” he recalled. “And she said ‘It’s the mosquito’s bedroom.’

“It was so intense to see it built versus something I’d drawn. It just sort of sparked. That just gave me a whole boost of energy and I said ‘Wow, maybe we should do this as a 3D photographed book instead of drawing it?’ I didn’t really know what that would entail. It’s a phenomenal amount of work considering sometimes you might need to build a whole set just for one page or panel or something. And to give you an idea: ‘Nufonia’ was 350 pages.”

San, Schabas and his friend Corinne Merrell — who would go on to become his wife and the mother of their two daughters, just to give you an idea of how much time has elapsed — started building the miniature world of “The Storyville Mosquito” in their spare time, while he expanded his original sketches into a heart-tugging tale of a small town mosquito who moves to the big city with dreams of playing the clarinet in his favourite jazz band.

“The book is still not finished,” laughed San. But along the way, he and his trusted gang of co-conspirators hit upon the idea of turning “Nufonia Must Fall” into a living piece of theatrical cinema where projections of puppets would mingle with live music to create a movie before audience’s eyes night after night, and somehow pulled it off in 2014. That show is still getting booked around the world, and “The Storyville Mosquito” was an obvious candidate for the same treatment.

San hopes the production gives audiences the same sense of wonder he felt as a child watching Charlie Chaplin movies or the Muppets with his family, trying to deduce all the cinematic tricks at play within the films.

“I remember my mom showing me this videotape of ‘The World of Jim Henson’ when I was 11 or 12 — it was a documentary that came out around then — and I’d seen ‘The Muppet Show’ and I’d seen ‘Sesame Street’ and I was into them, but I’d never had that behind-the-scenes access to all the work that went into designing the sets, building the puppets and even what it took to create one episode or one scene out of ‘The Muppet Movie.’ It was just so enthralling for me to witness.

“It just really cracked my head open to the joy of having access to seeing it being made. And I think with these shows you kind of get both of those things — you see the final product on the screen, but at any point you can scan the stage and see all the performers creating that magic that you’re seeing on the screen and how they’re doing it. So there’s a little bit of an equation that you get to complete yourself if you choose to see how it’s being made.”

It’s a “massive team effort,” of course, and an insanely intricate multimedia ballet that San likens to having “15 people on the same surfboard,” but the childlike spirit of fun embodied in the action onscreen and onstage comes from a genuine place: it’s damn fun to do this stuff in front of people day after day.

“From an adrenalin level, there’s way more happening in this show than, y’know, a needle skipping for me in a DJ set or something. There’s just so many more things operating,” said San. “But that said, when we do get in that zone and everything syncs up there’s nothing like it. The strings sweep up, the puppet’s turning his head to look up at the sky in this dreamy way whilst the camera is starting to do a slow pan up and it’s just magic, really. From a performance standpoint, for me, I just realize ‘Wow, this is fun.’ Fun is definitely part of it.”

“The Storyville Mosquito” is already booked around the globe well into 2024, but it’s just part of a very busy post-COVID re-emergence for Kid Koala. His 2011 graphic novel “Space Cadet” is being developed as a feature-length animated film and is currently in the storyboarding phase, while a brand-new album —Koala’s “first real turntable album” since 2012’s “12-Bit Blues” that isn’t “an ambient winter-music thing,” said San – is on the way next year.

Dubbed “Creatures of the Late Afternoon,” the new record is already destined to have a life onstage similar to that of “The Storyville Mosquito” and “Nufonia Must Fall.”

“The album is done,” affirms San. “And it’s going to be the third show in this format following “Mosquito.” The team has already decided that we’re going to use that album as the soundtrack to another show.”

Ben Rayner is a Toronto-based journalist and a frequent contributor to the Star’s Culture section. Follow him on Twitter: @ihatebenrayner

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