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| Wonderland (FIMFA Lx10, Maria Matos Teatro Municipal, 2010) |
My first big contact with puppets happened in 1994, through an unforgettable 3ª Estação co-creation experiment with João Paulo Seara Cardoso.
This experience was a huge challenge to me as interpreter and choreographer of a show that crossed dance and puppetry, having contributed to a different way of approaching the work of movement with puppets.
Because I have started with a human size puppet, which demanded a strong work of relation between a living body and a body to which one temporally is bowering life, maybe I gained a notion of profound consciousness as a real time spectator. Observing the detail, the direction, the impulse, to be present and absent in the puppet’s body.
Because I have started with a human size puppet, which demanded a strong work of relation between a living body and a body to which one temporally is bowering life, maybe I gained a notion of profound consciousness as a real time spectator. Observing the detail, the direction, the impulse, to be present and absent in the puppet’s body.
To defy my limits and broaden the puppet’s limits and possibilities, were and still are some of the guidelines when working the movement. Fly and suspend without taking off the ground, are movement experiments that I would say, are almost like a projection of my body in the body that I am observing, and simultaneously contributing to make this body perform whatever I wish it to perform, but that me as a body cannot materialize.
Meyerhold used to call puppets theatrical wonders. Actually, puppets bring dazzle to the theatrical act. Puppets have essential movements, they are unpretentious and bare. The actor’s living body is far too present but the puppet allows the distance and broadens space for the audience’s imagination.
In my imaginary, puppets don’t talk, they are light beings that draw poems through movement. They are fleshless beings, capable of living and dying with the same subtleness as they move.
Through movement, puppets become theatrical metaphors.
Free from the human body constraints, puppets are capable of taking the audience to more surreal places, reaching the universe of dreams, namely through the flight or the suspensions in the air. The human body concretizes through the movement of puppets, a level of impossibility, which makes it become a spectator.
Every work with the movement of puppets requires attention, focus, and the actor´s comprehension of the material, regardless of its small or bigger scale. The level of detail involved in the work of small scale puppets is precious for its necessary gentleness to the minimum gesture.
I would say that the act of borrowing life is a beautiful and generous one, which can only be possible with a profound conscience of oneself.
The actor/puppeteer will be as happier, the more he’ll be able to reach that status of body that observes and generates movement, doing what is exactly needed for that particular puppet in that particular moment.
And flying is the maximum limit. It is the achievement our own body’s desire.
The plasticity of the actor’s body will have a total reflex in puppet’s body/movement. It is in that framework that I position myself, as a choreographer and art director of puppets shows with an attentive look.
BIO
Isabel Barros (PT): Choreographer, artistic director of Teatro de Marionetas do Porto and Museu das Marionetas do Porto.
Teatro de Marionetas do Porto played in FIMFA with Teatro Dom Roberto (Teatro Taborda 2001, Jardim da Estrela, 2012), O Polegarzinho (Centro Cultural de Belém, 2002), O Mundo de Alex (Teatro da Trindade, 2004), Cabaret Molotov (Maria Matos Teatro Municipal, 2007), Capuchinho Vermelho XXX (Museu da Marioneta, 2008, 2011), Wonderland (Maria Matos Teatro Municipal, 2010), Os Três Porquinhos (Teatro Meridional, 2013), Pelos Cabelos (Museu da Marioneta, 2014), Óscar (Museu da Marioneta, 2014).
