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| Buddenbrooks (FIMFA Lx14, Maria Matos Teatro Municipal, 2014) |
Short time after I’ve started studying puppetry in East Germany, at the well-known Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, in East Berlin, the fall of the Berlin Wall happened, and for me the world changed completely. Therefore, the reasons which lead me to puppetry had also changed: the search for a subversive place, for more freedom, in the middle of a stagnated and closed society. At that time, I swore I would never touch a puppet again and that I would concentrate in expressing myself as an actor.
Ten years later, fate brought me back to puppetry again. And I have discovered a secret. In a certain show I had a puppet that was a dog. He walked around among other characters that were all actors. The audience specially loved that dog. They didn’t have any sympathy towards the humans were there on stage, yet they loved the puppet, with its fake and miniaturized image of something else that was alive.
We humans, have the faculty of placing ourselves in someone else’s skin, of having empathy, and the simpler, the more concise and smaller this other looks like, the more immediate is our empathy.
My intention in theatre, is to place the spectator in the skin of the person he is watching, letting him try this strong human desire for life and as much as the pain of failing, through big literary themes, in an immediate and direct way.
This is why I like that the protagonist(s) of a story to be a puppet(s). I want that from the beginning, the audience is ready to mentally transport itself to the puppet(s) position, avoiding this way, that the actor’s eventual characteristics may represent an obstacle to that. This is what manipulation is. And it can very easily become artificial. And the artificial is generally fake. Therefore, I unveil the process, I show the person who manipulates the puppets, just like the musician who touches his instrument. I show the manipulation process and it is up the spectator to choose, at every moment, which way to go: To follow the actor or to follow the puppet. The magic resides in the distance between events. I believe that Brecht, in his epic theatre, was also aware of that magic.
BIO
Moritz Sostmann (DE): Director and actor.
He participated in FIMFA with Buddenbrooks (Maria Matos Teatro Municipal, 2014).
