Mini teater at the Holon International Theatre and Film Festival in Isreal!

The 16th International Puppet Theatre and Film Festival

Will take place in the city of Holon on the 18th-27th of July, 2013

 

THUMBELINA is an interactive-virtual performance coming to Israel from Slovenia, “Rua Aire”– a virtuoso play from Spain all of whose puppets are balloons, “Blue Moon” – about a man who finds love on the day the first human lands on the moon, “The Shirt Between Them” – about a couple who can communicate only through a shirt, and “The Girl Ayelet” – visual theatre taking shape on a transparent window, a national conference on “The Puppet as a Therapeutic Tool” and dozens of plays and films that will be featured during the 16th International Puppet Theatre and Film Festival in Holon, from the 18th the 27th of July, 2013.

One of the most beautiful fairy tales written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, becomes virtual instance at Holon International Puppet and Film Festival. Interactive, the projected figures are triggered in real time, and young viewers are influencing the course of events.


Award-winning show, staged to date not only in Slovenian but also in Croatian, English, German, Flemish, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Romanian, Czech, Turkish, Hungarian, Persian, and now also Hebrew.


Show creator, Robert Waltl is a theater and film actor, director, puppeteer and artistic director. Many of his works have won awards at various festivals in the world. In 1998, self-financed, he founded the Slovenian theater Mini Theater, producing shows for young viewers as well as adults.
 

The International Puppet Theatre and Film Festival opens for its 16th year, and for nine days will be offering theatrical pleasure for the whole family in its dozens of performances, plays, films, exhibitions, workshops and extraordinary artistic festivity.

The festival, taking place between the 18th and the 27th of July 2013 at the Israel Puppet Center Holon will host premieres, dozens of leading puppeteers from Israel and abroad, internationally produced films and over 70 activities for adults and children combining performances and various puppeteering techniques.

Unique performances will be offered at the festival, among them premieres of two original productions for adults, plays for adults and children, exhibitions at the Puppet Museum, outdoor performances, workshops for the general public, professional workshops and puppeteer master-classes.

 

WORKSOPS: PUPPET PERFORMANCE DRAMATURGY

ROBERT WALTL, IVICA BULJAN,

HOLON, JULY 2013, ISRAEL

 

In several European countries, dramaturgs have been official employees of state-funded theatres. They have served as text-advisors, translators, publishers, researchers, ideologues, philosophers. Yet the role and function of the dramaturg has remained clouded in misunderstanding, remaining for many "a mysterious creature", somewhere between "reader-cum-literary advisor revisor, and literary manager". Drawing on Mary Luckhurst's study (Dramaturgy, 2003) of Bertolt Brecht's institutionalised role as mediator between theory and practice, writing and analysis, theatre historian and contemporary critic, philosopher and politician, actor and audience, Ivica Buljan and Robert Waltl advance a workshop of dramaturgical theory and practice. Having conducted dramaturgical fieldwork with Academie Experimentale des Theatres in Paris, I base my exploration on contemporary dramaturgical conceptions on archival research, participant observation, and conversations. Dramaturgy for puppet theatre is therefore not a "translation workshop". Puppet theatre must not submit itself, he writes, to an specific reasoning. 

Since the 1990s the productions by professional puppeteers and theatre-makers employing puppetry have surpassed – in richness of forms, themes and ingenuity of presentation – anything seen before. This incontrovertible renewal of the art form can be largely attributed to its closer ties with the human theatre. From these ties have come an injection of new dramaturgical ideas springing from a fresh approach by professional artists, theatre-makers trained to stage productions that rely on content as much as form, on adult audiences more than children. They have provided a necessary ballast, as it were, to puppet performance that formerly paid too little regard to theatrical values, relying too much on visual attractions and on craftsmanship. Both are of course intrinsic and essential to puppetry, and, because of the growing numbers of practitioners with little or no experience of puppetry technique, the problem of how to balance the technical, the visual and the verbal, has not been completely solved.

 

The absence of trained directors in the preparation of a satisfying show with puppets is a problem for puppeteers. If not enough attention and time is given to the technical and crafting preparation, the construction, choreography and manipulation, the deficiencies will be immediately evident to the spectators. But most often their dissatisfaction will be attributable to a failure more difficult to identify: in the final performance-text and its lack of coherence. For example, there are productions in which the scenography is beautiful, the objects well manipulated, but the sense of the story is lost in symbol or metaphor too recondite for the average spectator to read; or a folk tale will be told without reference to the inner meaning of a story that has persisted in the canon for scores, perhaps hundreds of years; or there is a simple absence of internal logic in the unfolding of the action. 

 

Robert Waltl and Ivica Buljan have realize more then 50 puppet and (post)drama productions. They adapted the most famous stories from Andersen, Grimm, Perrault, to contemporary european writers (Jelinek, Mueller, Handke, Hilling, Pasolini, Walser, Koltes, Mishima, Cvetajeva, Guibert..). They will present different forms of adaptations of stories for the puppet theatre.