According to tradition, City Day was marked by the Interlialka International Festival of Children’s Theaters. The cozy regional Transcarpathian puppet theater Bavka opened its doors to crowds of theatergoers, guests, and participants of the 9 th festival.
Over the years Interlialka, conceived in 1991 by Oleksandr Turianytsia, then director of the puppet theater, has turned into a prestigious international puppeteering forum. This festival is well known and is included in the calendar of UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionette).
21 PERFORMANCES A WEEK
The opening ceremony at the Interlialka Festival took place on the square in front of the puppet theater. The huge puppets Marichka and Ivanko, the festival mascots, led the guest companies onto the stage. In the space of seven days, the residents of Uzhhorod became accustomed to colorful scenes of children hurrying across the bridges spanning the Uzh River to get to their beloved puppet theater on time. In all, they watched 21 performances staged by puppet companies from Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Belarus, Bosnia, and Herzegovina.
Besides the audiences’ opinions, the artistic merits of the performances were judged by an international jury headed by the celebrated director of puppet plays, Prof. Leonid Popov. The jury awarded prizes in a number of nominations. This year’s festival was assigned the exalted mission of familiarizing children with the art of puppetry and expanding their range of cultural knowledge about other countries. In the form of a play, without any intentional didactic goal, a puppet show can easily and joyfully relate a story to a child about human values, eternal truths, and convince them that good triumphs over evil. It can also teach a child to love his native land and respect other nations. In fact, this was the underlying idea of the Interlialka Festival.
Despite differences in terms of creative schools, techniques, set designs, and dramaturgical passions, all the puppet companies showed their eagerness to search for new forms and engage in creative experimentation. The human factor dominated all the festival performances, a trend that has persisted in all puppet theaters for the past 30 years.
This is also one of the main problems facing puppeteers. It is good when a puppet retains its priority status, compared to the puppeteer, and plays the role assigned to it in a puppet show. But what happens when the puppet’s role is reduced to illustrating the puppeteer’s self-expression as a dramatic actor? Without a doubt, the actor will overshadow the puppet. But the erroneous nature of this approach is obvious, as the very nature of the art of puppetry is destroyed. A positive and creative approach to its development lies in surges of fantasy within this genre, a quest for ways to “animate” the puppet and other objects by using modern image-bearing solutions. After all, this is a desire to make a puppet show so interesting and innovative that children will not have any doubt that the theater is far superior to cartoons.
MARIONETTES AND SHADOWS
A multifaceted puppet-show sun rose, casting its beams on stained- glass images. Weathercocks flew off their perches, and oxen lowed good- naturedly, slowly turning their heads toward each other. Their silhouettes formed a traditional Ukrainian household, a house with cozy little windows decorated with embroidered towels, wicker fences, and sunflowers. The Bavka Puppet Theater of Uzhhorod staged Iryna and Yana Zlatopolsky’s Dereviane Dyvo, directed by Oleksandr Kutsyk, who created a model of the universe, using the history of only one family. This production, which was awarded the Cast Ensemble Award, featured a dramatic plot, visual brilliance, and excellent acting. The play is a nationally rooted parable, including Ukrainian music, traditions, and rites, all this conveyed to the young audience in an easily understandable way. This production is so edifying that after the performance the young viewer can justly take pride in his origins and land.
Interlialka presented a host of diverse puppets, puppeteering techniques, and puppet designs. Puppets worked miracles in the hall of the FundusMarionettentheater Dresden and were part of the unreal world of an interpretation of Lesia Ukrainka’s Forest Song, staged by a team of students from Kyiv’s Karpenko-Kary National University of Theater, Cinema, and Television.
Alesha, the hero puppet in Pogorelsky’s The Black Hen, or The Inhabitants of the Underground Kingdom, staged by the Kukla Puppet Theater of Vitebsk (Russia), challenged powerful dark forces represented by large masks and colorful suits of armor.
The only traditional puppet show that used screens and rods was Ya. Hrushetsky’s The Lame Duck staged by the Ivano-Frankivsk Theater. The hand-and-glove puppets were static and performed poorly in R. Neupokoiev’s The Magic Tree staged by the Chernivtsi Puppet Theater. In contrast, the Luhansk Puppet Theater gave an excellent and colorful performance of Gogol’s Christmas Eve, conveying the whole range of the brilliant author’s characters, and the use of screens and shadows made the whole performance action-intensive and visually eloquent.
Large and whimsically designed puppets were featured in Andersen’s The Princess and the Pea staged by a puppet theater from Kragujevac (Serbia), and in H. Yanushevska and Ya. Vilkovsky’s The Tiger Cub staged by Poltava’s puppet theater. The refined contours of the puppets that live in the String Bean Kingdom, the aristocratic prince and future princess, and the other maidens competing to become one, created the impression of beautiful, unreal figures, images that can exist only in fairy tales. Colorful animals, giraffes, parrots, tigers, ostriches, and elephants, designed in a high-tech style of severe, graphic lines, conveyed African motifs and a jungle atmosphere.
Andersen’s The Snow Queen, performed by Rzeszуw’s Maska Theater, was a glimpse of a real wonderland. In recognition of its superb performance, as well as N. Gernet’s A Small Drop staged by the Kaunas Puppet Theater and directed by Oleg Zhiugzhdu (Belarus), diplomas were awarded for best stage direction. The Snow Queen was awarded two diplomas for Best Set Design and Acting. By using stage props shaped like hunks from an ice floe, the director achieved the effect of the ice world ruled by the Snow Queen. She is a marble-white, emotionless, and seemingly disembodied puppet fashioned out of scraps of material. With a flicker of her blue eyes she ignites fear and evil. It is easy to succumb to the light in those eyes. The director created an interesting twist to the well-known story by adding dynamic mise en scenes involving Gerda. In their interaction, the actors and puppets gave an organic performance, so much so that you could feel the flow of energy that seems to turn a puppet into a living, intelligent being.
Those who watched The Adventures of Petr Ivanovich Uksusov, the performance of the Skaz Theater (Novokuznetsk, Russia), saw the traditional Petrushka clown, who kept the audience entertained and laughing. This was a hand-in-glove puppet show, so the puppeteer could easily change puppets by lifting them off and putting them on again to the accompaniment of live balalaika music. Petrushka got the better of all his opponents.
The Czech company Lisen from Brno staged a puppet show entitled Savitri, based on the Hindu epic Mahabharata. This was shadow theater, using interesting lighting and audio effects, and it featured sophisticated puppets shapes and magnificent puppeteering skills. The plot recounts the tale of Princess Savitri whose profound love for her beloved helps her to snatch him from the jaws of death. The performance is accompanied by live Hindu music that transports the audience to ancient India. This production won an award for Best Original Musical Arrangement.
Rivne’s puppet theater dazzled the audience with its superb performance of Mykola Lysenko’s comic opera Koza-dereza, directed by L. Popov. The performance offers a broad range of puppeteering techniques that organically blend with the “live backdrop.” The merry plot seemed to engulf the scene, so there seemed to be little room left for the actors behind the screen with their fairy tale characters. Each wanted to come downstage and show his/her talent. Koza-dereza is a case study of the company members’ effort to make the plot understandable to young audiences as much as possible and to interest them in the brilliant, playful form of Ukrainian classical music, and our magnificent cultural heritage. This play won the award for Best Original Play and Fantasy in Puppet Shows Adapted from Operas.
A BOX WITH A SECRET
Vilnius’s puppet theater Lele won the Grand Prix for V. Odoevski’s Music Box. This play is amazingly beautiful and pure in form and concept. As well as being ingenuously simple in terms of creative expression, it features the highest level of set design. The cast includes only three actors, who handle their puppets to create an allegory of a model of recognizing the world through simple objects. Three boxes on tall legs are rolled onto the stage. Out of the smaller one emerges a boy’s funny head. His quick hands grip the handles of a bicycle (the wheels of which miraculously appear under the box). The two bigger boxes snap open like the doors of a wardrobe and then turn into the boy’s father and mother. The cast’s inventiveness in making objects turn into the characters of a fairy tale is masterful, and the stage director’s ingenuity is admirable.
Stage director and production designer Yulia Skuratova decided to fulfill every child’s dream of penetrating the secret of every object, so she based the whole performance on a search of what is hidden in such objects. The metaphor of a “world inside each one of us” is revealed convincingly before our eyes. Although the actors spoke Lithuanian, the plot was easy to understand owing to the cast’s talent and excellent visual effects. Thus, the squabbling of his parents forces the boy to seek an answer to the question of human understanding. He takes apart a music box, but its components come alive and seem to return his parents to their youth, which brings back happiness into their home. In the final scene a family photo album emerges, its pages turning. These images look so real as to obliterate any resemblance to the funny little puppets. To the accompaniment of a loud, simple tune, the audience realizes the simple truth of the play, which underlines the importance of the subtle harmony of interrelationships between children and adults, and the need to have peace and accord in every family. Viewers come away convinced that every small and happy family creates great happiness in the whole world.
