When Jade Shih (石佩玉) first encountered the Puppet Theatre Festival in the Dutch city of Dordrecht 18 years ago, she was amazed at the diverse and imaginative forms of puppetry presented at the annual event. One particular program brings puppets into privately owned historic mansions where audiences watch a show while lounging in someone’s living room. When the show ends, audiences walk to the next performance staged in another grand house nearby.
“The entire experience is extremely interesting and intimate. Audiences are much closer to each other. They go into a small, intimate space, see a performance that happens right in front of them and exchange thoughts and ideas on their way to the next show. I have always wanted to transplant this idea to Taiwan,” said Shih, who set up the Flying-Group Theatre (飛人集社劇團) in 2004, which uses puppetry as its main artistic medium.
But since the puppeteer and her friends don’t know any rich mansion-dwellers, Shih decided to look for distinctive shops like cafes, restaurants and bookstores as the venues for the Close to You International Puppet Festival, which starts today and runs until next Sunday. Six teams of Taiwanese artists and three groups of performers from abroad have been invited to stage puppet shows at nine non-theatrical venues in the Shida (師大), Gongguan (公館) and Yongkang (永康) neighborhoods. All performances last 20 minutes in places located within a five to 10-minute walk from each other.
Photo Courtesy of The Flying-Group Theatre
Kappa Tseng (曾彥婷), who studied object theater in London, uses found objects from a hair salon to reveal fragments of the everyday life of an invisible woman. Her movements and actions can only be implied and suggested by the objects she manipulates with strings. The show is accompanied by Huang Sze-nung’s (黃思農) experimental erhu (二胡) music.
American artist Kyle Loven fuses shadow puppetry with video projections onto a newspaper-sized screen to conjure up memories of lost love. One unique aspect of Loven’s art, which combines puppetry, projections and other art forms with live actors, is that the scale of his works can be as small as a piece of paper or as large as the facade of an entire building.
A sweet love story is told by Rugiada Grignani and Facundo Moreno through clowning and puppetry accompanied by an accordion and guitar mixed with a bit of soprano singing. The artist duo comes from the family-run Dromosophist Company in Italy, whose diverse repertoire ranges from circuses, variety shows and pantomimes to large-scale outdoor spectacles and two-person street performances.
Finding shop owners willing to rent out their space during busy weekend hours is hard, and it is challenging on the artists’ part to put on a production in a non-theatrical venue devoid of proper hardware. But to Shih, the unique experience of being able to become an observer of subtle movements and emotions that is made possible by the intimate setting is itself worth the effort.
“For audiences, it also feels like joining a tour. They enter a space, see a show, take a walk and hopefully discover a place they have never visited before or see an old spot in new light,” said Shih, who serves as the artistic director of the puppet festival.
Since each venue only seats about two dozen people, organizers recommended buying tickets in advance. To purchase tickets online, click on www.wretch.cc/blog/flyinggroup, or call 0968-075-395 for assistance. A program with a map and detailed instructions on how to get to the venues is included with each ticket.
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