Ei! Marionetas / Teatro e Marionetas de Mandrágora

Ei! Marionetas - Encontro Internacional de Marionetas de Gondomar 2025

Mechanical Puppet Theater [ PLAY AREA ]

• Peus de Porc < CATALONIA
• all audiences . free access

Mechanical Puppet Theater

The bar machines have come out on the street and have met the puppets!

Mechanical puppet theatre offers you the opportunity to manipulate puppets while trying to win the game to your opponent.

Different routines will test your skills.

Mechanical puppet theatre consists of various glove puppet theatres that can be manipulated by the public through levers and buttons as in the old Bar machines.

Mechanical puppet theatre works in games. A pair of players can use levers to knock each other down, and the public can enjoy the game as if they were watching a puppet show.

The aesthetics of the theatres are in the style of the English Punch & Judy theatres (with a different colour scheme for each one), and the combination of wood and iron gives the machines a retro style.

Each glove theatre represents a different routine inspired by the traditional puppet theatre.

what the festival has to say

This company, which comes to us from Catalonia, brings to the Gondomar International Puppet Festival a proposal that expands on a dimension that the Festival itself promotes. The space for play and the autonomous enjoyment of objects and small theatrical dynamics, which encourage participants to take an active attitude towards the proposal.

Whether through our games or through our “O Mais Maior Grande Dom Roberto” (The Greatest Dom Roberto), present during several editions of this Festival, this proposal, which comes to us in the form of mechanical theatres, combines the image that refers to traditional puppet theatre, our Teatro de Robertos, as well as the beach huts that populate our northern beaches.

Here, there is a public space where each spectator, alone or in pairs, can play mechanically by manipulating the puppets that remind us of these characters from our Robertos theatre. The devils, the puppets, the sticks, which combine with each other in the Herculean struggles that characterize them so much. This creation is a proposal for autonomous public enjoyment, where each participant can experiment, enjoying the objects that are implemented over two days in the public space of the Encontro.

They remind us of the old arcade machines in game rooms, and we believe that The Game is thus an intermediate form of puppet manipulation.

It is undoubtedly important for the art of puppetry to be present on stage but also to go outside, especially since this is an Encontro that takes place in such a delightful season as summer.

Peus de Porc

Xesco Quadras has been combining his engineering knowledge with the world of puppetry for over ten years.

In 2013, he created the company Peus de Porc, with which he launched his show “A taula!”, winner of the FETEN Award for Best Puppet Show 2015 and the Amigos de Titeremurcia Award 2015. In 2017, he presented “I-MAG 341, un coet per fer volar la imaginació” (I-MAG 341, a rocket to make the imagination fly), which won the “DRAC D'OR A LA MILLOR ESCENOGRAFIA” award (DRAC D'OR FOR BEST SCENOGRAPHY) at the 2017 Lleida Puppet Fair “For the meticulous and impeccable work in developing a risky proposal.”

art

links

• lamaleta.cat
• lamaleta.cat/companyies/peus-de-porc-2

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that's how

As outdoor spaces are ideal for presenting projects, over the past eleven years we have used the area between the Gondomar Municipal Auditorium and the Gondomar Municipal Library for shows, workshops, and recreational activities.

This year, in addition to workshops, leisure and relaxation areas, and performance spaces, we also had the pleasure of welcoming this artist from Catalonia, who has ingeniously prepared a set of games that interact with the puppet as an autonomous play object. It is indeed a great feat of engineering that leads to the construction of these small tents that remind us of the tents of the Dom Roberto theater, in each of which one or two manipulators, using handles, cranks, or gears, can activate the various figures: the priest and the devils, the bullfighter and the bull, the rose and lovers, Roberto and the barber, among many others. The combination of levers that control these figures, which interact with each other, is extraordinarily creative, and in addition to movement, they also have sound, which amplifies the dimension of the actions. It is truly an incredible project that is presented to us in a way that could perhaps be considered to be on the threshold between sculpture, machinery, and automatons. There is a profound similarity with Dom Roberto theater. The tents have the stripes of our well-known beach tents, and we can get to know all the characters that make up the stories of this popular theater. We consider this proposal to have been a success with the audience that attended this meeting over the course of two days.