Toni Rumbau

Spain

A Manos Llenas

MUSEU DA MARIONETA

10, 11 May at 9.30pm

Creation, direction and puppeteer: Toni Rumbau Puppets: Mariona Masgrau Music: Octavi Rumbau Puppets choreography: Margarida Carbonell Collaboration, photographs and drawings: Jorge Raedó Puppet costumes: Carmen González Other props and costumes: Núria Mestres Shadow screen: Raquel Bonillo Technical assistant: José Menchero Dramaturgy assistants: Rebecca Simpson e Luca Valentino Production: La Fanfarra S.L. Technique: Hand puppets and shadows For audiences over: M/6 Time: 50 min. Language: Spanish

Toni Rumbau has created a new performance for hand and shadow puppets for audiences of all ages.

Following in the wake of his latest work, from his now classic “Two Hands”, through “Double and Shadow” and the opera “Euridice and the Puppets of Chairon”, in this new show the author-puppeteer brings together traditional, popular puppet theatre and an extremely visual language of shadows, hands and objects.

The central, archetypical themes of puppet tradition (birth, death, creation, hunger, the duality of good and evil, freedom…) are treated with the unleashed vitality of the hand puppet and from the poetic and deeply symbolic perspective of the shadow theatre.

The puppets: Polichinela, the Dog, the Policeman, the Devil, Death… Traditional characters, given life in today’s world by the imagination of the audience and the skill of the puppeteer. Shadows, puppets, images, sounds, a speeding rhythm of puppet manipulation, subtlety, tradition and modernity… A show created out of research and virtuosity, in which the puppeteer postulates the traditional practice of puppets as a trampoline for the search for new expressivity of sound and image. With the use of the swazzle (for some of the voices) and, furthermore, live music made by strong, but simple instruments, the puppets engendered in the depths of the mysterious puppet theatre come to life to represent the eternal rite of creativity and the struggle against death.

The puppet theatre, an elongated, translucent cube, is lit from inside so as to become a light and sound box filled with mysterious music. A box in which the indomitable and fecund breath of Polichinela hides and throbs with life and images.

The audience’s perception is thus amplified by a number of different points of view which are superimposed one upon the other. At the end, once the puppets have returned to the box from which they emerged, images from the Tradition which underlies a show like this are displayed in the puppet theatre. And the box of puppets, suddenly illuminated from within, becomes a new theatre - a theatre in miniature, intimate: a theatre in which the audience can imagine their own stories unfolding.

Toni Rumbau, writer, puppeteer and Spanish director, was born in 1949, Barcelona. B.A. degree in Spanish Literature and Language, from the University of Barcelona. In 1972 he travelled through Italy, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. He moved to Denmark in 1972 and lived in Portugal from 1974 to 1975. In 1976 he founded the puppet company La Fanfarra together with Mariona Masgrau and Eugenio Navarro. In 1984, with La Fanfarra, he opened the Malic Theatre in Barcelona, Spain's first fringe theatre. He is also director and founder of the Festival de Ópera de Bolsillo y Nuevas Creaciones de Barcelona, initiated in 1993. He is the author of the majority of the Fanfarra's productions until 1992, where he created the character Malic, an Iberian Adventurer. With his solo show Two Hands, and other productions by La Fanfarra, Toni Rumbau has toured the world. Author of libretto operas, as the ones he premiered with Joan Albert Amargós, and books as the recent “Malic, la aventura de los títeres”, published by the Arola Editors, a book about puppets and theatre that speaks of its past, since its times in Portugal, of Spain, of the end of the Soviet Union, the travels to Egypt, India, Pakistan, Jerusalem during the first Gulf War, to China, Macau...