Lišeň at the international shadow theater festival
Divadlo Líšeň at the Karakulit Shadow Theater Festival in Pécs, or How Sávitrí and Síta Met.
In the western part of Hungary, in the city of Pécs (also known as Pětikostelí), the Karakulit Shadow Theater Festival took place at the end of April. It hosted companies from all around the world – Indonesia, India, China, Spain, Poland, and Slovakia. The Brno-based theater Líšeň also participated in the festival with the shadow play “Sávitrí.”
The initiator and organizer of the festival was the MárkusZínház theater, led by the family of Gábor Pilári and his wife Zsuzsanna Vajdy. Their small theater in the center of Pécs, located in a former bakery, is filled with a multitude of shadow puppets, wayangs, and marionettes, some of which were brought from journeys to India and Turkey. These travels in pursuit of oriental theater also inspired the idea of organizing the festival and conceiving it as a connection between the East and the West, a confrontation of ancient art with experimental modern European forms. The festival aimed to bridge time and space, combining tradition with innovation and the distant East with Europe.
The festival was also a tribute to the 500th anniversary of the traditional Turkish shadow play genre named after its main comical character, Karagöz (Turkish counterpart to Czech Kasperle). In addition to performances, the Karakulit festival offered visitors and company members a rich accompanying program of numerous exhibitions, workshops, and lectures.
The production of “Sávitrí” by the Líšeň Theater perfectly resonated with the vision of the festival – presenting a millennia-old story from the Mahābhārata in an experimental and modern form. The play was performed in English, and after the performance, we were delighted by the sincere enthusiasm of the audience and the professional interest from colleagues of other companies. Especially noteworthy was the detailed exploration of our movable, nodding, and rotating puppet by the members of the Tholpava Koothu ensemble from India. We highly valued their interest and appreciation, as who else could better evaluate our interpretation of the ancient Indian epic than the members of the ancient Pulvar family, who have preserved the tradition of shadow rituals for twelve generations. Subsequently, they prepared a unique experience for us, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – we witnessed their play “Ramayana,” presented in the glow and smoke of oil lamps filled with coconut oil, accompanied by singing and drumming, performed by ancient leather puppets with incredibly ornamental details, hand-beaten. At the festival, they presented a shortened version of the play, which is usually performed as an all-night ritual before the temple of the deity Bhagavathi in the Indian region of Kerala – from dusk till dawn. At the end of the performance, the audience had the opportunity to include agreed-upon wishes, which were publicly sung (and promised to be fulfilled) for the appropriate fee.
After the performance, we had the honor to personally handle the puppets and, in close proximity to the flames, we understood why their male puppeteers wear traditional clothing that leaves half of their bodies exposed. It was an honor for me to operate the original Indian puppet of Sītā, which I admired no less than the sons and daughters of the Pulvar family admired our European-conceived Sávitrí. Both Sávitrí and Sītā are characters from ancient Indian literary epics. I also learned the typical gesture without which Sávitrí would not be complete in India. To see how I mastered this gesture and whether it will work, you can come and see us in the garden of Orlovná (Holzova 7) in Brno – Líšeň, where we will perform “Sávitrí” on July 22nd at 8:30 PM, as we prefer and as is customary in oriental countries – under the open sky (and in our case, under the hundred-year-old linden trees) after sunset.
Pavla Dombrovská
