Opening of the Cosmos of Zahra Sabri exhibition.

WThe Warsaw exhibition comprises puppets from Sabri's six performances: Eight Moments - based on stories written by eight unknown writers from all over the world, Tooti Par and the Earth and Universe - inspired by Rumi's sufi poetry, Bernard Alba's House - adaptation of Frederico Garcia Lorca's play, Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht and Count to One based on Khyyama's poem.

The exhibition is open till 30th November.

Hans Christian Andersen
Adaptation: Hanna Januszewska

Direction and puppets: Jarosław Kilian
Music: Grzegorz Turnau
Stage design: Robert Czajka
Vocal preparation: Aldona Krasucka
Assistant Director: Wojciech Pałęcki
Cast: Bartosz Budny (guest appearance), Michał Burbo, Beata Duda-Perzyna, Grzegorz Feluś, Aneta Harasimczuk, Roman Holc, Aneta Jucejko-Pałęcka, Agnieszka Mazurek, Tomasz Mazurek, Wojciech Pałęcki, Wojciech Słupiński and Milena Gąsiorek, Weronika Wachowska, Julia Pałęcka
Piano: Tomasz Pawłowski, Piotr Iwański
Violin: Bartosz Blachura

Musical show created by Jarosław Kilian and Grzegorz Turnau based upon one of the most beautiful tales of Andersen. Stage adaptation by Hanna Januszewska belongs to the classics of dramatic literature for children. This is a poetic story about the courage necessary to make our dreams come true, about love and the power of imagination. Vaudeville with puppets inspired by the paper cut-outs of Hans Christian Andersen.

Suitable for: children over 4 years old
Duration: 90 minutes (one interval)

Premiere: October 29, 2016

Directed by: Sabine Köhler, Heiki Ikkola

“Bring me the disco king”, a journey starts through time and space, inspired by David Bowie’s artistic work. The spectacle, using a puppet entourage, masks and costumes, evokes the mood known from the depths of a past fairground play. Coupled with black humor and playing on the instincts of the public, it casts doubt on the dividing line between normality and abnormality, by vivisecting interpersonal relationships and the mechanisms of social norms.

Directed by: Anurupa Roy

Mahabharata explores the inner dilemma and back stories of 14 characters in the play. Each character in the Mahabharata is an archetype whose single minded and unquestioning loyalty to one belief leads to the inevitable conflict. Was there ever a moment when each of these human beings by making a choice, the choice of letting go, could have averted the war?

Directed by: Igor Kazakov

July 25th, 1880. Great Northern Sahara. There were only two of them - the little girl Jamila and Petroc Yasukevich, a former rebel, a former Belarusian, a former man... a person without food, without water, without a homeland. In order to distract the girl from the thirst of torment, Petroc tells a story-tale about his homeland-paradise "Blue-blue", the history of loss and gaining. Time and space break up. The pictures of the past and the mirages float up and blend into the cocktail, forming a mosaic of scenes. Being between hallucination and physical reality, the hero makes attempts to reconstruct the events of his life and realize them. But the attempts are constantly broken by a ruthless enemy - sand, increasingly capturing them.

Direction: Aya Nakamura, Paul Piris

„Kwaidan” is a cinematic and atmospheric piece for teenagers and adults inspired by Japanese ghost stories and horror movies. It features life-sized puppets, humanettes, shadows, acting and videos. Set in Japan in the early 1980s, Kwaidan tells the story of Haru, a young woman who comes back to her abandoned childhood home after many years of absence. Strange events happen as the house seems to be inhabited by spirits and ghosts from the past. As the story unfolds, the memory of a terrible event resurfaces.

Directed by: Věra Říčařová, František Vítek

Legendary Czech pupeteers Věra Říčařová and František Vítek return to the Archa Theatre with a performance inspired by children’s games. Featuring dancers, artists, knights, horses, clowns and other puppets. The individual scenes are accompanied by old music machines and gramophones.

Directed by: Amândio Anastácio, Susana Nunes, Marco Fidalgo

„Fast Landscapes” is a project that invokes the origin, the relationship between a body and the idea of manipulation, velocity and territory. Traveling, racing, speeding, and driving an „automobile” in a perpetual motion, the gaze causes the mind to a tendency to see reality in a distorted way. Based on these notions, we constructed a happening-performance where the representation of „landscape and toy” departs from its original condition, moving away from stable, determined or homogeneous delimitations.

Director: Alexey Lelyavski
Artist: Alexander Vakhrameev
Music: Leonid Pavlenok
Actor: Mikhail Shelomentsev

Somewhere around us, far or near, there must live a Dragon. Even if there´s no Dragon, it has to be invented. If there´s no Dragon, who should we fight then? And why do we need the wonder-heroes? And we obviously need them! Otherwise, who can help us? Who will save us? Even if it´s a fairy tale.

Of course, Vanya will!

Directed by: Oleksij Krawczuk

Divine comedy about divine love. Sincere feelings, pure emotions: can all this transfer the puppet in the hands of the puppeteer?

Remembering the famous sentence of William Shakespeare: "The world is a theater, and we are actors," the director Oleksi Kravchuk with his show successfully showed us his interpretation. Conclusion, people are puppets, and life is "divine comedy".

Well, time to find out.

Johann Sebastian Bach, furious with the idea of sending his variations into space (the actual idea of NASA astronauts who sent Aria from Goldberg Variations into space in 1977 as a homo sapiens showcase in case Martians lived out there) decides to deprive humanity of its own legacy and give it to those who will listen to it in space. He arranges last one concert of the deceased on Earth after performing Glenn Gould's Variations, extracts it with his own recording on the grand piano (in the form of the super marionette) and presents his own musical testament.

Direction: Dorota Anna Dąbek
Staging: Dorota Anna Dąbek
Abridgement: Dorota Anna Dąbek, Wojciech Olejnik
Scenography: Tomasz Taracha
Music: Grzegorz Małkowski

The Other Room – one of the theatre plays written by Herbert – actor's expression deliberately has been abandoned in that staging.

Limited to necessary minimum, dialogues between two characters are heard as though in the background of pictures which mainly build here dramatization.

Animation activities are built into photographs zoomed to the stage size. It makes plans seem to penetrate and complete, which together with a subtle sound layer determine the impression's – as the performance has been called by the authors – unrepeatable climate.

Directed by: Jose Antonio Puchades, Julieta Gascón Roque

Brigitte is so old that her memories are in black and white. If you ask her how old she is, she will say too many years and a few more. So many that in her youth colour did not exist. Brigitte lives in her chair, a chair that she built by herself, based on her memories. Immobile memories that were and have stopped being. But today it’s different. Today Brigitte is leaving forever. But not by any manner: Brigitte wants to leave flying.

Staging: Dorota Anna Dąbek, Marzenna Anna Olszewska Directed by: Dorota Anna Dąbek Music: Bogdan Edmund Szczepański Scenography: Marzenna Anna Olszewska

... jestem początek jestem ...

Scarecrow: Marek Chodaczyński - Poland Death: Manuel Dias - Portugal Freak: Chiafi Hsu – Taiwán Worm: Merlin puppets theatre - Greece Vampire: Toni Rumbau – Spain Alien: Liliana Palacio – Colombia Puppet: Anurupa Roy - India General direction: David Zuazola
Managment: Giulia Poltronieri Lighting
Design: José Diego Ramirez
Music: David Zuazola
Puppet design: David Zuazola
Scenography: David Zuazola
Original idea: David Zuazola
Performed by: David Zuazola
Vampire piano: Mance López
Translations: Mary Kasinski, Cristina Vidal, Marek Żurawski
Voices: Cristina Vidal, David Zuazola

David Zuazola creates a unique performance, called The Game of Time. It's one performance, composed by 7 stories, 7 minutes each, directed by 7 directors from 7 different countries around the world. All this performed by only one puppeteer: David Zuazola. The Game of time is more than 7 separate stories.

Scarecrow: Marek Chodaczyński - Poland Death: Manuel Dias - Portugal Freak: Chiafi Hsu – Taiwán Worm: Merlin puppets theatre - Greece Vampire: Toni Rumbau – Spain Alien: Liliana Palacio – Colombia Puppet: Anurupa Roy - India General direction: David Zuazola
Managment: Giulia Poltronieri Lighting
Design: José Diego Ramirez
Music: David Zuazola
Puppet design: David Zuazola
Scenography: David Zuazola
Original idea: David Zuazola
Performed by: David Zuazola
Vampire piano: Mance López
Translations: Mary Kasinski, Cristina Vidal, Marek Żurawski
Voices: Cristina Vidal, David Zuazola

David Zuazola creates a unique performance, called The Game of Time. It's one performance, composed by 7 stories, 7 minutes each, directed by 7 directors from 7 different countries around the world. All this performed by only one puppeteer: David Zuazola. The Game of time is more than 7 separate stories.

based on „The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Script: Theater club's teamwork Direction: Bartłomiej Miernik Scenography: Joanna Biskup-Brykczyńska Caring of the theater club: Mariola Sarek

Trying to find out the best form to show the story of Little Prince, students used the puppetry art.