CARLO COLLA & FIGLI

In this production, the stage is seen without masking curtains, unveiling the first secret of the puppeteers: the bridge running over the stage from which they manipulate the marionettes.

The show, stripped of any spectacle, focuses on the object-actor, the marionette, revealing the many “tricks” of this art that combine to create the incredible shows performed by this company.

It starts with the simple movements – a small group of cardboard figures that is pulled across the stage with a single string. Then it moves on to demonstrations of how the many strings of one individual marionette (a single marionette can have as many as 64 strings), operated by as many as three or four puppeteers at a time, can create movements from something seemingly as simple as the moving of an art, to the great ballet at the end of the company’s show Excelsior.

The viewer gets an inside perspective on how some of the company’s greatest illusions are created, such as a great ship powered by oars all rowed in synchronization, or the magic trick in which the donkey of Puss in Boots switches his back half with his front.

A high point is the demonstration of the company’s mascot, Gerolamo (named after the theatre in Milan where the company was housed from 1906 until the building was torn down in 1957), a marionette of a puppeteer who controls a smaller marionette, who in his turn controls a tiny marionette.

PRODUCTION DATES
Milan, Italy
Piccolo Teatro
10 – 16 December 2001

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Carlo Colla & Figli
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