Handa Gote: Třetí ruka

Description

Inspired by the visionary production Piškanderdulá and the visuality of Mexican altars and the Day of the Dead celebration, as well as Japanese mobile theater kamishibai. Crafty playfulness, subtle humor, and specific nostalgia. The theater explorers Handa Gote bring to D29 a surreal puppet performance Třetí ruka. This is another project by the group that deals with puppet theater for adults and seeks its roots and inspirations in the avant-garde and visionaries, as well as in amateurs and artists from other genres. Třetí ruka creates a puppet microcosm that can be entered from various sides and does not offer any story—only small fragments of situations and images, open to the audience's interpretation. Handa Gote works here with a multitude of energetically charged objects, often found under unusual circumstances or from the possessions of their ancestors, and these powerful objects are composed into fragmented compositions referring to the theme of All Souls' Day or images with the theme of vanitas. The visual inspiration was the aesthetics of Vietnamese markets, Chinese shops, the visuality of Mexican altars and the Day of the Dead celebration, as well as Japanese mobile theater kamishibai or stage technology dogugaeshi. The group collaborates with an artist working under the brand kosmo_nauty on the visual aspect. In the project Třetí ruka, Handa Gote returns to puppet theater and particularly connects to their own production Safírová hlava, which was a reconstruction of a forgotten puppet project from the 90s. Now Handa Gote continues in the effort of reconstruction, this time in a genre that perhaps was not a genre at all and probably did not even exist. It is a research into the specific visuality of experimental puppetry from the 90s and an attempt at a kind of revival of this forgotten micro-genre of surrealist puppet theater. It is particularly inspired by the experiments of Petr Nikl with the theater Mehedaha, the puppet creations of František Skála and the BKS group, or Čestmír Suška and Petr Šoch, but also the works of Milan Grygar. One of the inspirations is also the unattainable Czech puppet legend—the production Piškanderdulá and through it the tradition of variety puppet performances, the tradition of “other” puppet aesthetics, represented for example by the puppets of Paul Klee and also the works of many art brut artists.