Somewhere else ⁷⁺

The performance talks about a girl caught in the middle of a war. It is through her eyes that we observe how the transforming city, full of horrors, violence and fear. Yet, there is hope too. Threatening planes are flying over the city, the streets are empty, and there is no food left on the store shelves. The school is closed. Every now and then gunshots can be heard nearby. Her environment gradually changed. It became intolerable. The girl’s only wish is to leave for a land where things would be nicer. She wants to go somewhere else, somewhere far away from the horrors of war. Somewhere Else is a shocking story about the absurdity of war atrocities. How do the horrors of war look like if we observe them through a child’s eyes? Only through this perspective can we fully comprehend the full absurdity of war. As this is a delicate and painful topic, it often stays unspoken, yet it is a topic that needs to be discussed, especially in front of the youngest audiences.

The performance includes a variety of modern technological approaches to puppet theatre. The classical puppet animation is intertwined with live video projections and virtual drawings. The actress-animator draws the environment on a rotating table, through which our heroine is strolling. She uses chalk to draw hilly landscapes, high skyscrapers and scary soldiers. It is a simple line drawing, which magically comes to life during the performance. The drawn figures move around the surface of the rotating table and react to the environments in which they find themselves. This is possible by a hidden projected image, which actually complements the chalk drawing.  This underlying image is moving according to the principles of stop-motion animation. The resulting combination of moving and non-moving drawings creates an illusion of an animated chalk drawing. Through the dynamic video mapping and specially made sensors, which are following all the movements on the table live, the boundary between the real and projected image becomes blurred. It is an entirely new technique in the puppet theatre, crossing and erasing the boundaries between individual genres. This visually animated adventure is interesting for theatre artists, animators and filmmakers alike, as it allows a strong intertwinement of genres. The video projections encapsulate the audience into the very heart of an exciting story about the horrors of war, which are fortunately happening somewhere else. Or maybe not?