Company Aiello is very happy to present four evenings of puppetry performances by local artists. Join us at Liberty Lands Park in Philadelphia August 2-5. Performances are a suggested $10 donation, all are welcome, no one turned away for lack of funds. Suitable for all ages!
Saturday August 4:
6:00pm Unconscious Theater Machines and Make Own Your Puppet, with musical guest John Wesley Wilder Jr.
7:00pm Company Aiello: Spazzolino Cameriere e Cavaliere
7:30pm Unconscious Theater Machines
Sunday August 5:
6:00pm Unconscious Theater Machines and Make Own Your Puppet, with musical guest Lis (of Cast Shadows)
7:00pm Mark Keeler: Rumpeldillskin
7:30pm Unconscious Theater Machines
Company Aiello offers workshops in puppet construction, utilizing recycled material. Things we would otherwise throw away every day are given new life as whimsical characters. Participants are provided newspaper, tape, and an assortment of other found objects with which to build their own bizarre figures.
King Pepper & Other Stories
Based on a fairy tale by Italo Calvino. Princess Reginella is unimpressed with all of her potential suitors, so she decides to create her husband herself. She builds her king out of flour and sugar, with a red chili pepper for a mouth. But when an evil queen kidnaps King Pepper, Reginella needs to enact a daring rescue. (Fairy Tale)
La Mappata di Pulcinella
The everyman Pulcinella takes on different adversaries: human, animal, and emotional. He uses a tool to convey his emotions called a “pivetta”, a kind of reed that is placed under the palate in the mouth, creating the metallic voice typical of the character. His dancing, accompanied by the distinctive sound of the pivetta and the rhythm of his stick, can expose deceit and defeat death. (Comedy)
Spazzolino Cameriere e Cavaliere Out of Italian theatrical tradition, Angelo has created an original character named Spazzolino. He’s a rascal and prankster who can’t help but save the day, a wooden-headed hero to the people who embodies a mischievous joie di vivre. He wants only two things: a mountain of beans to eat and justice for everyone. With a good heart and a good fork, he can get himself out of (almost) any situation.
(Comedy)
UNCONSCIOUS THEATER MACHINE
It’s an installation somewhere between visual arts and theater, a sort of do-it-yourself theater, where audience members perform, directed by the recorded voice of the Author.
In a few minutes you can play with the classics of literature and drama, or with renowned historical events, by means of a bunch of everyday objects living a new life in the context of the stories they are in.
Each performance takes place between two players in the respective roles of Manipulator and Spectator. The first moves the object under the Author’s voice instructions, but is unaware of what those objects and movements are about, while the Spectator listens to a narration that makes the same actions meaningful.
As the show goes on, a side performance comes to life, made by the mutual glances between the players: the Spectator laughs while the Manipulator switches from concerned to nonplussed. Neither can guess what’s really happening to the other. Each of them has to deal with the partner’s mind: the Manipulator feels full of responsibility for they realizes that the other’s reactions depend on what they’re doing; the Spectator enjoys the story and, little by little, adds to the enjoyment the mischievous knowledge to be the only one to understand what’s going on…
The double experience brings to evidence the simple-complex magic of staging, thanks to the power that objects have: to come to us both as they are and as they can be perceived.
It’s fun; it’s interplay, it’s discovery; it can even be thoughtful consideration.
UTM can be played in different languages, and new ones can be recorded on demand in a reasonably short time.
Suitable locations for UTM are theater foyer and in general waiting places by show entrances, meeting point and cafeterias in festivals, museums and exhibitions, open air situations where other events are programmed.
THE COMPANIES
Luì Angelini e Paola Serafini have been working with Object Theater since 1984, for twenty years under the name of Assondelli e Stecchettoni. Their shows have been present in important festivals in Europe and overseas. Beyond that, they offer education and workshops for professionals, adults and children. In 2000 Paola and Luì invented Macchina per il teatro incoscente (Unconscious Theater Machine), which are simultaneously performance, installation, game and methodological manifesto. In 2003 they give birth to the project La Voce delle Cose (The Voice of Things), which freely roams among play, theater, and visual arts.
Company Aiello is a puppet theater created by artist Angelo Aiello. Angelo, a puppeteer, teacher, and storyteller, began his career in 2001 by taking part in a professional puppetry course to become a burattinaio in Ravenna, Italy. He has participated in festivals both in Italy and abroad (France, Belgium, Austria, Israel, Poland). In September of 2013, he was selected to participate in the World Puppet Carnival’s International Festival in Jakarta, Indonesia, where he performed his original work Spazzolino and the Rubbish City. Drawing from the traditional repertoire of glove puppet theater and using the history of commedia dell’arte as a canvas, Angelo reimagines old stories in a contemporary light. Since 2016, Company Aiello has collaborated with the author Michele D’Ignazio on the project “Storia di una matita”, a narrated puppet show integrated with workshops to build puppets while also teaching conservation and recycling. Now located in Philadelphia, Angelo is ready to share his captivating world with a new audience.
American voice over by Aaron Roberge
Aaron Roberge is an actor who lives with his beautiful wife Leah in Philadelphia. He has most recently been seen in world premier of “Artemisia” at South Camden Theatre Company and “A Christmas Carol” at the Walnut Theatre. He looks forward to more voice over work, and working with Company Aiello on more projects.
PLAY/THEATER/ART INTERSECTION
These three intersected arts feed all the exploratory experiments and the public-oriented offers of La Voce delle Cose, focusing each time on one or another: there are some theater-like projects, other closer to plastic art and assemblage, some more that look like games, but all of them touch a part of the whole.
WORDS ABOUT US
“Their secret lays in object decontextualization, where they are in the same time themselves and something else, bouncing between meaning and signifier. […] One subtraction after another they get to the core of theater play. The actors disappear as does the audience, or at least the conscious dividing boundary. Here the Macchine del Teatro Incosciente are born: performing without knowing to do it.”
Alfonso Cipolla, La Repubblica – Torino, July 5th 2013
“… it’s the installation both of art and theater that “La Voce delle Cose”, founded by Luì Angelini and Paola Serafini, from Bergamo, have created for a theatrical project as simple as brilliant. […]
The outcome is pure stage energy and poetry. An enjoyable unexpected journey into the core of theater and its strong relationship between performer and spectator.”
Giulia Menegatti, www.klpteatro.it, July 31st 2013
“Born in the milieu of Object Theater, they made themselves different with their ‘Macchine per il Teatro Incosciente’, a brainwave discovery at Teatro a Corte, where they were installed at the entrance of all the other shows
Luì Angelini and Paola Serafini have created a repertoire of some fifteen stories, all in different languages. And we’d like to see more…”
Chantal Gibert, SUD-OUEST blogs (FR), September 19th 2013
“A story about manipulation and popular legends. A case Freud wouldn’t have missed to have in his luggage…”
Genica Baczynski, L’Humanité (FR), July 29th 2013
“All are common objects, taken away from their daily use and put in a different context, in a new sign system, ruled by a new code (or, better, two codes: one of the Manipulator and one of the Spectator): so the objects are invested with the Author’s wilfulness and become artwork. It’s the ready-made principle applied to theater.”
Piergiorgio Nosari’s essay, www.lavocedellecose.it, February 2009
Mark Keeler
In this show, Puppeteer Mark Keeler has created a fractured fairy tale that’s a real “dilly”. Adding a unique twist to the Brothers’ Grim classic story of Rumpelstiltskin, you will be thoroughly entertained as the Miller’s daughter attempts to get out of real “pickle” after promising her first born child to a wicked troll.
More information:
Unconscious Theater Machines:
http://www.lavocedellecose.it/english/engB/Bmacchina_eng.htm
http://www.broadstreetreview.com/theater/solow-2018-company-aiello-la-voce-delle-cose-unconscious-theater-machines
Mark Keeler:
http://home.earthlink.net/~yippeeshow
Cast Shadows:
https://castshadows.bandcamp.com
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