Puppeteers from Buryatia tell a love legend in Kazan
In Kazan, tours of Ulger Puppet Theatre of Buryatia started on the stage of Ekiyat Puppet Theatre. In fact, this event of the theatre life of Kazan was not known to many people. Nevertheless, puppeteers from Buryatia have four Golden Masks and participated in many prestigious festivals. A correspondent of Realnoe Vremya visited the first performance of the tour.
Famous guests
Ulger Puppet Theatre is a typical example illustrating that a province in a theatre meaning is a nominal place. The Puppet Theatre from Ulan-Ude won Golden Mask, the main Russian theatre award. And 'masks' are given here for performance, for best actor or actress and for the best direction. But it is not the end.
Ulger is a participant in many international festivals. The theatre itself organizes a festival called Ring of Baikal. It is one of the stages of Nomad's Path international project, which units all puppet theatres situated near the world pearl – Lake Baikal. The puppeteers from Ulan-Ude presented their theatre in prestigious festivals in Perm, Almaty and Samara. The playbill of the theatre consists of more than forty performances.
In principle, when famous collectives come to the city, it generates lots of buzz. At present tours of Ulger are not well known among the public. There is maybe little ad, or their colleagues from Kazan did not organize any PR programme. The opening of the tour was very short – a couple of ritual performances, ritual exchanges of presents…
The hall was to the gills. Kids watched with a fascination, though this generation is well informed about cultural novelties and watches cutting-edge both cartoons and blockbusters. But anyway, a live communication with an actor is very important and necessary. An episode before the beginning of the performance surprised me. In the foyer, a teacher who brought her class to the performance was loudly explaining to her children that if somebody acted up in the hall, employees of the theatre would write his or her surname down and call 'directly the director'. It is difficult to believe that such 'characters' still exist in our schools.
The puppeteers from Ulan-Ude presented their theatre in prestigious festivals in Perm, Almaty and Samara. The playbill of the theatre consists of more than forty performances. Photo: teatr-ulger.ru
Blue sky, blue lake
A feeling of freshness, wind, air full of moist, vast and freedom – it was the description of the atmosphere of the first performance of the theatre from Buryatia called Angara – Daughter of Baikal. The legend about deep rivers and fantastic Baikal is told by the theatre romantically and poetically but with a moderate piece of humour. The text is not designed for kids, but children understand and sympathize.
The inventiveness of the director is amazing: there are no difficult technical gimmicks, but there is an irrepressible fantasy of the producer of the place that made the simplest things work. Fresh air is a guy in a white costume, beauty Angara (a life-size puppet) is gentle and flexible, wise Baikal was wearing blue clothes, his costume flutter like a wave of the lake run on the wave.
When they need to show a submarine world, the actors use a light-blue transcendent material, and we see the bottom and its inhabitants. Everything is simple, witty and inventive. The performance of the puppeteers from Buryatia is complete and poetic, folkloric heroes speak in a modern, plain language and even use a teenage slang. But it is not a disadvantage, it just makes people smile because they understand the directing element. It is probably the example of how we should work with folklore and myths cleaning up all boring and alien elements. Tatarstan colleagues of the puppeteers from Buryatia maybe have something to learn.
