Every story has its puppet. Searching for them is undoubtedly the key process and the most passionate process of our work. This is, perhaps, why we took 8 years to create this show, based on the music for Romeo and Juliet by Sergei Prokofiev and the text by William Shakespeare. We first needed to stage other texts, create other puppets. We should have been able to give birth (this is surely the best way of defining the process) to puppets that not only had to tell one of the most beautiful yet one of the saddest stories of our culture but also had to do so through the medium of one of the most extraordinary musical compositions.
The puppets we sought had to be able to fight hard, dance gracefully, love with both gentleness and passion, show anxiety when fate turned against them, to have and lose hope, to kill and to die.
In our search, we found the puppets of our Romeo and Juliet. They are enormous yet light. The textures and colours prevail over facial expression. At times, they are products of a dream; at times, of a nightmare. And, above all, they are extraordinarily dynamic and therefore able to set the rhythm and the tension of the events that lead us to the final tragedy.
Finally, of the 52 themes in Sergei Prokofiev’s score, we selected the 15 that best helped us to tell the story. The work of William Shakespeare has been transformed into a text for a narrator as our puppets cannot speak.
We hope that you share with us the excitement of this search.