This Sunday in
order to find and excuse for not cleaning the house, I escaped the place and
headed towards Arbat, a pedestrian street in Almaty, where I encountered a
parade of participants of Almaty Puppet Carnival 2012. This is a second
international festival, which invites participants from all over the world.
By and large I am
not a fan of puppets and circus, because I find them a little bit creepy.
However, the parade on Arbat made me change my opinion about puppets and turned
out to be a pleasant event. In addition, it instigated my interest towards this
type of art. Due to the fact that not all participant of the Carnival took part
in the parade, it made me wonder what else is there to see. The
program
of
the
festival
looks
quite
full
and
diverse.
Parade on Arbat
attracted quite a number of people. Most of them were families with young children,
whose parents looked equally excited about seeing the puppets. In fact, this
was not surprising, because diversity and unusualness of those puppets does impress.
I found the fact that puppeteers seem to form an organic whole with their
puppets. They move in synchronicity and look very much alike even if at first
one cannot find any similarities.
While watching
the puppeteers I remembered the movie called “Plus one” directed by Oksana
Bychkova. The movie features a British puppeteer Tom Greenwood. Tom comes to
Moscow to teach seminars in puppet theater. He has this puppet called Diggie,
which he calls a friend and hardly ever leaves it alone. I shall not describe
and discuss the plot in details, but I have to say that watching the movie
makes you feel young, excited and warm.
The puppet
parade gave me the same feelings. At first one might think that the puppets are
not very pretty and some of them are rather ugly, but the puppeteers have this
gift of transferring a part of their souls into their puppets and making them
alive. At that very moment you begin to look at those puppets with new eyes.
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| This dog was particularly popular among children |
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| This guy looked quite fierce at first but the impression changed once he began to smile |
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