As shown by the work of Yngvild Aspeli, who revisits “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen, the art of puppetry is finally coming of age.
It seemed obvious to rub A doll’s housethe pinnacle of the classical repertoire by Henrik Ibsen, with puppets. However, this production by Franco-Norwegian Yngvild Aspeli is a first. There she is Nora, a wife in love with… freedom. In the patriarchal society of his time, the 19th century, this character is an exception. Yngvild Aspeli says of Nora that she “knocks, head first, against the invisible glass surface of his own existence”.
This house will gradually come to life, populated by ghosts and dolls. Above all, the director and actress has the magnificent idea of multiplying the spiders, more and more invasive on stage, while Nora enters the dance, a trance-like tarantella. The manipulation is done on sight, disturbing the perception of the spectator, no longer so certain of disentangling the true from the false. The creativity of Yngvild Aspeli, in collaboration with Paola Rizza, makes this doll house a theatrical success.
Free yourself from an excess of reality
Contemporary puppetry never ceases to surprise in recent times, tackling new themes: like Johanny Bert imagining A (new) round to evoke transidentity or polyamory. Or the Italian Marta Cuscunà who, alone on stage, multiplies the characters like puppets in Sorry Boy. Or questions our relationship to nature in Corvidae: When species look at each other (at the Théâtre des Abbesses, in Paris, from June 19 to 21). She summons mechanical crows into this room manipulated using a system of joysticks and bicycle brake cables!
-The dialogue then takes place between the actor and his puppet, a “just distance”, to use the words of Johanny Bert. Finally, manipulators can free themselves from an excess of reality, such as the gravity of bodies, creature in hands. There is no more beautiful special effect in the theater. In A doll’s housein addition to life-size puppets alongside Yngvild Aspeli, a spider’s web gradually unfolds. A way of reminding us that the puppet hangs on much more than a string.
A doll’s housedirected by Yngvild Aspeli and Paola Rizza, at the Théâtre du Rond-Point, Paris, from January 23 to February 2. Then on tour.
