SAPPHIRE HEAD

Puppet theatre showcase for adults - psychedelia, underground and even horror.
Puppet theatre never was and is not just a fun for children. It's a genre that is continuously exploring and remaking the adult world as well, giving birth to interesting experiments and borderline artistic attempts - as scarce and rare those may be. The showcase in Alfred ve dvoře provides a space to explore these liminal areas of the puppet art.

In 1996 there was a performance called SAPPHIRE HEAD, performed only once, in  Prácheň in the Northern Bohemian town of Kamenický Šenov, in the home of the Váchal family, neighbours to both of the performance’s protagonists and creators.  Having recently rediscovered the remnants of the set, bits of puppets and objects from this performance in the basement of a family home 23 years later, they attempted to recreate this work. They also found on a VHS-C videocassette a fragment of this original performance,  which was supposed to be performed many times, although fate decided otherwise. Instead of a short period of repeat performances then nostalgic reminiscence followed by an endless period of forgetting, it became a legend about which many heard, but nobody had ever seen. Our reconstruction does not really attempt to revive an old performance, but to go through the very process of reconstruction, preferably with a work that was more or less doomed to be forgotten at the very moment of its creation.

Part of the performance is a short documentary film, explaining the background of the whole project.

Prepared by: Kopřiva, Procházka, Smolík, Kropáček, Rous
Production: JEDEFRAU.ORG
Premiere: 6. 12. 2014, Truhlárna Žižkov

Handa Gote Research & Development is dedicated to experimenting with dramaturgy, incorporating non-theatrical elements into its work, and developing its own concept of post-dramatic and post-spectacular theater.It has long been inspired by science and technology. The group conducts continuous research into theater speech, laboratory work in the field of sound and light design, while questioning the above disciplines