Reprinted from: “Teatr Lalek” 2024, No 4.
This article should be a continuation of a series of my texts about puppetteers of the 21st century, published in previous issues of “Teatr Lalek”. Fabrizio Montecchi, the Italian shadow theatre creator, is not merely a master of puppetry but, predominantly, the most outstanding and, in a certain sense, sole artist who for almost over half a century uninterruptedly, consistently, and intriguingly has been developing contemporary shadow puppetry.
I decided not to write a copious sketch on Montecchi, since his work exceeds the framework of a brief text. Moreover, the last months offered a new edition of his excellent book Beyond the Screen/ Au-delà de l’Écran. On the margin of this extraordinary and brilliantly illustrated publication issued by Institut International de la Marionnette à Charleville-Mézières I would like to share several reflections dealing with the artist and his oeuvre encompassing almost half a century. Originally issued in Italian, the book in question appeared for the first time in English and German in 2015 (Einhorn Verlag), and a year later in a Spanish-language version published in Argentina (UNSAM Edita). The new French-language edition, available exclusively online, is a reference to the previous ones although it considerably expands them and in a certain sense constitutes Fabrizio Montecchi’s opus magnum.
Probably everyone interested in the puppet theatre, and in particular the shadow theatre, enjoyed an opportunity to come into contact with the works of Fabrizio Montecchi, or at the very least with his name. Throughout his entire creative life this artist, today almost 65 years old, residing and working in Piacenza, was associated with Teatro Gioco Vita, the famous Italian company established during the early 1970s and creating – together with other theatres active in Piacenza – a sui generis theatrical production centre headed by Diego Maj. Fabrizio Montecchi joined this group as an adolescent during the second half of the 1970s, and it is predominantly with his name that we associate the onset and brilliant development of the technique of the contemporary shadow theatre tested at Teatro Gioco Vita.
Fabrizio Montecchi (born in 1960) is predominantly a director and a stage designer; he studied art and architecture, pursued animation techniques, in time mastered pedagogical skills, and became an unquestioned leader within the domain of the contemporary shadow theatre. Montecchi continues to direct, expands visual art means of the shadow theatre, writes, organises exhibitions, teaches, and supervises specialist workshops and shadow theatre courses in multiple institutions all over the world: theatres, puppetry academies, and upon the occasion of assorted festivals and theatre projects. At the onset he fulfilled the function of animator at Teatro Gioco Vita, co-author of various spectacles and animation undertakings, and director’s assistant (Gilgamesh, 1982, and The Odyssey, 1983), and finally assumed responsibility for all productions, starting with Pescetopococcodrillo, shown in 1985. Although Montecchi staged the majority of the spectacles at Gioco Vita, upon numerous occasions he worked together with theatres the world over, i.a. in Finland, Slovenia, Croatia, the USA, and Sweden. In Poland he prepared two productions: The Phantom of Antigone / Widmo Antygony (BTL, 2011) and Żabka / Frog (Teatr Animacji, Poznań 2016). Furthermore, as a stage designer or author of the shadows he cooperated with many theatre, opera, and dramatic stages, i.a. the Milano La Scala, the Covent Garden Theatre in London, and theatres in France, Belgium, and Canada.
From the very onset Montecchi’s shadow productions were addressed to two groups of spectators: children and adults. Nonetheless, they were always intensely engagée and dealt with significant contemporary topics involving noteworthy children’s themes (friendship, isolation, loneliness, death) or universal problems (power, suffering, human cruelty, struggling with fate). Among spectacles intended for children I particularly recall, i.a. Alice in Wonderland(1997), Circoluna (2001), Pépé and Stella (2006), Ranocchio (2009, 2016), Duck, Death and the Tulip (2014), and Sonia and Alfredo (2020). Fabrizio Montecchi construes extremely lucid, unhurried, and precise dramaturgy. He is capable of brilliantly guiding the spectators and gradating tension or, whenever required, of amusing or touching a chord. Above all, the shadows evoked on screens are outright magical. Montecchi’s theatre simply pulsates with vivid colours, whose palette appears to be unlimited. The technological diversity of the shadows, the exposed or concealed animation, the variety of screens and their motion on stage, the original nature of the sources of light, the mixture of acting-dance conventions and their puppetry counterparts – all create an incredible volcano of ideas, effects, and aroused impressions.
In the case of a repertoire addressed to adults it would be difficult to omit the legendary production of The Firebird, a tale involving music, shadows, and dance, based on motifs from the Igor Stravinsky ballet (1994), to which the artist returned twenty years later and whose restored version is still presented to the public. In this production the music by Stravinsky – almost impossible to restrain – explodes due to the great potential of the shadow theatre. The corporeality of the dancers permeates the incorporeality of the shadow and detonates an incredible expression of abstract forms filling the stage image. Truly a theatre masterpiece.
The oeuvre of Fabrizio Montecchi consists of tens of other unforgettable spectacles such as Orlando Furioso(1991) and Orpheus and Eurydice (1998); I recall the scene of guiding Eurydice from the underworld as one of my most magnificent theatrical experiences. The dancer performing the part of Eurydice climbs stairs while unravelling a wide and long band of fabric encircling her hips, portraying the entire horror of the torment awaiting her. What imagination, what theatrical virtuosity!
Indubitably, Montecchi’s magnificent spectacles include Miracle in Milan (2002), A Midsummer Night’s Dream(2011), and The Nonexistent Knight (2015). Although Teatro Gioco Vita performed in Poland upon many occasions, in particular at the festival held in Bielsko-Biała, my special reminiscences are associated with The Phantom of Antigone, staged in Białystok, which revealed to the Polish audience the potential of the contemporary shadow theatre. Shortly after the premiere the director shared his impressions:
Subconsciously I felt concealed prejudice, which always lurks when the shadow theatre is mentioned; a prejudice that imposes an understating of the shadow theatre as an archaic, outdated form incapable of expressing contemporaneity […] The shadow theatre is a form of a message that requires discipline and total dedication for conveying its potential. It requires entering into an expressive universe created of rules that are not always easy to accept and embrace. In order to enter this ‘universum’ each accepted this game while rejecting something of his own nature and in return receiving something from others. The text, the stage language, the director’s intentions, all became the object of an exchange of experiences and mutual enhancement. In this way the preparation of a spectacle became a terrain of encounters, and the theatre – a convenient place for confrontations and visions[1].
At the time many of my colleagues (although not all) were captivated by Fabrizio Montecchi’s contemporary shadow theatre. On the other hand, just as many retained the bias mentioned by the artist. Some light was cast upon this original form of puppetry by Tadeusz Wierzbicki in his experiments with reflected light, and in particular by Teatr Figur (Kraków). Nonetheless, in Poland the shadow theatre still continues to be a genre little known and rarely presented. Perhaps Montecchi’s Beyond the Screen will become a good impulse for stirring interest in this form, at least for those tackling shadow theatre measures.
Beyond the Screen is not a textbook, a practical instruction, even though it deals with all aspects of the contemporary shadow theatre. It is rather a record of personal reflections, gathered for years and encompassing both the theoretical-philosophical aspect of the presence of shadows in an aesthetic and even historical perspective (part one) and an account of the author’s personal experiences and experiments, based on over sixty staged spectacles (three consecutive chapters).
It synthesises – Montecchi wrote – that which was the object of my constant research as an artist of the shadow theatre, namely, the return of the shadow theatre to theatrical circles by renovating stage space and transforming the animator into an artist-performer.
Although the shadow is inextricably linked with the activity of the animator and the object it does not enter into direct physical contact with them but solely via projection. This is precisely what one of the original features of the contemporary shadow theatre consists of. The only way for achieving theatrical expression in which there exists distance, space between the performed gesture and the perceived image. The spectator sees the animator animating a silhouette and, at a certain distance, a shadow creating it and separated from the action. Next, the spectator is expected to link those two events and decipher them together and/or separately. When action is concealed from his sight the spectator sees only the created image and is unable to connect it with any creative gesture[2].
The theatrical conception of contemporary shadow puppetry as interpreted by Fabrizio Montecchi is just as fascinating as his works.
The shadow theatre makes use of all opportunities inherent in each of the three types of presence, including two corporeal and one elusive, and does not reduce them (one could say that it is impossible to reduce them) by means of the shadow alone. Its abundance consists precisely of the skill of proposing on the contemporary stage the presence of a body (that of the animator and the object) and a shadow, together with everything borne by their different nature, as consequences for the concepts of space and time. The body of the animator finds itself in current space and time and is an irreplaceable witness of the “here and now” of the theatre. The outline of the body is a presence whose status is changeable; it can refer to another space or time, but this is not always so. On the other hand, the shadow is present but appears to be in a no-place that does not belong to the physical geography of the stage, in another foreign place; in no-time that does not belong to historical time, in ‘now’ intrinsic from ‘before’ and ‘after’, in ’forever’ indivisible from ‘never’. One can say that the shadow does not have time or space, inhabits the stage as an absent presence or present absence. If representing denotes making something that does not exist present, then I am convinced that thanks to various types of presence through which it makes itself known the shadow theatre fulfils this task excellently by going beyond the boundaries of that which is visible.
In three fundamental chapters Fabrizio Montecchi’s Beyond the Screen presents the praxis of the shadow theatre, its languages and teaching. It discusses projection equipment, sources of light, screens, shadow bodies-objects, the creation of silhouettes, the dramaturgy of shadow spectacles, and, finally, the animator and his transformation into a performer. Outfitted with scores of photographs from the artist’s spectacles and numerous technical drawings displaying ways of attaining concrete stage effects it remains a description of the artistic method devised by Fabrizio Montecchi. We have become accustomed to the fact that assorted creative methods refer to acting practices, with the Stanislavsky “method” in the forefront. Fabrizio Montecchi has created a method of his own – that of the shadow theatre.
Fabrizio Montecchi, Au-delà de l’écran. Pour un théâtre d’ombres contemporain. Translated from the Italian by Françoise Canon-Roger, Institut International de la Marionnette, Charleville-Mézières, 2024, pp. 225, illustrations.
[1] F. Montecchi, Przyjemność pewnego spotkania. Pracować w BTL, in: Nasz BTL. Conception, preparation, and edition by Marek Waszkiel, Białostocki Teatr Lalek, Białystok 2013, pp. 203-204.
[2] All quotes based on the discussed publication.
