Dramas Curtos em Miniatura (Short Dramas in Miniature) is part of the set of short comic plays written for puppets, Drama for Fools, by one of the great theatre reformers of the 20th century, Edward Gordon Craig, known for his theory of the Über-Marionette or the Super-Puppet. These texts, written during the First World War, reveal a lesser-known Craig, who imagined a cycle of 365 plays for puppets. Although he never finished this immense project, only around fifty texts were finalised or drafted, he never stopped correcting or completing them for almost forty years. The tiny size of each piece is often combined with various levels of narrative, nonsense and absurd humour.
Craig presents sketches that the directors and puppeteers of the future should finish.
Dramas Curtos em Miniatura is built from some of these micro-pieces, in a tropical and surreal environment, in which other authors will intervene, such as Tristan Tzara, René Magritte, Jacques Prévert or Mário-Henrique Leiria, in a narrative of meaningless stories, to try to discover the meaning of the world, like cadavre exquis, a regular feature of Tarumba’s work.
“There are only three ways to live in this world: either drunk, or in love, or a poet.” – Mário Cesariny
BIO
Tarumba – Teatro de Marionetas, directed by Luís Vieira and Rute Ribeiro, was created in 1993 with the aim of developing work of great technical and artistic quality, as well as bringing constant innovation to puppet theatre in Portugal. The company is responsible for the annual programming and production of the International Festival of Puppets and Animated Forms – FIMFA Lx, which was awarded the 2010 Theatre Critics Prize by the Portuguese Association of Theatre Critics. Tarumba’s artistic directors received the 2013 Personality Award, as part of the National Multimedia Award, given by APMP – Associação Multimédia, for their work on FIMFA.
Since 1993, plays by Christopher Marlowe, Federico Garcia Lorca, William Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht, among other authors, have been staged. The project’s technical and artistic qualities have been admired not only in Portugal, but also in countries such as France, the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Argentina, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, India, Pakistan, Hungary and Turkey. At the World Festival of Puppet Art (Prague), the company won the Best Dramaturgy Award and was nominated for the Best Manipulation Award. The shows Mironescópio and Este não é o Nariz de Gógol, mas podia ser com um toque de Jacques Prévert were presented in the IN section of the Festival Mondial des Théâtres de Marionnettes de Charleville-Mézières in 2013 and 2019.
Since its inception, Tarumba has held experimental workshops on the arts of puppetry and animated forms, with the Paper Theatre workshops standing out. This work has been realised in Portugal and internationally. Luís Vieira and Rute Ribeiro were guest artists at the Eugene O’Neill National Puppetry Conference 2024 – Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, United States.
CAMa – Centro de Artes da Marioneta is the company’s residency space and project development centre, which includes the Funicular Project, an international training programme and a documentation centre.
