Patricia O'Donovan

               



At present, after 40 years of performing Puppet Theater all over Israel and the world, I am letting go of the touring and settling on two aspects related my work in performance and visual theater. One of them concerns the image and the other the body gesture. I have sort of distilled and separated what once came together on stage but underwent a transformation. The image lost a dimension and is mainly 2D, and the body gesture focuses on the movements we do when we talk, or what we call Co-Speech gestures. The lost dimension means the visual, plastic aspect of theater has  now to find movement and composition on flat paper. After the idea is drawn in pencil, it migrates from white to black paper and emerges when my tools transits from pencil to knife. The final result is a paper cutout, where light can pass through the cut out areas of the image.
I find the sources of my love for the black and white cutout in the wood and lino prints of
Clement Moreau, that filled my childhood home (he was a friend of my parents and pupil of K.Kollwitz), and to Shadow Theater with which I have been involved since the early 70's in Buenos Aires, where I was born.

My interest in the gestures we do with hands, face and upper body grew from my courses teaching Oral Storytelling. I researched and developed exercises which at present I have been invited to teach at The School for Visual Theater.

Both my cutouts and gestures come together when I myself show my work as I tell the stories behind the images, what is called Picture Storytelling, a tradition alive and well in many parts of the world, where the performance consists of a combination of the aural (sounds, words) channel, the 2D image (painting, drawing, cutout) and the 3D work of the storyteller's body.


For a full view of my work and CV click HERE.