Patricia O'Donovan

               



After more than 40 years of intensive work as a creator, director, designer and performer of Puppet and Visual Theater, touring all over Israel and the world, I now focus on aspects that were once part of my work, but now  have gained center stage: paper cutting and physical storytelling. Paper cutting involves cutting over drawn lines in a technique related to but very different to woodcutting, and when the papercuts are illuminated from the back, they find ancestry in the full scenario images of Indian and Cambodian shadow puppetry. Physical storytelling involves exploring how the body takes charge of all the visual language now that hands are freed from moving objects and puppets.  I am interested in the latest neurobiology research that explains the generation and use of co-speech gestures and I look at different ways in which meaning arises from their interaction with the voice and body of the storyteller. When I tell a story to the audience together with my illuminated (sometimes projected)  2D papercuts, I find my performances fall in between animated Graphic Comics, Picture Storytelling and Shadow Theater.
I continue to train and direct students, young actors and puppeteers in the techniques, semiotics  and concepts of visual theater, and am currently researching and writing a new interpretation of Heinrich von Kleist's essay 'On the Theater of the Marionettes', in which my two fields of interest, theater and science, intersect.
 


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