Shadow Theater "Transparencias"

Oct 8, 2020

3 min read

Updated: Sep 2

Patricia O'Donovan

"The Princess Sac-Nicté"

At a time when there was no internet, the shadow theatre Transparencias was born in Buenos Aires. To reconstruct the artistic work created in the 1960s and 1970s, I drew on a few photographs I had preserved, articles published in local newspapers, and the memories of the participants.

A small number of the puppets survived and can still be seen today at the Argentine Puppet Museum (Museo Argentino del Títere) in the San Telmo neighbourhood.

Transparencias was created by the architect Beppi Kraus de Newbery. Born in Argentina, Beppi graduated from the School of Arts and Crafts of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. From the age of thirteen, when she first saw the work of Lotte Reiniger, the famous German pioneer of animation, Beppi dreamed of creating a shadow theatre.

Among the more than 100 musicians who emigrated to Argentina between the rise of Nazism and the end of the Second World War was a Viennese musician, Guillermo Graetzer. A musician and pedagogue, Graetzer founded the Collegium Musicum in 1946, an institution devoted to informal music education that continues to exist today. He invited other important figures in Argentine music education, including Ernesto Epstein, Ljerko Spiller, Erwin Leucher and Theodoro Fucks, to join the Collegium's teaching staff. In 1965, Graetzer made it possible for Beppi to fulfil her dream, inviting her to establish her shadow theatre within the Collegium Musicum's Youth Department.

Thus was born the first shadow theatre in Argentina. According to Mane Bernardo in her book (see bibliography), some puppeteers had incorporated shadow puppets into their performances, but a show made entirely of shadows was first created by Transparencias. More than a decade later, in 1988 Roberto Docampo together with the team of puppeteers at the Teatro Municipal General San Martín created a full shadow show Una vez en la Selva (Once Upon a Time in the Jungle).

It goes without saying that, for Transparencias, music was an integral part of the creative process. For more than fifteen years, the young members of the group developed shadow theatre pieces in design workshops led by Beppi, where they worked on drawing, painting, photography, and the making of puppets, masks and costumes. They also took part in music and vocal training workshops led by Guillermo Graetzer, Helga Epstein, Eduardo Segal and José Gallo, where they trained their voices and composed the music that they themselves would perform.

The techniques and artistic language of Transparencias had no known precedents; they were entirely the result of the group's own exploration and experimentation.

The innovations included the use of colourful translucent materials; full-body shadows, in addition to shadow puppets, projected onto enormous screens measuring up to 2.7 × 2.7 metres; the use of four slide projectors to project onto the screen images painted on celluloid or photographs of 3D models; and the use of two-dimensional masks made of wire mesh and celluloid.

I have travelled extensively as a touring professional puppeteer, and have participated in numerous international festivals where I got to see a great deal of shadow theatre. I can say with confidence that the work created by Transparencias so many years ago, was astonishingly original. Its techniques—particularly the use of large screens and the combination of figures and projections—began to appear in Europe only decades later, for example in the work of the Italian company Gioco Vita and the French company Amoros et Augustin.

Transparencias deserves a place in any anthology of Argentine puppet theatre.

The Shows:

El Burrito Flautista (The Little Flute-Playing Donkey), based on a fable by Tomás de Iriarte.

El Sol (The Sun), based on the Hymn to the Sun by Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV), 1385–1358 BCE.

Dr. Faustus, based on The Popular Book of Doctor Faustus, 1480–1540 CE.

Ricardo Corazón de León (Richard the Lionheart), a romantic legend.

La Princesa Sac-Nicté (Princess Sac-Nicté), a Maya legend.

Gilgamesh, the Babylonian epic, c. 2500 BCE.

Exhibitions of the work were held in Buenos Aires, Salzburg (Austria), at the Orff Symposium in Germany, and in Moscow.

From the Press

Las Sombras y las Máscaras de la Verdad. Alicia Dujovne Ortiz. La Nación, 16/04/1972

El Fascinante Mundo de las Sombras. L.B. La Capital,Rosario, 26/04/1973

El Teatro de Sombras, un singular espectáculo en el Collegium Musicum.

La Nación, 6/6/81

El Fascinante Juego de las Sombras. Marion Kaufman. La Prensa, 26/10/1982

Spiel mit farbigen Schatten. V.M. Argentinisches Tageblatt,15/09/72

Das Ritual des Schattenspiels. J.G. Argentinisches Tageblatt,10/07/1982

Bibliography

Bernardo, Mane. Teatro de Sombras. Actilibro, Capital, Argentina.1991

Among the group members:

Claudia Corrado, Claudio Debenedetti, Margarita De Larrocha, Alberto Eisler, Marcelo Epstein, Natan Elkin, Andi Goldschmidt, Marta Haftel, Maruja Lamana, Raúl Landau, Daniel Monteverde, Patricia O’Donovan, Ricardo Seldes, Claudia Senderowicz, Nora y Gerardo Strejilevich, Patricia Weissman, Eduardo Kachelli.