Moon Play (Mondspiel) by Lothar Schreyer is a German Expressionist puppet play first performed in 1923. Actors work with two hand-made life-size contemporary Bunraku styled puppets as an extension of their bodies, performing a magical ritual to the moon. As the puppets come to life so does the mystical world around them, through the use of OHP puppetry, digital recordings, visual art and live music this Bauhaus inspired play explores a mesmerizing transcendental form of puppet and object theatre. The abstract script experiments radically with language and deliberately avoids the use of conventional characterization and narrative plot structure to create a phantasmagorical bubble of eternity and escapism for its audience.
Like Schreyer's performances during the Expressionist movement our version of Moon Play emulates not the power of individual feeling but the purity of communal spirituality. Here the impetus to theatrical performance is not explosive expansion of individual personality - but in dissolution and subsumption into collective. In our show we attempt to fully realise this and work as an ensemble with the puppets and objects and have strived to develop and deliver an extremely close relationship between live and animated bodies.
Password: Moon
Moon Play from Fay Buzzard on Vimeo.
