6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Puppet Theater Gets Weird, With Georg Baselitz as a Guide
On a rainy morning earlier this month, in a theater in Salzburg, Austria, a soldier danced to an offbeat march with exaggerated high kicks. Flanking him, a cornet player and a percussionist bounced to the rhythm.
Suddenly, the soldier's foot flew off.
It was lucky, though, that the soldier's head was made of crinkled metal and his limbs were cardboard tubes. A rehearsal ground to a halt, the music stopped. A hand emerged from the bottom of the stage and began to reaffix the foot, and a technician came to sit on the stage lip. The effect was jarring, as if giants had invaded the human world.
These dislocations of scale are a specialty of the Salzburg Marionette Theater, where the rehearsal was taking place. This summer, the company is collaborating for the first time with a contemporary visual artist for a new production of Stravinsky's monodrama 'The Soldier's Tale,' opening July 29, with puppets and sets designed by Georg Baselitz.
The marionettes usually perform to classic recordings, but this show, a co-production with the Salzburg Festival, will feature a live chamber music group. After eight performances at the festival this summer, it will be filmed in cooperation with the Japanese broadcaster NHK and will tour Europe in fall 2026.
Baselitz, 87, a German artist known for his monumental paintings, especially the 'Heroes' series that expressed the complexity of German identity after World War II, approached the theater with the idea about two years ago.
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