Photo: Arta Kauliņa
At the end of the competition among ten applicants, Edgars Niklasons has been confirmed and started working as the artistic director of the Liepāja Puppet Theater at the end of 2023. The main responsibilities of the artistic director are the creation of the artistic vision of the theater, the composition of the repertoire, starting from the 2024/2025 season, as well as the creation of cooperation with local and international industry players in order to strengthen the artistic content of the theater, the connection with various target audiences and promote the professional development of the troupe, portal informed Ieva Hmieļevska, head of public relations of the Puppet Theatre.
Edgars Niklasons is a graduated theater director and playwright who started his professional career in the 2011/2012 season at the Latvian National Theater and “Dirty Deal Teatro”, but for the last few years he has been staging plays for children and young people at the Latvian Puppet Theatre, Mikhail Chekhov’s Riga Russian Theater, Rēzeknes in the theater “Yoriks” and elsewhere, and also participates in the creation of independent performing arts projects. In cooperation with the “Initium” foundation, he created theater performances in various communities, merging documentary with elements of visual and physical theater. Among these works, the utopian opera “(Experience Monday”) created by composer Goran Gora stands out, which tells about the relevance of today’s youth – mobbing in schools. On the other hand, until now the largest production directed by Niklasons was the woodwind concert performance “Stígo, brother! Stígo, masiņ!” in the Art Theater as part of the XXVI General Latvian Song and XVI Dance Festival. In the content of his works, Niklasons often deals with the topic of social exclusion, but in form he experiments with various visual means of expression, including text and dramaturgy. He has an essential emotional space for the viewer, which can be filled with everyone’s own experience and individual feelings about what they see.
“I see huge potential in the Liepāja Puppet Theater. Even now, this theater is an important player in the creation of the regional cultural offer, moreover, with an interest in puppet theater trends in Europe. Such a course is a favorable ground for meaningful artistic development and conquering its place in Latvia and beyond its borders. Puppet Theater the genre is universally understandable, it teaches you to think broadly, to be brave, to cross boundaries, and I am ready to do this hand in hand with the rest of the theater staff. I want to hope that an exciting time awaits us, in which we will allow ourselves the freedom to experiment and discover a lot of new things,” outlines the atmosphere of cooperation the new artistic director. “I can’t explain why, but if only the actor is on the stage, I have the feeling that something is missing. As soon as the puppet is in his hands, suddenly everything seems to fit and harmonious. And then the most beautiful thing begins – directing the puppet. Being present in this moment is to experience something divine and human at the same time: divine, because the actor is like the Creator of everything, who breathes life into the puppet, but human, because he retreats into the shadows or disappears behind the screen, letting the puppet shine in the spotlight. The actor’s ego remains in the background and the modern theater in the world it seems a rare and unselfish act. If we talk about the puppet itself, I have always felt a much greater force of truth through it than any actor in “live plan” performances. Perhaps because every movement of the puppet must be justified, understandable, with meaning; often , playing with halftones, there is a risk of getting into the “gray zone” where the puppet can become too generic and immediately noticeable. That’s why I can’t imagine myself without puppet theater, which is such a unique genre, to be nurtured and preserved, at the same time challenging in its technical capabilities and specific knowledge, skills and competences as a whole,” Niklasons describes the connection with the puppet theater.
2024-01-09 08:59:26
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