Description

Target Audience: All ages

Duration: 55 minutes

Synopsis:

About DRAKULA - The play is based on Bram Stoker's Dracula. MOŽ! is getting sicker and sicker. It must be the work of a vampire. He feels weak and his face is all pale. He is afraid of the night and the darkness. He must remain strong.

About MOŽ! - His name is often mispronounced. The exclamation mark is merely the letter ‘i’ turned upside down, and the character ‘Ž’ belongs to the Slovenian alphabet. Properly, he likes to be addressed as [mo?i], the ‘Ž’ thus should be pronounced as in ‘seclusion’. Only ‘mož’ means ‘man’ or ‘husband’. The ‘i’ in the end makes him small. He’s a ‘little man’ decorated by an exclamation mark. He may like to think of himself as big and important.

The technique used is a mixture of table puppet and Sicilian marionette. MOŽ! is made to be animated on a table surface and the puppeteer is standing behind him. His body is designed from simple shapes. The head is round and the body looks like a pear. The simplicity of his shape and the hybrid puppet technology gives lots of possibilities for puppet movement.

Authors: Bram Stoker, Yea (Tea Kovše and Yves Brägger)

Puppet Animation: Tea Kovše

Opera Singer, Soprano: Mateja Poto?nik

Acting, Technical, and Lighting: Yves Brägger

The Bed and Wheelchair: Kamran Gharabaghi

Special Thanks: Kristina Kovše & Dejan Stropnik

Photo: Uroš Zavodnik

Artist Profile

Teater Štrik is a puppetry knot of spooky vibes, humour and striking visual creations, free of language barriers. We refuse to be constrained by traditional styles, but as we are learning and evolving, we are taking lots of inspiration from them. We combine different puppet technologies, always curious, and play with principles of physical theatre.

With our shows we take the audience into an atmosphere of a specific place, such as the private room of an old man, a forgotten bar and Frankenstein’s laboratory. This approach for creating different worlds led us to an old caravan, which we transformed into a submarine. Now we take the audience deep down into the ocean.

Lately we have found a lot of fun in recycling every piece of trash we find and turning it into a puppet or a part of the set. For the end, Teater Štrik kindly recommends: Don't be a puppet, be a puppeteer!

Tea Kovše – puppeteer and dramaturge

Tea Kovše, born in Slovenia in 1988, is a puppeteer exploring the field of puppetry, physical and street theatre. After completing MA Dramaturgy at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television (AGRFT) in Ljubljana, she co-founded Gledalisce DELA (Theatre WORKS), a performative theatre based on puppetry, movement and music. The theatre's performances focus on social relations and phenomena such as boredom, burnout, mentality and stigmatisation.

She developed the puppet movement method Puppet Parkour, exploring the relationship between puppet movement and public space. During Corona Time 2020 she created the miniature puppet theatre MOŽ! in which she explores the themes of isolation and mental illness. Today she lives in Klagenfurt/Celovec, Austria.

Mateja Potocnik – opera singer

Mateja Potocnik is a Slovenian-born lyric soprano. She completed her Bachelor's and Master's studies at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music Berlin in the class of Anna Samuil.

After eight years of piano studies, she took her first voice lessons with Dušanka Simonovic in 2007. In 2009, her dream of becoming a professional opera singer led her to the Carinthian State Conservatory in Klagenfurt, Austria, where she graduated with highest honours in the class of Prof. Gabriel Lipuš.

Yves Brägger – philologist and linguist

Since 2019 Yves Brägger has been artistically active together with Tea Kovše. Since 2022 he is president of Teater Štrik in Klagenfurt/Celovec.

He holds a Master's degree in Education (German and Russian) from the University of Vienna (2019) and a Master's degree in Arabic Studies, also Vienna (2011). Furthermore, he is a trained dance teacher; Center for Expressive Dance and Dance Therapy, Graz (2010) and has been intensively involved in contemporary dance since 2009. He performed as a dancer on stage in Graz in 2011.

Currently he teaches German as a foreign language at the Carinthian adult education centres in Klagenfurt/Celovec and works for Teater Štrik on, behind and next to the stage.

strick.page | mozi.space | matejapotocnik.com
IG @teater_strik