Introduction

What opportunities do people have to come into contact with other people, countries, and cultures? How do they approach it? What are the obstacles, the misunderstandings, the challenges? Where are there similarities, how can they communicate, what can they share and learn from each other?

There are many ways to make contact: through trade, the exchange of scientific knowledge, power struggles and war, and naturally, through art – via curiosity about other cultures.

We tell the story of Zheng He, the great Chinese explorer, as the story of those people who met him or heard about him: in each of the countries he traveled through he left behind a story or an anecdote and each story is told by one figure using one of the main themes of his travels – using few words but many different visual impressions - in an entirely new form of the combination and integration of puppet theater, animation, and music.

Historical Background

Between 1405 and 1433 the Chinese admiral Zheng He led seven expeditions across the Pacific and the Indian Ocean far toward the West. His expeditions took him to Indochina, Indonesia, India, and the coast of Arabia to Africa – 90 years before Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama.

The Chinese fleet was so powerful and the ships so incredibly large that the European ships would have looked like nutshells next to them. More than 300 ships, the largest of which were 120 meters long – four times as long as European ships and with a volume many times greater, the powerful “dragon ships” had up to nine masts with red sails that proclaimed the power of the Chinese emperor.

China invested in the largest fleet before the start of the modern era in order to expand its sphere of influence; not to conquer, but to promote exchange, business, and trade, and especially to collect and process information on foreign lands – in botany, medicine, and technology – and to expand its sea routes and contact other cultures.

Implementation

Every child in China knows the stories of Zheng He’s travels, and they entered the treasure of stories in the Arabic-speaking world through the corruption of his birth name “Ma Sanbao” to “Sinbad” (the sailor), while in Europe they remained widely unknown.

We are interested in Zheng He’s story especially with respect to the question as to what opportunities people from different cultures with different languages and habits have to approach each other and how they communicate with one another.
What are the topics they talk about and how do they communicate?

The focus is on the perspective of various figures – people who met Zheng He or heard about him – and each scene features one of these persons, the story is told from his perspective:

A Chinese historian, from whom we learn the background of the trip, of the powerful fleet, the imposing ships, and their crews; an Indonesian   shadow player who depicts Zheng He’s battle against fierce pirates in a traditional, centuries-old Wayang production; the Indian monk who tells about the admiral’s (who was a Chinese Muslim) very special relationship to individual religions; a scholar from Arabia who exchanges scientific knowledge with the Chinese expedition; an African fisherman who helps bring wild animals, including a giraffe, onto the dragon ship; and finally, the businesswoman from Siam who knows the economic reasons behind the Chinese expedition and understands how to use them to her own advantage.

They all “tell” their stories not with words, but mainly with pictures – and with an imaginary artificial language that sounds like what foreign languages are to us: an incomprehensible sing-song that only allows us to guess from the gestures, movements, objects, and images what the other person really means. That is exactly how the exchange, how excursions and encounters worked: a slow approach on the part of both sides, a careful feeling the way and guessing about the world and the intentions of others.

The plot is accompanied by selected music from these different cultural regions that helps us understand that rhythm and sound have always been the link connecting cultures and people and are the basis of every encounter, and even of all communication.

Language and Music

One of the barriers in encounters with other cultures is language. We hear the others, but we cannot understand them – or maybe we can: gestures, facial expression, voice melody, rhythm – many things can be guessed at, seem familiar to us and sometimes we think we understand a whole story without understanding a single word. This experience is the basis of the linguistic and musical implementation of our play: for each of the countries visited, an onomatopoeic language is developed; a language that is all languages simultaneously and depending on the tone, accent, vowel and consonant portion, reminds us of other existing languages, imitating and building on them. It gives the figures in the play a voice without using real words. In addition, the stories are connected at the second level of communication – that of music and rhythm, which hint at the connections and similarities between these different cultures at the instrumental level.

Figures and Film

All main figures, the “storytellers”, are life size puppets, our “action puppets”, and they are built using a new technique especially invented by Karin Schäfer for this play.

These puppets also act in a completely new staging framework, first attempted in this production: a seamless integration of film animation and live puppet theater. The borders are absolutely fluid; the action takes place at all levels at the same time. Animation and stage play are part of the same action, continually merging, not just “complementing” each other, but already one with each other.

The various projection surfaces can be moved around the stage; they are rearranged in every scene and form an integral part of the set design and stage. Persons, figures, and objects move between the levels during the play; a Chinese character written on the projection screen can become a puppet and move off the screen and continue acting on the stage in three dimensions, and even continue to change, only to become the character and projection again.

All animation scenes were also drawn, built, animated, filmed, and assembled by Karin Schäfer’s team to various projection sequences with different dimensions, forms, and lengths so that they can be perfectly integrated into the live play.

The process of creating this play was thus one of the most elaborate ever for our theater, with an advance preparation time of more than six months, in which first the animation sequences were created in our workshops, while the scenes were already being worked on and sometimes simultaneously built and practiced, in order to integrate them perfectly.

In our productions “Pictures at an Exhibition” and “Wind” we already worked at the interface of visual art, theater, and even with self-produced animated video sequences and thus experimented a bit with the interaction of animated film and live theater.

Now we would like to build on this experience and explore the medium animation more deeply, which has always been closely associated with puppet theater and “borrowed” many elements from it in order to bring film, which has previously used puppet theater techniques only in parallel with theater, but always as an independent genre, back to theater and unite these two elements on stage to a new unit.

Premiere

November 2010 in DSCHUNGEL WIEN - Theater for young audiences in the MuseumsQuartier (MQ), Vienna, Austria

Guest performances possible at any time after November 2010, for more information: info@figurentheater.at / +43 2167 3384

Karin Schäfer

Studied puppet theater at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona, Spain, where she established her first theater and worked for many years. Since 1993 she has been living in Austria again, the Karin Schäfer Figuren Theater has produced a number of productions on various topics, various techniques, and for every age.

Under the label “Visual Theater” she established a form of theater in which not the text is the most important factor, but the image, the visual fascination: magical optical experiences and stories that all people can understand, irrespective of age, origin, or country. She works with her team, starting with the classical forms of puppet theater, always combining disciplines, e.g. with dance, music, visual art, and new media.

All previous productions are available for tours in Austria and abroad; she and her theater have been invited to give guest performances in more than 30 countries around the world and have been awarded many prizes, among them the first prize at the International Festival of Solo-Puppeteers in Lodz, the "Premio Villanueva" in Havana for the best foreign performance of the year, and four prizes at the Shanghai International Puppet Theatre Festival during her China-Japan tour in 2009. She won prizes from the Dr. Lorenz Karall Stiftung 2009 and the Burgenlandstiftung Theodor Kery 2010.

Since 2003 she has also headed the International Puppet Theater Festival “PannOpticum” which is held in Neusiedl am See and brings international stars of puppet theater to Austria every two years.

In the fall of 2008 was the premiere of her newest production “Wind” in the Vienna Concert Hall, which then toured through all states in Austria and was invited to perform in Germany, Luxembourg, and other places.

Her most successful production thus far has been “Pictures at an Exhibition”, with Christopher Hinterhuber at the piano, in the Vienna Concert Hall, in the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, and in the Luxembourg Philharmonic, and others. In March 2010 she presented this play for the first time in Ravel’s orchestra version with the Izmir State Symphony Orchestra at the Izmir Festival for 1,250 people in the second largest concert hall in Turkey. In June 2010, the “Pictures” can be seen at the Feldkirch Festival in Vorarlberg together with the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Dornbirn.

For the work on the current production “Zheng He”, she conducted research in China, Japan, and Bali during her Asia tour in 2009. In the 2009/2010 season alone, the Karin Schäfer Figuren Theater has been invited to guest performances, tours, and festivals in Austria, Germany, Turkey, Poland, Serbia, Hungary, Lithuania, Israel, Luxembourg, China, and Japan and is thus one of the most internationally successful independent theaters from Austria.