"The Golden Apple and the Well of Wine" - is one of the most beautiful and most popular fairy tales of Lithuania. It is a magical story about an orphan girl oppressed by her stepmother. As in every fairy tale of this kind, there are many obstacles posed by evil: the wicked witch and her daughters torture the girl with impossible tasks, but good, with the help of magical forces, eventually wins and the Orphan is freed at the end of the tale, and is led away by the young King.
The creators of the production are impressed with the opportunity to employ visual forms of theatre that are more a part of the cinematic arts rather than of theatre. While the tale contains a number of folk songs and rhymes, the narrative is built more on images. The audience will see a variety of visual theatre devices that have been popular since ancient Greece, such as panoramas, myrioramas, diaoramas, thaumatrope, laterna magica, myriorama cards, and shadow theatre.
I performed the story for the first time at the Society of Lovers of the Stage "Theatrical Initiatives" (premiere on December 18th 1997). Then I also designed the stage design. Dainius Vengelis, the actor of Vilnius Senamiesčio Theatre, who played this mono-performance with marionettes, was graduating from the Master's degree programme of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in 2009, and was working on his graduation play based on this performance (set designer Neringa Keršulytė). Returning to this fairy tale in Puppet, I drew on a collection of spectacles and optical metamorphoses used by puppeteers centuries ago (mechanical theatre, diorama, miriorama, moire, Jacob's Ladder, Laterna magica, etc.). These forms of spectacle are today attributed to the origin story of cinematography." (dir. R. Driežis)
AUCK'S APPLE, MAN'S CANDLE || A fairy tale for children Sessions
