Chief puppeteers in ‘The Good, the Dangerous, and the Wolf’ by Aperture Africa this Friday evening opening at Oshwal Junior Academy. PHOTO | MARGARETTA WA GACHERU | NMG

Kasia Meszaros has been enjoying the a part of an envoy’s spouse since she arrived in Kenya in 2015. She had left behind knowledgeable performing profession in Cracow, Poland, to strive on her new character as spouse and mom.

However she couldn’t go away her performing for domesticity completely. So, in lower than a yr she was staging a puppet present that illustrated the tumultuous historical past of her nation through the Fifties.

“It was an emotional present, and our puppets have been life-sized,” Kasia tells BDLife only a few days earlier than she is about to direct her second puppet present in Kenya on the Oshwal Academy Junior Excessive Auditorium.

“However what I found is that Kenyans have a really totally different idea of puppetry from what I studied as a masters diploma scholar,” she continues.

That distinction between what Kenyans know as puppetry and what Kasia and her forged will illustrate after they current ‘The Good, the Dangerous, and the Wolf’ subsequent weekend from March 3^rd -5^th will come as a pleasing shock.

Produced by Aperture Africa, and directed by Kasia who additionally scripted the present, the forged itself shall be all Kenyan with puppets designed by Kasia’s Polish buddy however constructed by Fedelis Kyalo, the identical craftsman who creates the XYZ puppets.

Described as a family-friendly manufacturing, Kasia says that as a younger mom, she has been studying scads of youngsters’s tales, together with Little Crimson Driving Hood and Three Little Pigs.

“In each cases, the villain was the wolf. However each time, earlier than he succeeds in doing his [dirty] deed, he will get caught. So, I’ve married the 2 tales, however you’ll have to come to see the present to learn how the story goes,” she says.

The principle distinction between Kenyan puppetry and hers (which she says is what’s now the most recent perspective on puppetry within the West) is that beforehand, the puppeteers have been at all times invisible and solely the puppets are the actors on stage.

However now, the puppeteers are a part of the expertise. “We name puppeteers ‘animators’ since they animate and provides life to their puppets,” she says.

She assures us that we might want to see what she means in an effort to perceive how she has been taught that the ‘animator’ or puppeteer can infuse life into any object, not solely a puppet. “I could make a cup right into a dwelling factor,” she explains, basically describing what an imaginative thoughts can do whether it is targeted on enlivening a bodily object of any sort.

In any case, Kasia has been educating Kenyans the fashion of puppetry that she realized on the Theatre Academy of Warsaw and within the Division of Puppetry. On the similar time, she has included puppeteers like Fedelis and Victor Otieno from the Kenya Institute of Puppet Theatre in her lessons and in her forged.

Aperture Africa has introduced collectively among the Kenyans who’ve made lots of their earlier exhibits a hit. They embrace Bilal Wanjau and Andrew Tumbo in addition to Chandaya Vaya, Doanna Owano, Fedelis and Victor.

“All collectively we may have six puppets, 4 masks, and one shock,” says Kasia who provides that one of many joys about working with puppets is that they will create new dimensions in a manufacturing. They’ll exaggerate a personality when a human actor couldn’t carry the identical exaggeration off effectively.

The masks, she says, present one other dimension in a puppetry manufacturing. “The masks serves equally to a puppet in that the particular person sporting the masks [which is just a half mask] creates one other character with the masks.” That means a personality like Bilal can play a number of roles relying on which masks he places on.

Kasia additionally explains that there’s a lot of choreography concerned in puppeteering since there are at all times problems with rhythm and timing, each of which require self-control and self-discipline, qualities which aren’t straightforward to domesticate except one is totally dedicated to his or her craft.

‘The Good, The Dangerous, and the Wolf’ could also be based mostly on kids’s bedtime tales. However Aperture Africa’s venturing into puppet theatre is sure to deliver an enchanting in addition to a enjoyable expertise that each kids and adults will love.