Ei! Marionetas / Teatro e Marionetas de Mandrágora

Ei! Marionetas - Encontro Internacional de Marionetas de Gondomar 2025

Stone Soup [ SHOW ]

• Fio d’Azeite – Marionetas do Chão de Oliva < Sintra
• M/4 . 50mins . free access

Stone Soup

This traditional tale, which has been passed down from parents to children for centuries—often told on cold nights as families gathered around the fireplace—tells the story of a friar who uses a stone to make a delicious soup. A soup that became part of many menus throughout our country.

A show with lots of animation and interaction with the audience, where two friars take the opportunity to recount amusing passages from the life of their mentor — Francis of Assisi —, which serve as authentic interludes in the traditional tale “Sopa da Pedra” (Stone Soup). To do this, they build puppets in full view of everyone with the materials or objects they find on site (shoes, newspaper, paper…).

With the help of the audience, we will learn this delicious recipe together. Actors and puppets will show us how to teach a lesson to an entire village that did not want to help the friar comfort his “little” stomach.

A show that we believe is for all ages, but where we reserve the front seats for the youngest.

what the festival has to say

Ei! Marionetas presents a creation that takes us back to the interludes, storytellers, here in the form of Franciscan friars. The story of the stone soup is a symbolic narrative, a metaphor, amplified on stage to transform a simple traditional story into a whole universe of dialogues with the audience, where objects take on an enlarged dimension, given by the actors' interpretation.

This company, which has developed a great deal of theatrical work in Sintra, and which Ei! Marionetas has already had the pleasure of welcoming in other editions, returns so that we can enjoy an entertaining moment, where words mix with actions in a playful dynamic that creates everything from nothing.

Fio d’Azeite – Marionetas do Chão de Oliva

Fio D'Azeite was formed in 1992, based on a project to raise awareness of puppets and animated forms carried out in 1989 by the Chão de Oliva Cultural Association and guided, through courses on construction and manipulation, by José Carlos Barros, a leading figure in puppet theatre and animated forms in Portugal, and also by José Ramalho.

From the outset, the group's activity has been characterized, on a technical level, by its mastery of the traditional languages of the “art of puppetry” and the search for new formal solutions for this ancient theatrical expression; in terms of themes, the revisiting of timeless tales, both from oral and written tradition, as well as texts by authors who reveal themselves as a source of pleasure and accomplices of restlessness (since we do not understand the emergence of new forms without the profound stimulus of content), in a work of research where the figure, the image—in short, the plastic form—and the texts take on new meanings.

Throughout its activity — particularly in the last five years — an audience has been created, both through the shows on stage and through countless visits to schools, communities, street initiatives, festivals, etc. In addition, and always with a view to consolidating and expanding audiences rather than a specific type of audience, we have developed awareness-raising activities on puppets through short lectures and seminars on construction and manipulation, aimed at both the general public and educators.

In this journey, we try never to confuse the themes to be addressed—which until now have favoured an imaginary linked to childhood, but with a projection beyond time and age groups—with techniques: here our concern is, beyond the learning of classical knowledge, aesthetic research into the artistic concerns of our time. In this search, we will continue to take into account multidisciplinarity; the valorization of image and movement; the parity of visual elements, as well as the extension to other arts, such as theatre, music, and dance, in a dynamic and attentive research of contemporary living arts.

art

links

• chaodeoliva.com
• facebook.com/chaodeoliva
• instagram.com/chaodeoliva
• linkedin.com/company/chaodeoliva
• youtube.com/user/chaodeoliva

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