In memory of Oscar Goldszmidt Don, 1936–2024
An artist who gave life to what was only wood and cloth.
Where there was a classroom he brought a puppet; where there was a puppet, the joy, the curiosity and the wonder of a child shone through.
This site is the home of his work.

Gepeto's Puppet Theatre

Gepeto’s Puppet Theatre performs and runs workshops in all kinds of spaces.


A puppet show lasting forty minutes.


Workshops on storytelling with objects, on building puppets and on staging scenes.


The workshops are intended for teachers, psychologists, educational psychologists, social workers, occupational therapists, cultural workers and actors, among others.



The group’s founder and director, Oscar Goldszmidt, left a career in engineering to follow his vocation as an actor. He began with workshops and stage roles in Sorocaba, among them Gepeto, Pinocchio’s father, in a play for actors and marionettes.


He studied Puppet Theatre at the Grande Otelo Cultural Centre in Sorocaba, where he created The Princess and the Frog, after the Brothers Grimm, using PET soft-drink bottles, and formed a group that took the production to the municipal schools of Sorocaba.

For three years Oscar was Theatre Coordinator at the Paulo Betti Cultural Centre in Araçoiaba da Serra. He attended the permanent workshop in animated theatre at Cia Truks, and studied with the marionettist Roger DuPen, the Argentine puppeteer Guillermo Bernasconi, and many other puppeteers from Brazil and abroad.

Oscar Goldszmidt and Henrique Sitchin, director of Truks

He took Animated Theatre I and II and Mime I at the Performing Arts Centre of ECA-USP. He took part in the sixth ABRACE congress, which gathers masters and doctors of the performing arts from all over Brazil, and joined the Research Group on Contemporary Animation Processes at USP.

The group wrote a collective article titled “Perishable bodies: animation processes beyond analogue codes”. A separate piece of research by Oscar, this one individual, proposing an animated theatre with no puppets, no animated forms and no objects, working only with the four essential elements and physical energies, was accepted for presentation at an international event of UNIMA, the Union Internationale de la Marionnette, at the University of Connecticut, United States, in April 2011.

Putting all of this into practice, Oscar led a workshop on puppet manipulation and animation at the Grande Otelo Cultural Centre and, together with Julio Scandolo, taught workshops in Iperó and Porto Feliz for nursery, pre-school and primary school educators.

With Julio Scandolo in the group, two seasons of “Pipocando com Pinóquio” toured Sorocaba and the surrounding region, with 44 performances and 5,500 spectators, supported respectively by the Sorocaba cultural incentive law and by ProAC of São Paulo.

In 2013 the puppeteer Daniel Camargo joined the group and is already rehearsing a new version of The Princess and the Frog, written by Julio Scandolo. The production is part of a project approved by PROAC to encourage reading in the municipal libraries of Sorocaba and the region.



Comments

Post a Comment