"Low Life," also an Edinburgh play, inspired by the short stories and poems of Charles Bukowski, creates a cabaret where puppets are the central characters. People with hang-ups and puppets with hangovers act out a mad and magical stage full of downbeats and losers. A man dances a love duet with a beer glass, a diva drinks to forget, and a plumber drowns behind the bar.
Its production team Blind Summit applies a style of Bunraku (a traditional Japanese puppet theater)-inspired puppetry to explore the relationship between puppeteers and puppets. Inside their alcohol-soaked world, people interact with puppets and even fall in love with them.
ACT 08 also include various kinds of stage performances from Israel, Spain, Germany and Japan.
"La Mariposa" ("Butterfly") from Israel is a 50-minute dance theater with no dialogue. The butterfly image is drawn from the book of psychologist Clarissa P. Estes, "Women Who Run with the Wolves."
A women's play performed by women, choreographer Galia Fradkin and the actress-dancers explore the world of women through graceful physicality and a stage that is neither quite cellar nor a bomb shelter. They take spectators on a life-cycle tour.
Japan's Dougeze Theater is renowned for emotional plays of ghost stories with realistic backgrounds. "Live with Father" goes back to 1945, when many Japanese lost their families to US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's a story about a daughter and her father's ghost, and its message is peace.
The girl Fukuyoshi has lost her entire family and herself lives virtually as a ghost, suffering overwhelming survivor's guilt. She cannot enjoy the feeling of love, even though she has a crush on someone.
Then her father's ghost appears.
Spanish play "Solala" is a 65-minute monologue about the life of a poor woman, a mother of five children, whose husband is at war. She tells her life story though a flamenco number, theater of shades and a magic show.
