The Journey to Lilliput
Based on the classic book by Jonathan Swift.
After his boat was capsized in the sea, Gulliver finds himself at the shores of Lilliput: a country of little people with great wishes. For the Lilliputs, Gulliver is a giant, omnipotent, and certainly can fulfill all their wishes. Gulliver tries to behave as a polite guest, and to satisfy the small Lilliputs. The performance combines acting with the use of models, mechanical toys, tiny machines, puppets and film. The theatrical language, rich and unique, creates an intimate, surprising experience, full of imagination.
The performance “Gulliver – The Journey to Lilliput”, an adaptation of the classical story of Jonathan Swift, examines the limits in the world of game.
The classical story was adapted for a single actor. The stage is designed as a playroom where Gulliver puts together and disassembles various places and landscapes, characters and situations, and creates a whole story about the journey and the Lilliput country.
The show is based on the connection created by the storyteller and the children as journey associates. Gulliver invites the children to join his journey diary – and his inner world. The journey begins with an innocent game combining wooden cubes. The basic and clean geometry of the models enables Gulliver to transform the cubes into landscapes only through his imagination.
The game evolves through the arrangement of the cubes and than complicates when Gulliver discovers he is now a prisoner in Lilliput – A country made of cubes and its little residents are wood characters designed from basic shapes: ball, triangle and a cube.
Does Gulliver rule his world and destiny? Or the Game world succeeds to control him? The show engages the children with a familiar situation where the game, usually motivated from the imagination and experience, transforms into a temporary world with its inner rules. What is than the freedom of choice in these new conditions?
Gulliver, along with the children, his journey associates, examines this question, and examines his strength in the “game”. The peak arrives when a war breaks out between Lilliput and its rival country Blefusco, due to an argument about the right way to peel an egg. The political satire of Swift engages another dimension through the question of choice and our ability to control our destiny.
The dialogue between the classic story and the contemporary adaptation is also manifested through the material-esthetical dimension in the show: The stage designed as the playing room through the creation of a colorful and emotional chaos. At the beginning of the show, the stage is empty apart from a few wood cubes. During the show, the content of the cubes is slowly being revealed. While on the one hand the cubes manifest architectures of the small Lilliput countries, they also reveal handmade mechanical toys that create wondrous everyday and urban scenes: local band, active zoo, street party and more.
Lilliput’s moon accompanies Gulliver’s journey, screening short films that enlarge the small details appearing on the stage. Functioning as a mirror as well as a magnifying glass, the screening moon enables the audience to observe Lilliput at both scales.