The Little Soldier

This show consists in the adaptation - into the theatre of puppets, objects and animated forms - of the tale by Hans Christian Andersen, thus transforming the toy soldiers and other toys of the past into the empowered heroes of the future. We build a re-enactment of the form, without damaging the essence of the tale, of the platonic, impossible love between the soldier and the ballerina, of this kind of Romeo and Juliet in toy-form.

Although fairy tales carry in themselves a huge diversity of unconscious signs, we will not approach the tale under that perspective, but instead under the prism of the theatricality of the situations, the emotions, and the characters.

O Soldadinho (The Little Soldier) was originally created in 1994, at the Teatro de Marionetas do Porto, by Igor Gandra, and trafficked into the Teatro de Ferro's repertoire in 2002. Since then, it has already been presented in itinerancy throughout the whole country and in a variety of settings: Schools, Municipal Theatres and Auditoriums, Libraries, Factories, Cultural Centres, etc.

Resuming the structure of Hans Christian Andersen's tale, O Soldadinho tells us about a real love between a toy soldier and a toy ballerina. The manipulation of objects, the little stage machines and other gadgets articulate themselves in the scenic apparatus - small telling-stories machine - in which the actors are simultaneously machinists and passengers.

There were a lot of toys in the room
There were toys of this
There were toys of that
Toys with battery
Toys made of rope
Toys for boy
Toys for girl
And also there was a ballerina that let the little soldier en-chan-ted!