Artello Teatro alla Scala 1:5
Artello Teatro’s version of El Gato Manchado, Una de Amor, presented a barnyard society that pressured the swallow to stick to her own species, regardless of her feelings. They used a combination of shadow puppets, remarkable for the crispness of their shapes and vivid colors against the cool bright white florescent-lighted screen. This more complex telling of the story used Beethoven’s chamber music to great atmospheric effect. The two leading characters were also vibrantly portrayed by additional rod puppets visibly manipulated by creators Rosa Hurtado and Santiago Montenegro in front of the screen. These scenes were the most dramatically satisfying as they brought the two leading characters into emotional contact. The cat and the swallow were seen as three-dimensional individuals, as they appeared to one another. Also, the immediacy brought by the "live" vocal performance of these sequences made the recorded text of the shadow sequences appear much colder. In this version, after being rejected by the swallow, the cat lost his life as he saved her from the jaws of a rattlesnake on her wedding day.
