About Theater Gnaffel

In the performances by Theater Gnaffel, the theatre company from Zwolle, life-size puppets are magically brought to life. The puppets appear alongside the actors as completely equal characters on the stage. Theater Gnaffel’s performances allow audiences to be swept away by the experiences of these characters, whose boundless curiosity creates an opportunity for change. Winning a place of one’s own, against the current; dealing with intolerance and indifference: these are some of the issues in Theater Gnaffel’s performances.

Artistic Director Elout Hol has developed a distinct and unique method of performing and  a personal dramatic vocabulary: passion and intimacy are among its defining characteristics. His performances stand out for their displays of wilfulness, imagination, poetry and humour.

Mission

Theater Gnaffel takes people on a journey rich in imagination and wonder, into a unique world where life-size puppets magically come to life.

Elout Hol:
“Puppets can still simply take my breath away. During a performance I will be watching one of them as it goes about its business, and suddenly a look or a movement will take me by surprise. And that’s the magic of puppetry. If it’s done well, the puppets become complete characters with a will of their own and the power to think.”

Performances

Theater Gnaffel has been around for nearly 25 years. Over the past few years the company has created a series of highly successful performances: the performing arts journal TM Theatermaker included Het boek van alle dingen (The Book of All Things) in their top 5 of the best youth and children’s theatre performances of 2009/10. In 2006, Gnaffel received a Silver Cricket Award and in 2007 a Gold Cricket Award, honorary prizes awarded by the VSCD, the Dutch association of theatre and concert hall directors, for the most impressive productions in youth theatre.

Other performances which have been very favourably received by audiences include De koning en de rest (The King and the Others), Zwart als inkt (Black as Ink, a site-specific performance for the Oerol festival) and Roodkapje (Little Red Riding Hood) with the Dutch Philharmonic Orchestra and The Hague Philharmonic. Theater Gnaffel has also regularly played abroad these past few years, in countries such as Germany, Scotland and the United States, with the performance Durven in het donker (Daring in the Dark). We also played De ingebeelde zieke (The Imaginary Invalid) in Canada, and in 2011 we presented Het boek van alle dingen at Germany’s Starke Stücke festival, for which occasion we had the entire piece translated into German.

The Current Season

This season Theater Gnaffel is performing a rerun of Nachtverhaal (Nighttime Story), a fairy tale of magical realism based on Paul Biegel’s award-winning children’s book of the same name.

Goblin, Toad and Rat live in the same house. Toad and Rat in the cellar, Goblin in the attic. They are friends. One night, a Fairy who has lost her way comes flying into Goblin’s attic. She would like to stay, but Goblin does not want her to. After all, Fairies are dangerous. But he is afraid to say no. When the Fairy starts telling her enchanting stories, Goblin is unable to stop listening. What should he do? He is forced to lie to his friends; his little life is turned upside down. But Toad and Rat smell something fishy, and set out to investigate.

Tour: February – April 2012

Next Season

During the 2012-2013 season, Theater Gnaffel will be presenting the following performances:

Witte en het wilde paard (Whitey and the Wild Horse)
About the vulnerability of friendship and imagination.

Nobody has hair as light as Whitey’s. “Angel’s hair”, his mother says: “he is a boy who thinks angels’ thoughts.” His friends think that Whitey’s ideas are weird. They laugh at them. Over the summer, Whitey and his sister go and stay with granddad. Granddad lives in the dunes, among heather, copses, pools, and endless sands. One day, Whitey discovers a wild horse whose manes are as white as his own hair. He cannot take his eyes off the animal. He tries to come closer. Step by step their friendship grows, until the horse knows what he is thinking. Whitey has found a real friend at last. Until some thieves arrive to steal the horse… Time for Whitey to prove that he can be a true friend to his horse.

With this poetic performance Theater Gnaffel will be celebrating its 25^th anniversary.
Tour: October – December 2012

De ingebeelde zieke (The Imaginary Invalid)
A fast-paced and exuberant comedy about cry-babies, charlatans and true love, performed by two actors and a host of life-size puppets.

Gullible Argan is under the constant impression that something is wrong with him. He suffers from palpitations, stomach cramps and headaches. So he thinks that having a doctor as his son in law would be a good idea. But his daughter Angelique does not agree at all, and has set her sights on the attractive Cleante. In a funny, intrigue-laden game Toinette, the clever servant girl, makes sure the lovers can end up together.

De ingebeelde zieke was created in 2001, a coproduction with the former Theatergroep Wederzijds (now merged with Huis aan de Amstel to form De Toneelmakerij).
Tour: February and March 2013

The press on Theater Gnaffel

De Worstelaar:
“De Worstelaar is a very moving performance with puppets that is part spectacle and part poetry. Its creators very cunningly manage to unite the different worlds in which old people and children live.”  (De Volkskrant, Bart Deuss, September 2006)

Het boek van alle dingen:
“Those wonderful creations in latex sit at the kitchen table just as if they were real-life actors. Even when they are not moving, the rubber characters come to life on the stage where Hol and Coetsier perform the barest of actions. (…) All through the premiere of Het boek van alle dingen, after Guus Kuijer’s eponymous novel, the audience remain deadly quiet, right up to the applause.” (De Stentor, Marion Groenewoud, January 2010)

De ingebeelde zieke:
“Güthschmidt and Hol achieve remarkable performances under Ad de Bont’s direction. Elout Hol switches between his different puppets’ voices and characters at an amazing speed, and his performance of the servant girl is equally masterful.” (Trouw, 17 July 2001, Anita Twaalfhoven)

Peter Pan en de verloren jongens:
“A funny new introduction is the serial puppet Gnaffel (led by Elout Hol) is now presenting for the first time: a row of Indians capturing one of the lost boys, a school of colourful fish acting as mermaids with marigold fins flapping, and the gang of one-legged pirates all with plungers for peg-legs. Peter Pan’s fight with the pirates is simply hilarious – puppet-to-puppet – with him decapitating one pirate after the next.”  (De Volkskrant, Annette Embrechts, 27 September 2011)

Education

Art education can help children discover unknown worlds and to open them up. We at Gnaffel set up our educational activities around the performances and based on the magic of creating theatre through puppets. Gnaffel’s aim is for children’s experiences to reach beyond mere thinking and understanding.

Gnaffel’s educational materials are aimed at: 
- stimulating the senses
- stirring the imagination
- teaching children to be curious about their own abilities and opportunities within the field of art
- teaching children about watching a theatre performance

All of our educational materials are connected, created as they are from the same points of departure:
- we depart from the resilience every child possesses
- we believe that children are brimming with ideas, thoughts and fantasies from a very early age, and that they are constantly questioning the world
- in our experience, children are looking for meaning and explore their world with everything they have intrinsically available to them
- we see children as creators; the producers of their own theories and knowledge
- it is our conviction that children are strong, competent and intelligent

Theater Gnaffel wants to encourage children to be open-minded in their observations: of themselves and the performance, of the world and the people around them. The question is not so much if they understand what the performance is about; it is what they see and what they experience, and how this affects them. In our educational programmes we aim to offer a range of different forms to make the contents of our performances tangible. In addition to theatre the children will also work on visual art, dance, film, photography and poetry. Most of all we want to show them that there can be multiple angles and views to see the same subject, that there are other truths besides their own.

Publicity

The connecting thread in Gnaffel’s publicity material are the characterful puppets. They are the central feature of our promo materials – flyers, posters, postcards – but also on our website, social media and in presentations. In doing so Gnaffel has chosen a recognisable course, communicating about its performances using recognisable images. Recently, Gnaffel’s company identity has had a complete makeover: our website, logo and all other materials such as letterheads and envelopes have been given new colours and a fresh new design.

Contact

Theater Gnaffel,
Mimosastraat 1,
8013 SB Zwolle,
The Netherlands.
T +31-(0)38-4548727
E info@gnaffel.nl