Solitária - Gestural Interface for Puppetry Performance

Solitária is a performance that employs puppetry techniques to manipulate digital media. The
performance was designed upon the duality between the material and the non material existence, between
the physicality and the virtuality. A gestural vocabulary was developed to manipulate both sound and visuals
in realtime. We have built an interactive system to support both tangible and intangible manipulation, as
well to respond and react to a specific body movement. This work explores puppetry techniques with sound
and digital animation, engaging the audience with a dialog between the body language and the digital media.
We found that sound and visuals can be manipulated in a similar manner through puppetry methods, as if
we pull the strings from the same instrument. This framework was implemented with success responding to
the requirements of the performance. Solitária was presented at the Festival Internacional de Marionetas do
Porto (FIMP19) in October 2019. In this paper we describe the project’s concept, the methodology and the
outcomes.