Fair puppet festival combines “Odyssey” with fado

Cthe ninth edition of the event will bring a total of seven shows by artists from Portugal, Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey and Argentina to the district of Aveiro and Metropolitan Area of Porto, and complements this offer with an exhibition, two workshops and a debate, always on themes related to the theatrical genre that inspires the initiative.

“ With a quality programming and an increasingly international dimension, the Outer Axis has become a reference festival. Gathers artists and companies from different countries, promotes dialogue between cultures and projects Santa Maria da Feira as a county open to creativity and performing arts ", said Lusa the president of the Chamber of Fair, Amadeu Albergaria.

The mayor thus justifies the bet on the gratuity of the festival: “We want each person to live this experience, discover new forms of artistic expression and participate in an event that transforms our cultural spaces into places of encounter, imagination and sharing”.

One of the works that the organization highlights in the 2026 edition is “O fado de Ulysses”, with which the company Luso-argentina Rodopio d’Ideias will recreate “Odyssey” with puppets and a fado soundtrack. “We accompany Ulysses on their long journey home, among challenges, doubts and hope, in a poetic fusion between the Portuguese musical tradition and one of the great classics of literature”, anticipate Carlota Blanc and Cláudio Hochman, founders of the collective.

By the Cultural Center of Mileiros de Poiares will also pass what the organization of the Outside of the Axis points as the absolute debut of “Karagöz”, Turkish puppeteer Cemal Fatih Polat. The show will be only two to three minutes long, but will be repeated successively over an hour, in an individual display for a single viewer at a time, in order of arrival.

The organization of the Outer Axis explains that “Karagöz” involves “the smallest stage in the world” – because the usual in the so-called “lambe-lambe” theater is that the action takes place within a box – but the performance will resort to characters as a giant fly to, intimately, with “humor and poetry”, cross this genre with “the traditional theater of Turkish shadows, which has more than 600 years of history”.

The remaining five festival shows include “Horizon”, in which the company Limit Zero tells the story of a Miranda do Douro boy who dreams of knowing the sea, and “Etc...”, in which the collective S. A. Marionetas associates a contemporary visual universe to plots about affections, human relations and humor.

The same company will also make known “Rosa and the three boyfriends”, a roberto theatre with a “fun succession of misconceptions and confusions”, since the protagonist tries to hide from the bosses the suitors she receives in their house.

The other two performances announced for the Outer Axis are “Dura Dita Dura”, with which the Iron Theatre revisits the daily life of the dictatorial regime of the New State through the gaze of a child, and “Limmonardo Da Vento”, in which the Hispano-Bulgarian collective resorts to an adventure with magical objects to value the courage and generosity of a young man who wants to recover in the wind the flour that it took him.