A puppet cabaret on the marketplace – an original project based on motifs from the history of the city of Rijeka and the Rijeka Puppet Theatre is presented within the Tobogan Festival and upon the 60th anniversary of the Rijeka Puppet Theatre.

Using the former old name of today’s Rijeka Puppet Theatre in the title, in his unusual puppet variety show Matija Solce leads us through the history of puppetry in Rijeka: From the Marionette Theatre of Giovanni Lukezić in Rijeka to the Falcon Puppet Theatre in Sušak and the puppet, the legendary Jurić, who was created by Viktor Car Emin. This way the performance combines two different historical moments of Rijeka puppetry in a crazy journey through time, the story about Rijeka and its industrial heritage through favourite products such as the famous Elefánt chocolate and the popular Rigojanči cake. The performance also includes intimate stories about ordinary people, which also make up the spirit and identity of the city, being inspired at the same time by the city in which so many minorities live and where so many different European languages were once spoken.

By combining Rijeka’s puppetry history, the present and the future in a hilarious puppet variety show, this puppet Amarcord wants to draw attention to the importance of the art of puppetry for the city, as well as its meaning in the context of Croatian and European puppetry. The puppet work of Matija Solce, a puppeteer, musician, bohemian, global traveller and eccentric, is dedicated to exploring the unusual relationship between the puppet, theatre objects and music.

The performance is also designed as a kind of theatre in a specific location and is played out at points on Brajda marketplace and around it, all the way to Rijeka Puppet Theatre itself.