The Wolfsfrau Project is the second evening programme by puppen.etc, the puppeteer Christiane Klatt and the director Susanne Henke. Underscored by the music of accordionist Felix Kroll, our protagonist (puppet construction: Silvia Eisele) is confronted with changes in her familiar surroundings that she cannot ignore any longer. Scattered bones become figures that impose themselves on her. A confrontation appears unavoidable, as her world runs further and further off the rails...

inspiration
The piece is inspired by the saga of La Loba, the Wolf-woman or Bone-woman. She shambles along, bent-backed, looking for bones, especially wolf-bones, until she is able to reconstruct a complete skeleton. Then she folds her hands over it and sings. Slowly, flesh and skin cover the bones again, the tail begins to move and the wolf begins to breathe. Then it springs up and runs away, taking on the form of a woman on the horizon before shaking with laughter and disappearing - thus the story as told by Clarissa Pinkola Estès in her book Women who Run with the Wolves, which concerns itself with initiation rites, encounters with one's own intuition, the way towards the Wild-hearted Woman, the way to harmony and healing.

Conception
At a time when our wishes, goals and way of life are precisely dictated to us down to the smallest detail, we lose the thread, the silken-fine link to our innermost selves more and more.
More and more people are on the hunt as a result, because without this connection to our core self, we sense an emptiness that cannot be filled by consumerism. How do we find our way back to passion, to creativity, to instinct, to self-confidence? It's not for no reason that there is such an interest in the esoteric, in yoga, meditation, seminars on the meaning of life. Back to our basic instincts, back home - this homesickness is present everywhere, in many conversations we have had along the way. But how? How can a way back be found? Or worse: is turning back allowed? Burnout becomes for many a preferred alternative...

This project allows us to follow by way of example the journey of a character through the various episodes, or stages, of first finding these "bones", through the process of collecting these bones all the way to their revitalisation. The essence of puppetry is animation, and it is for this reason that we consider this theme to be tailor-made for our new production. The myth of the Bone-woman is the skeleton, if you will, of the evening.
It's not about taking painful stock of the fact that we are missing something, that we are no longer whole, but rather about an opportunity, an offer through which wholeness may be found again. It is about an active searching, confrontation, openness to things and letting go.