No grafiskā romāna līdz izrādei: “Sibīrijas haiku” adaptācija Latvijas Leļļu teātrī

Abstract

The article analyses the adaptation of Jurga Vilė (b. 1977) and Lina Itagaki’s (b. 1979) graphic novel Siberian Haiku on the stage of the Latvian Puppet Theatre. The corpus of the study includes the graphic novel (2017), Dace Meiere’s (b. 1973) Latvian translation (2020), as well as director Valters Sīlis’s (b. 1985) dramaturgy and its staging at the Latvian Puppet Theatre (2024). This approach makes it possible to examine the adaptation process across several phases – from the literary text to the play and theatrical performance.

The study aims to explore how the graphic novel is adapted for the stage, how an intermedial dialogue between the book and the performance emerges in this process, and how it affects the work’s meaning and the spectator’s emotional reception. Particular attention is given to the graphic novel’s multimedia and multimodal structure, its transformations in dramaturgy and staging, and the semantic functions of paper puppet theatre and real-time visual solutions.

The analysis is grounded in adaptation studies theory, applying the concepts of intermediality and transtextuality to examine media transformations and textual interrelations. Gérard Genette’s (1930–2018) transtextuality framework provides tools for conceptualising the levels and forms of textual dialogue, while Lars Elleström’s (1960–2021) conception of intermediality as intermodality offers an analytical framework for the study of media structures and their interaction.

In this perspective, the graphic novel functions as a hypotext characterised by its multimediality and multimodality, and by the particular expression of the haiku principle, while the stage production, as a hypertext, interprets the experience of exile and actualises haiku poetics through theatrical means of expression.

The study concludes that form and medium are not neutral channels of transfer but constitute an essential part of a text’s semantic structure. In the Latvian Puppet Theatre adaptation, the visual and narrative logic of the hypotext is preserved yet expanded, creating a new experience that engages the audience through multidimensional perceptual strategies. Thus, the performance not only interprets the experience of exile but also reveals memory as a collective and performative process that is continuously re-enacted.