Benita Steinmann

Benita Steinmann (born April 7, 1940 - December 3, 1996 in Berlin ) was a German puppeteer .

Life

Benita Steinmann became famous with her animated figure of Mr. Uli von Bödefeld from Sesame Street , to whom she also gave his unmistakable “impertinentarrogant näselende and straight offended” high nobility voice.

Together with her husband, the puppeteer Peter K. Steinmann , who died in 2004 , she founded the bühne - literary puppet theater Steinmann in Berlin in 1964 , which until 1984 was based in the Urania house . For a long time it was the only stationary puppet theater in the western part of Berlin.

The Steinmanns played, improvised and experimented primarily with the hand puppet as a theater figure for children and adults, combined different playing techniques and types of figures both in the children's play and in the evening play, and developed the open play in front of the stage - up to and including the complete abandonment of conventional peep boxes - or Paravant stage. Between 1960 and 1990 you played a key role in shaping and developing puppetry as a form of theater in the Federal Republic of Germany.

In addition to the character of Herr von Bödefeld from Peter Röders' Fabula film puppet workshop , Benita Steinmann played a number of other puppet roles for television. So she was z. B. Friederike Friedmann in TV magazine Boulevard Germany . She played in the Gulp, in Das Hondebott and in Der kranke Realchenerzähler from the SDR , also in Der Held and in Der third Ton. In several series of the western edition of the Sandman , such as B. We are three by Gina Ruck-Pauquèt or Die Wawuschels with the green hair by Irina Korschunow , she brought the characters to life.

She also worked as an author, graphic artist and costume designer, she staged, directed and passed on her knowledge of voice finding and training for a theater puppet to colleagues in many seminars at the Free Educational Center for Puppet Theater in Idstedt .

She played on stage in a total of 57 productions.

She died of bronchial carcinoma in Berlin in 1996 at the age of 56 .

literature

• Christoph Lepschy: Puppets for “the stage”. 40 years of "Literary Puppet Theater Steinmann" . Stadtmuseum, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-934609-02-3 (catalog of the exhibition of the same name, Puppentheater-Museum Berlin and in the Stadtmuseum München (puppet theater museum ) 1999/2000).
• Mourning for Benita Steinmann . In: Puppenspiel-Information , Vol. 75 (1996), Issue 2, pp. 24ff, ISSN  0720-7565 .
• Benita and Peter Klaus Steinmann : Igitt-Igitt. A piece about prejudice . Puppen & Masken Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 2007, ISBN 978-3-935011-22-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Benita Steinmann: The voice of Sesame Street has fallen silent. In: Berliner Kurier. December 6, 1996, accessed August 14, 2015 . 

Web links

• Association of German Puppet Theater eV
• Benita Steinmann taking pictures of Sesame Street in the Fabula workshop