Museu da Marioneta

These puppets act in a small wooden pulpit that has a double network of strings, placed vertically between the puppets and the audience. The manipulators are hidden by chintz sheets. The lighting is made with oil lamps and there are painted carton scenarios. The dolls are rod puppets, manipulated from above, individually or in groups. Made of wood and cork, they are extremely simple, small sized, measuring between twenty to forty centimetres. The musical background is given by a Portuguese guitar.

The repertoire includes pieces of secular tradition, with a more specifically religious tone, along with texts belonging, in general, to popular literature.
Their charismatic characters are Father Chancas, representing the ecclesiastic authority, and Master Sala, the master of ceremonies, who traditionally carries a bat with which he punishes or embraces the Father, while the latter preaches.  The oldest references to Santo Aleixo’s Dolls date from the end of the 18th century, in Vila Viçosa, where the puppets were subject to an act-of-faith (religious trial), due to the style of Padre Chanca’s speech.

The Santo Aleixo’s Puppets who made it to the 20th century will have originated from mid 19th century, having been their texts been “invented” or “recreated” by a certain Nepomucena – the Old Promucena –, seemingly a keeper of rural estates, natural from Santo Aleixo.
The texts were transmitted orally, and so was the respective puppet case, until they reached the couple Manuel Jaleca and Antónia Maria, who will have received their case through their ancestors. Later, this couple, when separated broke the line of continuity of Santo Aleixo’s Dolls, for Antónia keeps the puppet case. The collection of the Puppet Museum displays some of those puppets