Santiago (‘Santi’) Arnal was born in Barcelona in 1958. His love of dance and theatre led him to study at the Barcelona Theatre Institute, where, having become fascinated by the figure of Harry V. Tozer, he chose the theatre discipline of puppetry. From the master Tozer, he learned all the secrets and meticulousness of building and operating string puppets.
In 1989, Santiago Arnal created Per Poc to dedicated himself to string-puppet theatre. His first shows, ‘Jazz shhhh’, alongside Camilo de la Espriella and ‘Piccolo, forte, pianissimo’, with Karin Schaffer, already incorporated music as a star element. Later, Santiago Arnal worked with the Jordi Bertrán Company on the creation of the show ‘Poemas Visuales’ and with the Teatre de Sac Company, acting in its different shows.
In 1996, he took up Per Poc again and staged the musical fairy tale ‘Peter and the Wolf’, by Sergei Prokofiev, which opened to tremendous success alongside the Liceo Conservatory Orchestra. This initial approach to symphonic music was followed by the ballet ‘The Nutcracker’, by Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, in 1999, where he combined string puppets with shadow-puppet theatre. In 2000, Per Poc worked in cinema for Terry Gilliam, on the creation and construction of a scene with giant string puppets for the film ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quijote’. In 2002, he brought to puppet theatre the popular cartoon characters ‘The Triplets’ to commemorate the International Year of Gaudí, with ‘The Triplets and the Enigmatic Mr. Gaudí’, which toured all the theatres of Spain. In 2004, he staged the musical ‘Joaquín el barrendero’ (Joaquín the Street Sweeper), an environmentalist and pacifist allegory that denounces the political situation in Spain at the time with its corruption and the declaration of the Iraq war.
In 2006, Per Poc managed to bring a dream to the stage: the ballet ‘Romeo and Juliet’, by Prokofiev, and since then, the company has continued to propose musical works with puppets, such as ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, by Felix Mendelssohn; ‘The Soldier’s Tale’, by Igor Stravinsky; ‘The Little Sweep’, by Benjamin Britten; ‘Petrushka’, by Stravinsky; ‘El Retablo de Maese Pedro’ (Master Peter’s Puppets Show), by Manuel de Falla and ‘The Puss in Boots’ with French Baroque Music.