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| Mironescópio: A Máquina do Amor (FIMFA Lx14, Teatro Taborda, 2014) |
"Each artist possesses an offensive weapon that allows him to intimidate tradition."
- Fernand Léger
- Fernand Léger
To be fair, I have always been fascinated by puppets, first in school where I curiously made my first puppets with my mother’s help, and later the fascination by the work of several artists who had puppets as the centre of their creativity.
The world of puppets is extremely exciting, and in a certain way an operatic universe where we look at the world with God’s eyes. I would say that puppet theatre is a total theatre; it is a unique experience where we can write, paint, draw, built and give life to inanimate characters…where we can perform the miracle!
The art of puppetry is one deeply rooted in the multiple traditions that give it its identity, but that because of its nature, has the germ of renovation in it.
No, puppets are not “things from the past”, puppets are Today’s theatre and they are more and more present in film, in TV, everywhere. When we go up on stage, they are the Gods of our ephemeral existence; they are that place for the creation of truth and share with the audience, they are that magic space of creation.
Puppetry projects the spectator into a magic place, out of time, to introduce him to a universe of wide emotions. The audience is called to participate in the creation of this reality, to which he cannot be indifferent, otherwise this reality may simply stop existing or never taking place.
Puppets knew from its genesis, how to question these relations between the scene and the audience, upon which today’s theatre and contemporary dance now reflect; the audience’s place, is inside the theatre, space for communion and share.
Modernity, future, experiment and discover, theatre as a rhizome, fragmented with multiple choices, public art, theatre, dance, objects, circus and installation…puppets have the capacity to take ownership and contaminate Art to evoke the sacralisation of death/life, be it through a piece of metal or wood, through a sheet of paper or a piece of string, in the attempt to give meaning and explain the human existence and their own reality.
And it is this fragility what makes their nature fascinating, hybrid art, mutant and experimental. A place for constant questioning that allows artists to risk, reinventing their art, opening more and more stimulant perspectives about puppetry and the theatre of the future.
Puppets are part of our lives, they´re the reasons of our living, and it is for them that work every day, and it is with them that we can rely on stage to bring the dazzle with which we want to share and live our lives. It is the art that listens to the materials, to which we surrender when we are hit in the heart by an arrow, when for some instants, the creature gains autonomy.
It is an art of the time, present and future, and the future of puppetry is the one of the reinvention of the mankind and its unceasing search for freedom.
BIO
Luís Vieira (PT): Artistic director of FIMFA Lx - International Festival of Puppetry and Animated Forms and A Tarumba - Teatro de Marionetas.
He played in FIMFA with Amor de Don Perlimplín com Belisa no seu Jardim (Casa d’Os Dias da Água, 2004); Red Hot FIMFA’s Jazz Band (Maria Matos Teatro Municipal, 2008), Mironescópio: A Máquina do Amor (CAMa – Centro de Artes da Marioneta, 2010; Galeria Boavista, 2012; Teatro Taborda, 2014), Cabaret de Insectos: Dracularium Freak (São Luiz Teatro Municipal, 2015).
