Luís Vieira and Rute Ribeiro still remember the shock of seeing people with babies in their arms show up at midnight for FIMFA’s inaugural shows 22 years ago. “They thought it would be children’s plays. Then we had to explain that we didn’t do it…” Ruth recalls. “Fortunately, it didn’t.”
In two more decades, the International Festival of Puppets and Animated Forms has had time to create a faithful public, with a critical sense and who debates the shows. “They know what they are going for”, guarantees Luís, “but most people have no idea and continue to associate puppets with the traditional idea of puppets, the string puppet and the children’s universe”.
Nothing could be worse for the duo that 29 years ago created A Tarumba – Puppet Theater, whose mission was to create puppet theater works for adults, and which since 2000 has been the artistic creation structure through which Luís and Rute they produce and direct the International Festival of Puppets and Animated Forms.
Gone are the puppets as wooden puppets operated by strings or puppets that fit like gloves on the hands of the puppeteer. Today, the universe of puppets is permeable to the influence of artists from different areas, such as dance, painting and cinema, who have been experimenting in this field. For this reason, for the artistic directors of the event, the public enters a parallel universe when they attend a puppet show. “It is art where it is forbidden to prohibit, because through the puppet you can give life to things that you never thought, whether with images, robots or whatever”, considers Rute.
“This moves a lot with the limit of creation. Suddenly we see things, objects that we would not have given importance to, they come to life and provoke feelings, and we find ourselves thinking ‘So this moves me?'”, says Luís, referring to programs like “Work”, by Claudio Stellato, a choreographer who works with matter -in this case, wood and construction objects such as nails or a concrete mixer that also enters the scene- and the body. “Everything is transformed and can come to life, like in a Dadaist show.”
“Work” will have presentations at the São Luiz Theater, on May 13 and 14, at 8:00 p.m. And it is for people over 8 years old, or, as Rute says, “from 8 to 108” – for a change, in this year’s programming there are, in fact, a series of proposals that the little ones will appreciate, although they are not, for nature, children’s games. “’Work’ surprises with the unpredictability of what happens on stage. I think that’s why the kids like it. It is a pure piece of art where you start working on the materials, which in turn transform, as you continue this process of continuous transformation.”
Closer to the children’s theater is a work that takes insects over two meters long to invade the floor of the garden of the Palácio Pimenta, in the Lisbon Museum, where they join the porcelain ones that already permanently inhabit the space. Big Bugs Show is a street show by the Dutch company Mr. Image Theater -actors who interact with the public dressed as hyper-realistic insects- designed for children from 4 years old and scheduled for the last weekend of FIMFA, 4 and 5 June, at 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.
But just as a swallow does not make spring, the presence of some more children’s shows does not make FIMFA a festival designed for children. Proof of this is, for example, “Gallina”, a piece for people over 16 years of age that the artistic directors describe as a concert-cabaret about freedom, with a queer and punk puppet. “Hen is a Swedish pronoun that does not define masculine or feminine. The puppet, who is manipulated in public view, fights for the freedom to be whoever he wants to be. And she can be everything. The play by Johanny Bert, from the Théâtre de Romette, takes the stage at the Teatro do Bairro on May 26, 27 and 28, always at 9:30 p.m.
The tradition of this art as a cry for freedom is long, as they remember: “In the time of the Estado Novo, there were puppets who were imprisoned for talking about what they shouldn’t,” says Rute, laughing at the absurdity of repression. falls on objects and not on who handles them.
But it is in robotics, technology and the intersection of these two with biology -and, in a certain way, in the future- where we find the focus of this edition of FIMFA. As in “Earthbound”, a science fiction show in which the Italian Marta Cuscunà talks about a future in which the human genome is questioned. It is she alone who controls and gives voice to several animatronic creatures of considerable dimensions scattered around the stage. It’s time to remember that until the 2000s, many of the special effects in science fiction or horror films were based on animatronics. Think of Star Wars or Jurassic Park, for example. “Nobody thinks about that when they see these movies, but the technology of puppetry, of bringing inanimate objects to life, is still present in these great movies today,” says Luís. “Earthbound” is on stage in São Luiz, on May 20 and 21, at 8:00 p.m.
Still in the field of robotics, “Simple Machines” by Ugo Dehaes, from the Belgian company Kwaad Bloed, stands out, which questions the relationship between man and machines -and their movement- imagining a future without human bodies. The idea is to teach robots to create choreography through artificial intelligence to the point of becoming completely autonomous. At the same time, the artist brings to São Luiz an installation of robots with which the public can interact on the days of the performances: May 21 and 22, at 3:00 p.m., 5:00 p.m., 7:30 p.m. (Sunday) and 9:30 p.m. (Saturday).
Ugo Dehaes was linked to dance and choreography, inseparable from the notion of movement, before dedicating himself to the art of puppetry, he worked with the choreographer Meg Stuart, a recognized figure in contemporary dance, when the desire to transmit movement through robots and objects led him to an interest in robotics.
And if we wanted to draw a robotic portrait of the modern puppeteer, we would end up with a sketch of the absolute artist. From someone who has to know how to use his voice, but also his body, with training in dance or visual arts. “The traditional puppeteer was already a Swiss army knife, but today this profession, like almost all others, has specialized. In the puppet theater there are those who make light drawings for the puppets, those who build them, those who manipulate them and those who put them on stage, just as it happens in the theater as a general rule.
There are also those who ask the public to take an electrocardiogram and turn the result into a score that will then be heard. That’s what will happen in “Cardiophone,” a Moran Duvshani show designed for one person at a time, in which a perforated strip is made from the graph of each participant’s heart activity that follows the pattern of the ECG. It is then inserted into a music box, so that at the end each viewer can hear the melody of his heart. It is in São Luiz, on May 21 and 22, at 3:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.
The art of puppetry has become a hybrid of dance, cinema, theater and new technologies, but despite this mix of styles and influences, it has not deviated from its roots: “Puppets arose when man first saw I saw the shadow and I knew it was him, but at the same time it wasn’t him,” says Rute, attributing the quote to an Argentine puppeteer.
“People enter another dimension. This theater provides that space of transcendence.”
FIMFA’22 takes place in Lisbon between May 13 and June 5. The full program of the festival is available for consultation here
Source: Observadora
