Goals
The Commission continues working on ongoing projects and collaborates with projects proposed by UNIMA leadership, other commissions, national centres or individual members of UNIMA.
Ongoing Projects
- The on-line English, French and Spanish editions of the World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts WEPA,
- The collection of information concerning contemporary texts written for the puppet theatre,
- Support for other UNIMA commissions.
WEPA
The encyclopedia’s 1,262 updated and expanded articles have been translated into English, French and Spanish, mounted on the Internet, in three versions, on WEPA’s own website.
Royalty-free photos and images to illustrate articles have been solicited from the appropriate national centres.
Preparing, translating and processing of the captions for the illustrations which are received is underway, and this is an onerous task. These will be mounted on the WEPA website and the related articles will be illustrated as soon as possible.
Additional resources in the form of volunteers or paid assistance will be required if additional articles are to be illustrated.
A new structure which engages additional resources would be required to ensure the reliability of the WEPA’s contents and process incoming requests for additions, changes and corrections once the trilingual encyclopedia goes public. This could take the form of an editorial/”scientific” committee, and/or coordination with the Research Commission and independent puppetry research centres (e.g. IIM, Ballard Institute, museums).
Contemporary Writing
The primary goal of this ongoing project is to identify and gather as much information as possible related to texts/scripts written for the puppet theatre with the purpose of circulating these texts among countries through UNIMA for future collaborations, translations, and the like.
This undertaking was initiated in 2012 by Greta Bruggeman.
In 2016, a trilingual print publication (download it here) with the findings from the initial four-year research was prepared. It is an online publication on the UNIMA Website and will be updated. Volunteers for this project are welcome, particularly those interested in searching within their own countries for authors who are creating works for the puppet stage.
Puppetry Publications Online
There are two separate projects for the UNIMA Publication Sub Commission, the Puppetry Publication Online (PPO): the Publication directory of puppetry magazines and the editorial project for an international magazine. For more information, visit the link: https://www.unima.org/en/projects-and-achievements/publications-directory/ or write to ppo@unima.org.
Support for other Commissions
The Publication Commission stands ready to offer suggestions to the presidents of other UNIMA commissions interested in issuing their own publications.
The objective is to assist in making UNIMA more visible and recognizable.
New Collaborative Projects
Two new undertakings have been proposed for the Commission. The first relates to UNIMA’s 90th Anniversary and the second to the creation of a new online journal.
UNIMA 90th Anniversary Project
This collaborative project scheduled for 2016-2019 was initiated by UNIMA Czech Republic and will be financed by the Czech government. Nina Malíková (along with her Czech and Slovak counterparts) will lead this project, with the aim of preparing printed and electronic publications to celebrate 90 years of UNIMA (1929-2019).
This project would involve UNIMA leadership and UNIMA archives, several UNIMA commissions (Publication & Contemporary Writing Commission, Research Commission, Heritage Commission) as well as UNIMA national centres.
The goal of this collaborative project is to research, collect and prepare, by 2019, a variety of writings and events that would present “UNIMA’s historical contribution to the acknowledgement and development of the puppetry arts around the world in the 20th and 21st centuries”.
The proposed output, by 2019, includes:
- a printed and online publication, with photographs and video;
- a conference, possibly with a focus on the future of UNIMA and the development of puppet theatre;
- a celebration, to be held in Prague, of the 90th anniversary of the founding of UNIMA in 1929, with an accompanying exhibition with a focus on new works/new directions in the field of puppetry.
