UNIMA – Union Internationale de la Marionnette, which will celebrate its 90th anniversary in 2019, was built on the strong intention to create a European bond: to go beyond borders in order to connect citizens, amateurs, artists and researchers around puppets. This anniversary is an opportunity for the oldest world theatre organization to turn towards new generations to examine puppetry’s heritage and to explore the ways this heritage can be invested, preserved, and shared.

Tutor: Stathis Markopoulos, Ayusaya Puppet Theater!
Dates: 11-13 October 2019
Duration: 20 hours (11/10: 15:00 – 20:00 – 12/10: 09:30 – 13:30 & 15:30 – 19:30 – 13/10: 09:30 – 13:30 & 15:30 – 18:30)
Place: Vería – Macedonia Central – Greece / Steghi Grammaton & technon” – Municipal theatre du Veria (Arival Airport: Makedonia airport Thessaloniki – 100 km from Veria)
Working language: English

Who can participate?: Puppeteers and other theatre professionals or educational from all over the world, who work regularly with puppet theatre.

 

Objectives of those workshops are, among others:

• Training through the challenging of cultural practices and approaches around traditional techniques, their contemporary re-appropriation and their exploitation on a professional level.
• Building and gathering collective tools about specific aspects of those traditions
• Contributing to a common framework of specific aspects of puppet practices and expertise of puppeteers.


Aim
. Practical research on the questions:


• What is it we call “tradition”?
• How does “tradition” relate to “contemporary art”?
• What do the puppetry traditions have to offer to the 21st century man?

Main Goals


1. Familiarizing with the tradition of the European puppet theater, its codes and techniques: the example of Fasoulis
2. Practical experimentation with puppet animation techniques: tools and processes, exercises and improvised stories
3. Practical experimentation with the puppet theater functions and rituals: discovering tradition in a new context



Issues to be researched


• “Tradition” means modern collective creation
• The living tradition in the age of individualism
• The artist’s recognition of the dead ancestors within him
• Multiple levels: from universal to local traditions
• The puppet as a carrier of the tradition of rebellion against death
• Fasoulis as a crystallization of the carnival code of laughter
• The popular comic hero: Eros Against Death
• From Bologna’s Faggiolino to Greek Fasoulis
• Fasoulis and Karagiozis: West and East on a common ground
• Traditional players and social ritual: the initiation into sacrifice
• The human hand as an object: from touch to image-gesture
• The technique of the hand-puppet: making and manipulating the hand we lost
• Technique as Meaning: Dramaturgy and the poetics of solid matter
• The “Animation” of the “inanimate”: What is “alive” and how it works
• Viewer manipulation: the magic triangle inverted
• “Artificial life” as a means of exploring “natural life”
• The puppeteer as an Inanimate Object Servant
• The puppeteer as part of the puppet’s mechanism: From Fasoulis to the robot/cyborg

Add-ons


• During the workshop the performance “Fasoulis, History of Love and Death” will be publicly presented by Ayusaya! Puppet Theater
• At the end of the workshop a public event/ happening will be presented by the working group
• Visual material from international puppet theater history will be used in presentations/ discussions

Context

This course is part of the “Thesspuppet Festival 2019”.This workshops is also part of a European project. It’s a larger framework of 4 workshops, leading to a European production for 2020, and some collaborative intellectual outputs about puppetry art, traditional techniques and the professional issues. The selection of people for the European production will take place in Amiens (France) in December 2020. All participants who want to be part of the European production should have participated in two workshops: the one in Stuttgart and a previous one that was part of the project.

 

Inscription

• Candidates must present their curriculum vitae for the selection and confirmation of their participation at eurocultura.centre@gmail.com
• Maximum number of entries: 14 people
• Cost of participation: 50 euros. This covers the purchase of the material for the workshop. The rest of the workshop is financed by “Thesspuppet Festival 2019”.
• For more information: eurocultura.centre@gmail.com or europe@unima.org / 00 30 69 77 63 56 06 / 00 34 688611614 / 00 33 24 32 85 63.
• For information on possible aid in your country for your trip, contact the UNIMA’s Youth Commission: youth@unima.org