Logo UNIMA

Union Internationale de la Marionnette

Non-Governmental Organization affiliated to UNESCO

News

  • Photo of the geometric puppet built by Buckmeister Füller for Bill Baird in 1958, which disappeared in 1987, thanks to the artist Zaven Paré for sharing to me.

Magic lanterns, physicality of the doll, and capacity,

‘The puppet was born at the first dawn, when the first man saw his own shadow for the first time and discovered that it was him and at the same time that it was not him. This is why the puppet, like his shadow, will live with him and die with him’.

          (Javier Villafane)

Shouting out in broad daylight that words are only as good as words are in the face of atrocities, tools perhaps or means always to build passages over abysses; Affirming that puppets are of course only puppets and much more besides; Opening up and understanding that openness is never as open as it is challenged by facts that can, reversibly, project or just stop. Anticipating also means learning to unlearn and to try – mistakes are not just thorny bushes.

In these times of darkness, the play of light is all the more important because it tells stories, trajectories and leaps forward to do more and do it differently. Is it a mistake to throw things in order to make echoes bounce off the surface and make circles? Are these echoes nothing more than stones thrown at the surface? Why not look at the processes and the changes, why not understand that the answers change before the mirrors for realities that can meet and that reality is also an exercise in creativity.

Eccentrics projects are echoes, or perhaps flat, smooth stones that a child throws on the surface to make circles, resonances perhaps that, far from being abstract, make circles to create collaborations with centres and members. The desire to link and (re)connect, to provoke dynamics, thanks to financial and voluntary support, to launch the hospitality of gesture, word and idea. The success of FLUM in Mostar and the meeting with UNIMA International at the SLUK festival in June 2023 (after the Bali Council) will be part of the possible and the impossible, the marvellous that sometimes happens. In the meetings Four centres – Ireland, Ukraine, Croatia and South Korea – have agreed to help the new representation from Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has been dormant for over 15 years, with a festival in a town scarred by a fratricidal war in the 1990s. I would like to thank UNIMA Croatia for inviting me and helping me to develop these thoughts for a UNIMA that many of us want differently, like all the centres present at this meeting at the beginning of June 2023. The UNIMA Collaboratorium project is an experiment by UNIMA Eccentrics between these 4 centres at the request of an open project with Bosnia-Herzegovina and with the director Edin Kmetas of the FLUM festival.

UNIMA International is also about creating projects and centres all over the world, connecting centres and launching projects between centres and members. The Pro-vocation project is one of the miracles that UNIMA can create, so that puppets from all over the world can be brought together for even more promising contacts and projects. This desire is a desire for new ways of collaborating and working with greater visibility and in a dynamic of circularity between members, centres and the vision of UNIMA International. This Eccentrics dynamic is a revolution in mentality, not to highlight one member or one project, but to create this multiple dynamic everywhere and differently, with different possibilities of combination between centres and listening to members’ initiatives. The project pushes the gesture and the desire, the gesture pushes the idea, as the idea pushes the gesture. The idea is disappropriated so that it can be propagated in other ways and elsewhere. The gesture learns to disappropriate the gesture and the idea.

Why not think up creative projects between centres, whether on the subject of cooperation, or creative residencies, or invitations to discuss and share practices, or workshops, or highlighting artists and contemporary and/or traditional practices, exchanges of young puppeteers or setting up exchange projects between festivals in an eco-responsible spirit in the same region. Why not create decentralisation as well as (im)possible projects between different neighbouring and even (trans-)continental regions, to create virtuous circularities.

Why not develop the means to match our ambitions? Why not open up UNIMA International to the creativity of projects coming from centres, and think of UNIMA International as a relay or a spotlight that gives rise to creative gestures and creations between centres and members, to push ever further into games of light? Why not increase the number of cross-cutting projects with the Centres, with or without commissions, and develop international UNUMA International projects with the national Centres and national Centre projects with UNIMA International? Why not increase the representation of UNIMA International in all international organisations in the international socio-cultural field, in every region and on every continent?  UNIMA is a network of contacts, exchanges and creativity, as I like to repeat.

As we approach the end of the year and the new year, which will take us into another quarter of a century, and another half of a decade, in this future year of change, and the Chuncheon Congress (from 23 to 30 May 2025) for the 100-year horizon, we invite you all to come and/or participate by your presence, your listening and your questions, physically and/or digitally, by supporting, disseminating and discussing, and by proposing the projects of this horizon. Learning to unlearn, anticipating, and provoking light games and processes, possibilities and also reveries.  The reports from the centres must reach us before the end of January 2025 (maximum 3 pages). World Puppetry Day 2025 will raise the question of the puppet’s dream, Artificial Intelligence and robotics.  We ask you to register your events before 15 February 2025 and your videos before 28 February. Thank you for your enthusiasm and your participation.

Happy Holidays and lots of dizzying light! 

Dimitri Jageneau

General Secretary of UNIMA