Notes on sustainable touring for visual theatre and puppetry

Preface

People have the Power - Puppets have the power

Luís Vieira, Rute Ribeiro

The world is changing at a breakneck and wild pace. This constant change in a world profoundly affected by climate change, technology and political thinking is forcing organisations and our behaviours to try to keep up with or to adapt to these mutations. What about the artists? What role can they play? And their organisations? They must be attentive and to raise awareness of these changes - thinking about the present and projecting the future.

The word curiosity occupies an important place in our journey, both as creators and as programmers of an international festival. The desire for knowledge, for information, for learning, combined with the artistic choice of working around puppetry, an ancient art that has managed to adapt to the constant changes in the world.

Our interest and vision towards puppetry as creatives, lies in its own nature, its theatrical specificity and special plurality. For us, puppetry is the art of movement and the art of artistic freedom. The art that combines several arts and makes us dream and think that everything is possible, the art where it is forbidden to forbid. It is a theatre that uses objects, puppets, masks, shadows... This visual and plastic theatre allows us to move from a microcosm to a macrocosm in a flash, to play with gravity and with scale changes. A theatre full of images and material forms in movement.

Puppetry is more and more present in contemporary creation, proving to be an exceptional ‘tool’ for artistic transversality. Its presence and influence in the creations of numerous artists is notorious, establishing bridges with dance, theatre, visual arts, cinema and the new technologies. The contemporary puppet theatre has been characterised by new dramaturgies associated with all types of puppets, but also with the manipulation of materials, objects and images. The puppet has the power to seriously and creatively address all subjects, even the most sensitive ones, and increasingly symbolises our time, invaded by images and objects. Within our festival’s programme we have attempted to create a showcase of that multiplicity, present in the world of puppetry.

Artists live off the idea of travelling, they live off audiences, and for that they need to travel, to meet other artists, to show their work and discoveries, to meet new people and new ideas, they need to find their ‘fuel’. On the other hand, our organisations are obliged to think about what is happening in the world and be on the lookout for new possibilities. That's why it's increasingly challenging to programme meetings between artists and audiences and to organise festivals, which are a source of great artistic inspiration, as well as engines of development and discovery, in addition to providing moments of sharing, knowledge, communion and celebration.

The FIMFA Lx - Festival Internacional de Marionetas e Formas Animadas - International Festival of Puppets and Animated Forms celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2025, and has kept pace with these changes. We try to create conditions so that companies can present their work more often, and sometimes we work with other territorial partnerships, broadening our audiences. We promote transmission and talks with the audience and with artists and their works. As creators, we favour natural or biodegradable materials, and we encourage recycling. We promote the presentation of performances with relevant topics that challenge our society, that speak of identity, freedom, memory, environment, but also of what threatens us, following our motto: the puppet as a means of seeing and thinking the world with another gaze.

The puppeteer is guided by the curiosity, by the freedom to invent worlds, to discover new ideas, new ways of thinking and challenging, new materials and new ways of communicating, and this spirit must underpin the new structuring practices of organisations, promoting behaviours and ways of intervening that take into account the contemporary society and promote a sustainable world.

It's clearly in our hands: People have the Power, as Patty Smith's song says. From this perspective, and as far as we are concerned, we are committed to promoting more sustainable practices in our activities, encouraging the definitive abandonment of the use of more polluting materials in our workshops and rethinking the way artists show and promote their work, in order to reduce our ecological footprint. The puppet has this power to seduce audiences, to reimagine new possibilities and to be an important driving force in changing behaviours, due to its ability to reinvent itself and its relationship with the world.

Puppets have the power - Artists have the power - Taking an inanimate figure or object and giving it the illusion of life is a superpower that can be a valuable agent of change in the world.