Happy World Puppetry Day to everyone out there! This year’s WPD message (pdf) is by the great Catalan multidisciplinary artist, Joan Baixas.

Above, my puppeteer friend Gary Friedman is interviewed by Con Quest about how WPD is celebrated, and he tells how he has chosen today to launch his new more expanded website,  Puppetry News, which will include web-based puppetry courses down the track.

(Joan Baixas’ keynote at Unima 2008)

Gary Friedman has a small clip and description of a secret performance of Terra Prenyada (The Pregnant Earth) by the master puppeteer and Spanish artist, Joan Baixas, at Unima 2008. You can see it full screen if you watch it at YouTube. I wish I had seen the show; it looks wonderful, a fusion of painting and theatre, done on a big sheet of back-lit plastic. I gathered from Baixas’ keynote talk that he often uses ochres that he finds locally for this, and that he began doing so when he spent time in the Australian desert, collaborating with the Arabanna community in the outback of South Australia to design and make masks for the Naidoc Festival in Maree. He also mentioned that he has a new show called Toast to Zoe, improvisations of painting and piano, with jazz pianist Agustí Fernandez.

The painting reminds me of how kids sometimes tell the story as they are drawing or painting, so that it almost becomes a live animation. For example boys of about 8 or 10 draw action scenes of battles and talk through the action: one plane turns into a flight of planes, they will be given guns, which then burst into fire as marks raining down to earth, and then a plane might crash and burn; the whole narrative on one page. It also reminds me of the kind of print where you ink up the plate and make marks on it for a one-off print.

Baixas ran a masterclass at Unima 2008, too, the Great Laughing Mutant Project. The participants presented a performance on Carnival Day, using these lovely minimalist shapes in lots of different ways:

Afterwards they gave them to kids in the crowd, and the little boy in front of me was having fun with his:

My attendence at Unima 2008 is supported by the ACT Government.

Last weekend the Tate Modern in London hosted a new production of Mori el Merma, which was first performed in 1978, and emerged out of a collaboration between the surrealist painter Joan Miró and La Claca, an experimental theatre troupe from Barcelona, headed by Joan Baixas. In the new revision,

‘… Joan Baixas evokes the critical spirit of Mori el Merma and recovers Miró’s original idea to make a street parade in the Catalonian tradition. Baixas’s work insists on the idea of the absurdity of power, the abuses of the tyrant and the impertinences of dictators, themes which are ever present and must be critised and
denounced.

‘The puppets are replicas made under supervision and control of the Succesió Miró SL and range from giants with the heads of monsters, grotesque torsos and six-foot-long arms to creatures that whisper and
squeal as if Miró’s free-form shapes had to leapt to life.’

In an article in the Guardian, Baixas comments that the play has been retitled Merma Never Dies, because almost 30 years later, Merma is alive and well:

‘The name is unimportant because, unfortunately, there are many Mermas now. In recent years we have seen leaders who wage wars with lies and who play games with democracy. The least we can do is laugh at them.’

I’ve come across the following accounts and photos of the performance and parade. It looks pretty bizarre!

Cronicas desde Londres: photos and video
Yahoo News collection of photos
No-necked Monster’s photos and video