Puppets and Puppeteers

This Sunday ended the first day of Puppeteer Havana: Characters on Paving Stones. Much can do the puppets in these times...

Even in the era of smartphones and video games children are still marveled by puppets, by a simple doll that has to be a drive for creation. In the first day of Puppeteer Havana that ended this Sunday at the historical center of the Cuban capital, there were shows for all publics, but children were at the center of all the action.

For a full week, puppeteers, actors, professors, researchers, designers… participated in a huge intense program that had in several spaces of Old Havana the perfect scenario.

Erduyn Masa, general director of the event (also of La Proa Theater, the group that organized the event together with National Council of Scenic Arts, Hermanos Saíz Association and other institutions), believes that puppets are necessary in Havana as well in faraway communities of the Cuban rural areas.

"This is a very cosmopolitan area, of permanent commercial and cultural exchange. We must defend that the culture we share has ethical and aesthetic values that it can be tell apart from the purely merchandizing practices. Puppets and puppeteers have much to do in this regard."

Erduyn is completely right about it: art must open horizons, never close them. And watching the children enjoy with something so "handmade" as a puppet is prove that not everything is lost against the “merciless” impact of new technologies.

(It wouldn’t be bad, anyway that some artists from the puppet show assumed many of those new technologies in their shows, but that could be an issue to discuss some other time).

This sort of shows help to the socialization of the work of a group that is not always rewarded by the big audience… and which, up to a degree must keep working in its professional and artistic upgrading.

It must be said that: there are many groups “doing” puppets show (only in Havana there are over 30), but they are not so many that have a steady and overwhelming production.

The quality of the proposal, obviously, guarantees an audience. Children, no matter where they live, they are still an unbiased and expectant public... but nobody should underestimate them.

Every time a child attends a show, a puppet workshop or puppet production (as it happened this time), it’s a win... he is probably a theater spectator for life.

For that reason, for children, the best theater ever! Puppets with head and heart!