|  21st
MARCH, 2008
WORLD PUPPETRY DAY
International Message
Jean-Pierre
Guingané
Jean-Pierre
Guingané,
stage director, dramatist, Burkina university professor
and vice-president of the International Theatre Institute,
is the founder and director of FITMO, the Ouagadougou International
Puppet Theatre Festival.
Dear puppetry friends,
On the occasion of this World Puppetry Day, allow me to
congratulate all of you who, through puppetry and all over
the world, provide dreams and emotion to those who, like
me, passionately love your art.
I do
not, like you, practice puppetry. I should say
that I don’t anymore, for as teenagers, people of my
generation and of the Bissa ethnic group I belong to in Burkina
Faso had to build and manipulate their toys themselves. My
friends today claim that I seemed to have a particular talent
for it, which always set me above my playmates. Truth
or flattery, I don’t know. It is especially the
pleasure I experienced in making my toys that I remember
from that time of my life, a sufficiently strong pleasure
for me to accept being severely punished several times for
having sacrificed doing some of my chores for it.
This
attachment to my childhood toys was certainly part of the
enthusiasm I felt when, in 1984, Mr Jacques Félix
suggested that I become the UNIMA representative in Upper
Volta (today’s Burkina Faso). I knew I could
no longer be a puppeteer. But I committed myself to
doing everything in my power to assist the birth and development
of this art form, practically nonexistent in my country at
the time. The one exception was the work a French language
teacher, Ms Grésillon (you see that I remember her
name!), who, from time to time, would teach her students
at the Zinda secondary school how to make puppets out of
papier-mâché.
I undertook
helping artists by using all the opportunities offered
me by my professional theatrical life. I would
especially send the best of my youngest actors to get training
everywhere possible. Then, in order to assure a minimum
of visibility to puppeteers, I transformed the Ouagadougou
International Theatre Festival, which I founded and directed,
into the Ouagadougou International Puppet Theatre Festival
(FITMO). This gave puppet and actors’ theatre
the same standing and offered puppeteers from French-speaking
Africa and elsewhere, their first African festival.
I am
a confirmed man of theatre. A stage director,
troupe director and dramatist, my works have been played
nearly everywhere in Africa and in certain top-level European
theatres. However, I don’t feel the least bit concerned
with the absurd controversy tending to oppose puppets and
theatre. This distinction is all the more absurd in
Africa, where a successful theatrical performance implies
many other forms of artistic expression. Puppets have
always been quite naturally present in my shows every time
the need was felt, to the immense delight of audiences.
Puppetry,
as an autonomous form of artistic expression is as yet
relatively unknown in Africa and insufficiently developed. Through
the building and manipulating of toys, however, puppets have
contributed a lot to the development of African Art. I
remain convinced that African adults, whether they have had
a Western education or not, would happily find the path of
dreams and emotion again through a good puppet performance.
My wish
is that UNIMA and puppeteers from every continent will
help Africans to fill what could be seen as a void.
Happy World Puppetry Day to all those who practice and are
in love with puppetry.
Jean-Pierre
Guingané
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