Project description
Taking stock of Europe’s puppet theatres
One of the most ancient forms of theatre is puppetry. Long established as a popular form of entertainment in Europe, puppetry was used to tell stories from the bible during the Middle Ages. By the 17th Century, marionettes took the stage to provide a more realistic mimicry. The EU-funded PuppetPlays project will explore how puppet theatre contributed to the rise of this dramaturgy in Europe. Focussing on key periods of drama history between 1600 and 2000, the project will select plays that document the development of puppetry in Western Europe. It will also identify the specific features of puppet plays and their variations through time, cultural areas and audiences.
Objective
This project aims at transcending boundaries between « high » and « popular » cultures, here established playwrights and anonymous writers, by investigating their productions for a same medium: puppet and marionette theatre. Focusing on key-periods of drama history (1600-2000) it explores how puppeteers and authors both contribute to the raise of a specific dramaturgy. Introducing these repertoires into the history of Western European drama opens a double ground-breaking perspective: on one side, it exceeds the limits of local inquiries and reveals cultural transfers through social groups and nations; on the other, it leads to reexamine theatre historiography by considering the cohesion of “theatrical systems” (Marotti) and giving visibility to a long despised and scatered corpus. The main objectives are 1) to gather a corpus of representative plays which document the development of puppetry in Western Europe (Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Nederlands, Portugal, Spain); 2) to identify the specific features of puppet and marionette plays and their variations through time, cultural areas, conditions of production and targeted audiences; 3) to re-evaluate the contribution of these repertoires to the construction of European cultural identity. The principal investigator brings to this project, besides a long experience of internationally recognized research, an excellent knowledge of artistic and cultural networks which guarantees the access to primary sources as well as the mobilisation of experts and partner institutions. Using digital humanities tools and methods, the project will produce a platform making available the selected corpus through a data base and searchable thesaurus, and offering innovative resources to the research community, pedagogues, practitioners and public at large. The research will lead to a better integration of puppetry into theatre history, an increased knowledge of its heritage, and a growing institutional recognition.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Funding Scheme
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantHost institution
34199 Montpellier Cedex 5
France