You’ve also founded a department of puppetry and visual theatre and You ran a famous festival of visual theatre and puppetry in Barcelona. What “animal” is this “visual theatre”?
Visual theatre is a crazy name, because all the theatre is visual but at same time we’re talking about musical theatre and all the theatre has music, or we talk – I don’t know – about gesture-theatre and all the theatre has gesture. I used that name to go one step further from puppetry without losing puppetry. The expression “visual theatre” is used a lot for example in England and also other countries, and I used it to put more focus on the image. The name of visual theatre was actually invented in Bauhaus. In there, at Oscar Schlemmer’s time, it was not just using images but making dramaturgy of the images – that’s the point. It was Schawinsky who named the visual theatre. Oscar Schlemmer was doing the “Triadic Ballet” and people asked – “what do we do, do we do dance? Is it a ballet, or if we do cabaret?” The ideas of Oscar Schlemmer were very much cabaret-like with numbers and music and parody and grotesque, it was not a ballet. He called it ballet triadic with the humour, he put it “ballet with humour”. Oscar Schlemmer had very-very good humour, nowadays not many people remember that he was a very humoristic man, he did clowneries and carnevals and all that. And one day they were talking with Stravinsky who said: “What we do, is visual theatre – theatre with image.” This saying was there around and I also like to put the focus on the image.

Is it telling a story through the images?
Telling a story or not, but making the show.

Do You think a story isn’t important in the theatre?
Sometimes, but not always. It’s not essential.

What is essential?
Essential is the show to me. To make something spectacular, that gives an emotion to the audience. Sometimes it’s through narrative, sometimes not. For example, one of the masters of this kind of theatre was Tadeusz Kantor and he didn’t tell stories but he made theatre. Fragmentary, very poetic, around the things that happened. Things are happening on scene, but they don’t tell a story.

Though he had very strong stories behind it, the stories of his life, of his childhood.
And of his country. Kantor defined very well the importance of the image on the stage. Sometimes we forget that he said: “Image on the stage needs density.”. We’re supposed to live in the culture of the image, but with the culture of the image we mean a light image. What is the culture of the image? The publicity, the signals on the streets for driving, the logos, the hollywood stars and all that kind of things are images, so we talk about our culture of the image – but it’s light image. Image that everybody understands. Avatar is an image that everybody, from children to adults, understands. But Kantor said that on the stage the image has to have density; so You don’t have to project images and to do nice beautiful images – no,You have to do images that will stay forever at the hart of the people. Important is that the image on stage has time. If You see an image of painting, You can stay one minute in front of it and then You have a general impression of it; but on the stage You are there, sitting in front of the image so the image has to have the density to go inside, to grow and stay inside of the mind and the imagination of the people – we have to remember the images from the stage. We can do the light images in the theatre – just flash – some people do it a lot, but it’s not interesting, You know. These are images that disappear. So I used the name of visual theatre for the festival and for the school because, more or less, the puppetry is an old art, it’s a bit a ghetto. Even if it’s very contemporary and there are lots of interesting things, for lots of people, it’s a bit a ghetto. It’s an island, you know. To break that, and to bring more audiences to the shows and to the festival, we called it visual theatre.

What is the reason for puppetry being a ghetto?
I think partly it’s a ghetto because of the puppeteers. Because puppeteers have made this world organization UNIMA and international festivals and all that. This movement of puppeteers around the world have made lots of contacts between people during the last century and it has been very positive, but at the same time it has become a ghetto where puppeteers are talking about puppets and other people doesn’t go to puppet shows.

You meet the same people at every puppet festival. It’s a fun in a way, but…
Exactly, You meet the same people, it’s very nice and at the same time it’s very closed. With puppetry world I have a relationship that I go in and out. During fifteen years I didn’t play at puppet festivals, I was performing at other places, but then I started again in a puppet circuit and it’s funny that I found there my old friends: in Australia, South Africa, Germany, very good friends who I know for thirty years, but they are only in the puppetry world and I know – if I go there, I meet these people. They are there – in this puppet-tube around the world. It has very positive senses and also some negative.

Still, why this have happened to puppetry? For example painters are also dealing mainly with their thing and communicating mainly with each other. Why is puppetry so exceptional ghetto?
Maybe it’s because of the very close relationship with the tradition, I think. The puppet itself doesn’t change. The shows change and artists change, but puppet doesn’t change. It’s a strange thing, because what is a puppet? It’s a tool, an instrument, a copy of human-being, a symbol, a grotesque figure, it’s lots of things but it’s there. It’s like another humanity – a parallel humanity. It’s very much related to the tradition of the puppetry and it hasn’t happened to other arts. Contemporary poet can have the influence of medieval poets, nobody knows, it’s his personal vision and interest, but if he’s contemporary he’s contemporary. In puppetry, even if You’re very contemporary, there is always that root that goes to tradition. This is not bad, it’s a good thing. This root is always alive and goes further to the very old times – to animism and all that. It’s good but it forms that ghetto around itself. But puppetry is not just a ghetto of puppeteers. For example when Robert Lepage used the puppets, nobody thought it’s a puppet theatre. Nobody thinks in cinema that “Avatar” is a puppet show, but if You analyze it – it’s a puppetry. “Alien” is a puppet and Jim Henson’s colleagues did the puppets for the first films of the “Star Wars”. Yoda is one of the best puppets in cinema – how it moves and the character are fantastic – and nobody thinks that Yoda is a puppet. Nobody says that Alien is a puppet, but it’s a traditional puppet that is moved by the hand of a puppeteer. It’s not virtual, made with a computer, it’s a real puppet made of wood and fabric but nobody thinks it’s a puppet. So, there is a lot of puppets out of the world of puppetry, which means that the ghetto is created by the puppeteers themselves. They are happy, good for their cultures and for their world, but at the same time they are closed. I think it’s very important for the new generations to know that. When I was teaching at the theatre institute, the students were very surprised when I showed the films with puppets starting already from Murnau. “Faustus” is a puppet film and also “Golem” which is a puppet that becomes alive. The monster of Frankenstein is a puppet. It’s a creature  made by someone: it gets life, it’s animated so it’s a puppet. The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk writes at his most important book “The Spheres” most curiously about animation: he says that in the beginning it was animation. God is an animation of the human being. It’s a very nice idea, it’s the explanation of the puppet: God is the puppet of the human being. If You believe in God then God is God, but if You are not a believer but just a philosopher, then God is a creature made by the imagination of human being and the human being represents this character, this puppet, this animation, and human being talks for him and invents the dialogs of God. God is like Punch and Judy, he’s the creation of imagination of human being. This explanation of animation is fantastic because animation means: “to give an anima” – and the soul is the beginning of the puppet. It’s something out-inside, it’s the root of the puppet. So puppetry is much more than the puppeteers talk about. Puppeteers talk about puppets but they don’t talk about this animation.

Is this the thing that draws You to puppetry and gives You the energy to deal with it?
Yes, for that puppetry interests me a lot. Animation of mystery, of the things that we don’t know. There are so many things that human being does not understand, about nature and himself, about the world – how does this machine work? We improvise the explanations. What we do when we don’t understand something? We create something to represent our intuition – that’s animation. René Girard, a French philosopher who works in USA, puts all his anthropological work’s attention to what he calls “the sacrificial victim”. He says that human beings are the only animals that can kill one each other. All the animals in nature can fight, but when one lion wins the other, the looser goes away, the winner doesn’t need to kill him. Animals can dye by accident in fights but the purpose is not to kill each other. The purpose of the animals’ fights is to throw the other male away and to keep the females and the food. Human beings do not have that, if one human being have won the woman of another human being, he kills the other. The one who loses doesn’t go away, he comes back and tries to kill the other in an other way, maybe at night. This have really happened in the fights of different cultures: one group killed everyone from the other group to get food or women and kids for sex or for work or for eating them, and to stop that killing, they did put something in-between: “the sacrificial victim.” This is very clear in the bible: instead of killing you, I kill something that I offer to You. Instead of killing the whole tribe, I say – “Ok. I’ll give You the best I have – my son. You can kill my son and we will be in peace.” Girard describes how all the cultures tell that in myths, like Oedipus or Christ. Christ is the sacrificial victim that God offers to himself. I need to excuse the falls of the human beings so I transform my son into a human being and human beings will kill him as an offer to me and so we’ll be in peace. The sacrificial victim is the beginning of the culture, beginning of myths. Girard has written five or six books about that, analyzing this process on Greek and biblical mythology, and this sacrificial victim is finally a puppet. We use puppets to do some things that we can’t do with human beings. Why is Punch – a very-very bad character who kills people etc – so strong and powerful? Because in the end he fights with death. He is the one that can fight with death. Also Petruschka and Pulchinella are fighting with death – all the big characters of puppetry finally have their important fight with death. They can’t win death, but they can escape or put death in a bag or in a box. They escape from death – that’s the power of these characters. So the relationship of a human being and a puppet is very deep. It’s the sacrificial victim, the offering, so for that it doesn’t disappear and for that it creates a ghetto around itself. Because it’s very magic, very deep, very strange.

Too deep for everybody?
Yes, maybe it’s too primitive for contemporary art – too religious, too mythical. At the same time some of the most famous artists used the puppets. Kantor didn’t use a puppet, but his actors are like puppets. All the actors have a double mannequin, and they carry their mannequin and they see the mannequin and they talk with it and they dance – it’s a puppet. I remember Kantor saying: “No-no-no, I don’t do puppets!”, but finally he was at the Charleville school doing puppets. There are a lot of artists of the twentieth century that used puppets without saying that these were puppets: Robert Lepage, Peter Brook or Bob Wilson etc.

You said that working with Joan Miró was a great inspiration for You. Was his work driven from same ideas?
When he went to Paris in 1930, one of the first things that he discovered was Alfred Jarry and his character Ubu. Miró had a table in his studio where he was sitting and writing and organizing the world of his and had all his life there. When he was 85 I saw that he had there the original edition of “Ubu Roi” from when he was 27, the time he came to Paris. This small book was the thing that was with Miró all his life, he wrote there notations and did drawings. He did the illustrations for three books of Ubu: of “Ubu Roi”, “L’Enfance d’Ubu” and “Ubu aux Balearés”. The theme of Ubu was with him all his life. One thing that I lent from Miró as an artist was his absolute concentration to his world. He had this all along his life – every minute he was concentrated to his inner-world. For an artist it’s not easy because we go in-and-out. We say, we go to work and then we concentrate – he was all the time concentrated. His concentration started when he was about 19 and his father put him to work to his friend’s shop. He was working there for seven or nine months and got sick of the money, so he told his father – “I can’t work like that, I can’t do a normal work, I have to concentrate on my inner world.” I think that is the important point of art. He decided to live 24 hours a day in the art world. There are people who live 24 hours a day for money, to make business and to be somebody, or people who live 24 hours a day for religion or for helping other people, or for nothing, but art – it’s a place, art is somewhere.

Some kind of passion for the purpose?
We say passion, we say concentration – we say words like that, but it’s different, You know, the art is there.

Do You have this kind of thing Yourself also?
More or less. Not as Joan Miró, of course. He was absolutely concentrated. I remember the last time I saw Miró at the hospital, and I asked him – “How are You?”, and he said – “Now, it’s perfect – I’m all day magnetized.“. He meant that he was all the time at the other side – at the art’s side. He said – “Everything is part of my painting, everything.” He was 24 hours a day there, at this space that we call art. That is a form of knowledge, a form of research – it’s a space in the human mind, a space of questions and emotions – finally a space of knowledge. Spanish physicist Jorge Wagensberg, the designer and director of the science museum at the Barcelona, said that there are three forms of knowledge: one is science which is asking the reality all the time and nothing is never sure for science; second is intuition, which means spirituality; and the third one is art, which is doing things. The spirituality is more about receiving, the art is more about doing. You ask the world by doing things: experimenting life and making forms out of these inner experiences – sometimes psychological, sometimes historical, sometimes political and sometimes just natural experiences. This is the experience of the world through the art. I like very much this definition of Wagensberg: three languages to understand the world. He doesn’t say religion, he’s very critical about religion, because he says that religion is about power, spirituality is different.

Do You think religion could be the fourth form of knowledge?
Religion is organized for power, I agree. Religion takes it’s power from spirituality. It’s a very formal power like all the forms of power. Power of money and power of military are stupid powers. All the powers are stupid, power is about the stupidity. Power is about “I don’t understand, but I will win.”, I will say that “No way, fuck You!”. Power is the bad side of the human being, in any field. The strongest powers that we know, the military powers, are killing people, making wars, causing disasters and destroying the human lives, and religious power is the same. This is different from spirituality.

So in a way You’re an anarchist?
No, I believe in organization, I do believe in democracy, for example. I don’t like if democracy means that some people have took all the power. The idea of democracy means different kinds of powers – it’s a very good idea.

But is democracy really possible? What we see every day, is not the idea that we like.
This is like happiness: You can’t wait until everything is perfect, You have to use as much as You can. No one is happy for 24 hours a day all of his life, happiness is some moments and if You make the bridge between one happy moment and next happy moment with a lots of troubles in between, You can become a happy person. With democracy it’s the same – it goes up and down. The general vision of anything is a disaster, the details are important, not the general vision. We see the world, and we see the people who went to Gaza with their boats and that disaster that happened to everyone, because everyone did the wrong thing. It was the moment of the travel, a very long travel – but not the whole world is Gaza. We are not in Gaza, so we have to enjoy life, because we are at this bar.

Do You think we should only enjoy or should we somehow fight for our ideas also?
I think we have to work but not fight. We have to make things better, to improve things and to make a life better, but it will never be perfect. There will always be problems – political, economical, car that kills somebody at the street, someone who can have everything and make more love than You… That’s always happening, all the time, so we have to work for the good things and I think it’s very important to enjoy the good moments. We have to be happy when happiness happens at our lives and not to complain – “Oh, it could be better!”. To enjoy these moments, this music, this bar…

It’s a really Catalonian thought. But still, is it important for You as an artist to express Your political views to people?
Yes, I did a lot and I still do. I work with the things that I have in mind, but the first thing is pleasure. I think that, first of all, art is about pleasure and we don’t have to forget that. It’s about pleasure of being alive, about being together, about shapes and forms: to make a song, to make a poem, to hear a poem – this is a nice thing. Firstly – life is a pleasure. I think human being invented art as a pleasure and does art as a pleasure, because we enjoy it, because it’s good. Then, sometimes there are so nasty things that You have to talk about. It’s like Paul Celan making poems at concentration camp. What it means – “we can’t make poetry after Auschwitz” – no, it’s Auschwitz where we can make poetry. Some of the most beautiful poems ever wrote in Europe were written in Auschwitz. What it means, that even there is at least one human being who takes the pleasure to put words together, to express the horror. No, in the middle of horror, in the middle of death, he finds a pleasure to put the words together and do a poem. That’s art. That’s art through pain, suffering, politics, bad moments, problems etc. You can still do the big poems in concentration camp as Paul Celan did – very beautiful and very strong, but he didn’t tell about the horror. When he says this image – “the black milk of dawn” – it’s so strong! Imagine the dawn at Auschwitz, one more day – one more day of life in the middle of horror, but it’s one more day! I always explain to Young people that place where I heard most jokes was in Sarajevo during the war, when I was playing at the hospitals. I’m sure you were telling more jokes during the soviet period than now.

Absolutely, we had a parade of great humorists then.
Like in the Spain in time of the francoism: we were telling jokes every day – lots of jokes! Humor is a form of art.

Then art had also more essential importance for people. Theatres were full, for You could say things through art that You couldn’t say otherwise. Now I feel that art has became somehow headless. What could be the importance of art for the society, for human being? Why does a human being need art?
I think that it’s a form of knowledge, language of knowledge. It’s fantastic that a dictatorship period is finished and You have a normal life. It’s a pity that we can’t do an art that is just joyful, about happiness and pleasure. But the thing that we have finished our period of tyranny doesn’t mean that we did change very much the world. The end of Franco is for me and my generation at my country very important, but in the middle of the world it was very small thing. Humanity has still many problems. Europe has big problems and we, Europeans, have to wake up and to think what to do. It’s happening, we are there, and it involves Europe economically, politically, financially, artistically, religiously, spiritually. The idea of how we consider family is going to be reinvented in Europe. We proposed to the humanity a way of life that we practiced because we were rich, but it looks like we’ll not be rich anymore so we’ll change this life. We’ll throw away the immigrates, we’ll not take care of old people, we’ll not give help for the elders when they finish their work, we’ll not have the social security for everybody – will it mean that, or we want to keep all that with no money? Does it mean that we, rich people, will have to pay more – or what it means? How will we keep that form of life that we’ve proposed to the humanity? It’s a good form: we believe in social security and democracy and culture for everybody, taking care of the elders, receiving the immigrates, being multicultural – we believe in all that but we can’t pay it anymore. So, what we will do? We will renounce and we will be racist and we’ll close Europe and we’ll close the cultural institutions and we’ll leave the old people with the families on the corner without attention and we’ll have to pay for the medicines and the poor will dye earlier – does it mean that? This model of Europe is based on the richness that we get from exploitation of other countries and not on our own production. It was based on good prices of petrol, on good use of the basic materials etc. On that base of richness we invented Europe – this idea of democracy and wellness for everybody.

Can You propose any solution?
No, I don’t know. I think we Europeans have to think and talk because it will not be easy. The other cultures, Latin America, India, China, have their own ways and they’ll work for them, they’ll not work for Europe.

What kind of function does art have there?
I think at least art is one of the spaces to think, to talk, to be aware, to put the problems on the top of the table. It’s one of the things that art can do. Artists are the luxury of Occidental cultures and just the survival of their-self is the problem for artists. European artists are confident in the idea that the society has to take care of the them: “we are the richness of the country so we all need subsidies”. If someone says that we have other things to pay so we can’t pay the artists and You have to manage by Yourself, artists will say – “oh, they’re not culturally elevated” – and all that. I think we are not the problem of the society, we have to do our work with money or no money, with institutions or no institutions. I think it’s very good if the institutions take care of the culture, but if the institutions don’t take care because they are political or they don’t like to or they don’t have money or because they have problems with unemployment in incredible numbers etc – the artists can’t stop. If an artist stops because the government doesn’t pay, he’s a liar, he’s a shit! Exactly this is one problem of the art – the survival of itself. What are we doing? Are we doing something because we believe in life and in the model of our society or are we just parasitizing our own society and hanging on the fee and thinking – “ooh, give me food, I’m an artist!” – - “What do You do?” – - “Oh, I’m doing modern things.”. In last fifty years we, artists in Europe, believe that we all have to be helped by some government. Everybody! True or not? and everybody has something so important that needs subsidy. Ok, I prefer to have subsidy, I mean, who wouldn’t prefer! But when I started, there were no subsidies so I worked and made my life from the first day that I decided to go into that business. I’ve always said to my sons – “Look, I have a business with what I can go to any corner of the street and I can do so good show, that the people are willing to by me a plate of soup.” I’m sure that I can make my life and the life of my sons anywhere in the world. At least art itself has this problem and I really do believe that artists could think of the society. It’s a place to think, a place to have experiences, a place to be together, place of talking about things – so it’s important part of our society.

You were acquainted to Kantor. How did he influence You?
I met him at his first season in London at Riverside Studios, and after that I saw him in Paris and in Barcelona and other places, we had in-common friends, who introduced us, and I liked him very much. He was one of the big masters. So intense! I didn’t have very strong relationship with Kantor because he was a person closed in himself. It was not dialogue: he was talking and I learned a lot from him. Joan Miró was living out of the society, closed to his world in his studio at Mallorca, but Kantor was living his artistic life in Poland, which has been one of the harts of Europe. It’s the country that suffered so much – invasions from everybody, incredible punishment during the two wars, and Kantor was there. So it was very different for me to talk with Miro, who was like a monk in his studio, or talk with Kantor who was from there – from Poland, living the war and the camps and the Soviet period.

Kantor was expressing his own and his country’s past all the time. Do You feel something like that with Your creation also, that You are somehow connected to Your past – Catalonian, or else?
Yes, everything is there. The whole world and the closed community at the same time. I do not analyze that very much.

You don’t want to?
I don’t do it. I don’t analyze very much my own situation. I have been traveling around the world for forty years already. I started traveling when I was nineteen, so I really feel that I am from the world. I live in Catalonia and I like it very much and it’s my culture – my roots, it is my mother-tongue, my culture and I’m happy with my language but I’m not nationalistic at all.

You don’t dream about separate Catalonian Republic? When I was in Barcelona some five years ago, I heard from many Catalonian people, that they would like to have their own republic.
I don’t want to think about that now. It’s not important for me at all. I’m in the world. I’m really the citizen of the world and I feel very comfortable talking with people, knowing people from all over the world, thinking of the world. Maybe at one day I will think about that, it depends in which moment. Because it’s just a matter of organization, it’s just the matter of politics, it’s not so important.

You have worked in a lot of countries. Is it somehow feeding for You to work in different cultures, backgrounds, histories? What does it mean to You?
The main thing is that I learn. I do my job, this is the main thing, but working with the people gives a lot. I receive much more than I give. There are still lots of new worlds for me. Last trip was in Latin America: Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina. I received the experiences of different people, of different cultures, of different situations and I’m very curious. I ask and they talk and I go and I watch and I read – so I receive a lot. I’m very happy with that.

Was Your school also international?
Not really, there were some students with Erasmus programs. There are some sections like gesture theatre, where a lot of students come from other areas of Spain or Latin America, because they don’t need language. In our school the main group is the actors, and acting is based on language so they need catalan. Therefore it’s difficult for foreigners to come to acting school. The main work that I do in the school, for ten years now, is that the Rose Bruford College from UK sends their students to Barcelona to work with me. These are the students from speciality called – “European Theatre”. Twenty or twenty five students from all over the Europe, and even from America and Japan, come to Barcelona and work with me very intensively during three months. We work very day, eight hours a day, and then we do a show. But I’ll do it for one more year and then I’ll stop. I don’t want to work anymore in the schools, because I feel that what I can do, is done. Here in Tallinn I had the proof when I saw the lecture of Rene Baker. I know her really well, she came to Barcelona to work with my company and after that I asked her to teach at the Theatre Institute, and now when I saw her lecture, I thought – it’s done. This woman takes a piece from here and a piece from there, takes my ideas, the ideas of Philip Genty and ideas from Theatre du Mouvement – all the ideas of my generation, puts it together, organizes it and does a pedagogy out of it. She does it very well! So, there is a new generation of teachers of visual theatre that are doing very well. I have nothing more to say. She is better, she is using my experience, and so does lots of other people. I think it’s very important to know if something is finished. I’ve done it for several times of my life: I was working with the theatre La Claca for twenty one years, and one day I said – it’s finished. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to work with the company, but this project is finished. I come, I chop that tree and I go away. I open new doors – new things, new projects – it makes me more alive. I don’t want to be “the one that teaches puppets at the Theatre Institute forever. He came to the school and became old there.”.

What is the new door that You will open now?
Now I’m in between. This means writing this book and new door for me is “Mapa Mundi”. It’s the work with Young people, who can use my experience, but not in the classroom at the school. Out of the school, with direct collaboration.

You’re going to make the “Mapa Mundi” with the prisoners. Why are You doing this?
Charleville’s festival proposed me, that they would like to do something at the prison of Charleville. There are Young people who had problems with robbery and drugs etc.

Is it also important for You what backgrounds the prisoners have – what crimes etc.?
No, it is their problem. I like to work with the people from the prison because the prison is one of the places where people think a lot. I want to know what do they think and how do they see their situation, how do they see our society. I want to learn. It’s a place where they have lots of time to think, and they have a big thing to think about – “I did something that was forbidden and so I’m in jail. I’m out of the society – I’m the bad one. I have the title of “bad-one”.” I Want to know what do they think, what do they want to do and what do they want to explain to the others.

Is it somehow essentially connected to “Mapa Mundi” also?
Yes, I think it’s a good idea to do it in the prison. One of the problems of Europe for me is, that everybody becomes bourgeois – all of us. All of us like to have nice cars, holidays and bla-bla-bla – to have a comfortable life.  It’s like the purpose of life. I don’t think that this idea of Europe – “comfortable life is better” – is a very good idea . It’s not sure that it’s better, for comfortable maybe means eating too much, but eating too much is not better than eating just what You need – for obesity, and sickness and heart-attacks and problems with the knees. So the European idea of comfortability is maybe a stupid idea. In the Europe we all become bourgeois and very comfortable. If someone is too comfortable it’s not too interesting.

Before You said that art is about pleasure?
Pleasure is different than comfort. Sometimes pleasure is not comfortable at all. If You want the pleasure of going to the top of Himalaya, it’s not comfortable. If You want to have the pleasure of the most beautiful girl to go to bed with You, it’s not comfortable – You’ll have to work. No, comfortable is not the best, for me it’s not the purpose of life for sure. I prefer the pleasure of effort. If I want to do something, I don’t care if it’s hard to do it – I’ll do it! I have done crazy things that made me very happy and very strong. I walked at the Australian desert for days, it was very hard, but it was a pleasure. So asking about Europe, the most interesting is not to ask about comfort of people because probably everyone will say the same – “Oh, I don’t want to lose my sofa! I don’t want to lose my air-conditioner!” I prefer to talk with people who don’t have sofas and air-conditioners, it’s more interesting, and people in prison don’t have it. I did a work in association of men who had rheumatoid arthritis, it’s something with what You’ll have pain for whole day, and it’s a pain that makes you cry. But it was incredible when I asked them – “How can You live with the pain every day?”, they answered – “It’s  like that, we have to be happy. We can’t take pills every day, so we have to be confident and go through suffering.” So I thought, these people have the experience of life that nobody can believe. So it’s good to ask these people and to learn from these people – they know more about life.

Is there some-kind of connection with artists also? Does art also have to come through the pain?
I think this suffering of artists is a legend. Artists suffer the same as waiters or taxi drivers: if You’re not happy and have to drive a taxi every day and wait at the taxi station for hours until somebody calls You. If You have problems with Yourself, You suffer the same. Suffering of being a mother in the kitchen, cooking for somebody who is at the factory and having no smiles at home, and no savings and no good food – all that can be a horrible suffering. Suffering is always there, that’s the reality of human-being. Even the most rich people, who have everything they need, suffer from inner-reasons. Suffering is something of the human-being – it exists. In one moment or another, we’ll all suffer: for death, for sickness, for somebody from our family, for a friend. For stupid things: for things that we don’t understand, for our education, for things that some teacher, a mother, a father, a friend or a lover have put into our head. Suffering is a part of the life – it’s the normal state of life. I always say, suffering it happens itself, we have to to an effort for happiness. So we don’t care of suffering – when it comes, it comes and we try to not talk much about suffering, it happens. But the nice thing is that the artists can turn their suffering into something very good. Looks like Kafka suffered very much from his inner life: from his relationship with his father, from his society around him but he transformed it into beautiful pieces of art. Those pieces of art go through suffering, You can see the suffering of Kafka in his work and You understand that suffering. It’s like Paul Celan with the poems in concentration camp, or Frieda Kahlo suffering so much with her destroyed body and at the same time she is a song for life and for happiness. That’s what an artist can do, but it’s the same suffering as of the other human-beings.

Do You sense it as some-kind of thrive for Your creation – to make some staging or painting?
I’ve tried to escape from suffering, but the frame of suffering is always there. I think we all are aware of that suffering all the time. It’s like the presence of death or even the time passing by. We all would like to stop life for a while – for a little moment and be blind and transparent. What the Buddhists say about the illumination – we all dream about jumping out of this daily suffering, but it doesn’t happen, at least I haven’t had this experience. The art is the way to talk with the suffering, not to try to take it out and forget it, but to have it near by: “Okay, come hear, You are the part of the life, so let’s go together!” I bought today a postcard of the fantastic painting from Tallinn – “The Dance of Death”. Death dancing with the emperor, with the pope… – this is fantastic! The presence of death and the image of dancing with death – making art with death. It’s very wise image, it’s an ethic representation because it says that the emperor and pope and everybody will dye and the death is always there – sitting nearby. Death that means the maximum suffering. It’s always there and we can’t complain of something that is always there, that is part of ourself – we have to dance with it: make art, poems, songs and jokes.

Toni Rumbau to Joan Baixas

1- You’re a puppeteer but also a painter or plastic artist. Actually, you left puppetry for some years and devoted yourself to painting. Then you returned to theatre incorporating your painting skills live on stage, going for a clearly perceived form of « teatro visual » and now it seems like you’re returning in some way to the world of puppetry. Do you still identify yourself with that person we call « puppeteer » ? What does he means to you?

« Teatro visual » isn’t a profession, one could say it’s an academic category to study some forms of performances in which special attention is given to visuals on stage in their theatrical treatment or it’s a category used in marketing a festival to give the public some orientation about unfamiliar performances. It’s a name I used and will continue to use, but it shouldn’t confuse, all theatrical performances are visual and the usage of visuals in one way or another doesn’t determine a profession.

But I’m a puppeteer and very happy with my profession, firstly because it’s not regarded as a serious profession and that is wonderful. Not being considered serious is an honour, compared with all what is regarded as such in artistic circles. And above all I like this profession, because herein I can develop, at the same time and in a dialogue with them, the different artistic languages I’m interested in: painting, literature, stage direction and I can do this in a very flexible, very direct way, with craftsmanship.

And there’s also something quite unique, puppetry-performances are taking place in very different contexts, one day you find yourself with a more popular audience and a few days later you find yourself in an extremely sophisticated ambience, avant-garde, such as, for example, the festival in New York, organised by the Henson Foundation and which was seen as the most modern of the city and took place in the most exquisite locations. This diversity of audiences is quite healthy for an artist, because in the end it’s all about connecting the audience with what we do, that it feels challenged, maybe moved.

In 1967 I became a professional in puppetry and was fully committed from the first day on. I like to say that the puppeteers in those days, there were only a very few and all turning around a tradition in real decline, practised many different professions and puppeteer was a complementary one, mostly shown at family parties. I decided to dedicate myself exclusively to it, which turned out difficult economically, but very easy in other aspects. In those times you had to do more than twohundred shows per year to make a living and in some years we did almost threehundred. We were Putxinel·lis Claca and for ten years, with my wife, my sons and an assistant, we did thousands of kilometers in a van, mainly in Catalonia and Spain, but also in Europe. The easiest part was in human relations, there were neither subsidies nor the institutions to give them, but we got enthusiastic support from artists, teachers, political activists, priests, people engaged in culture and neighbourhood communities: politics happened on the street by persons of flesh and blood and were not decided in the domes of the parties. Ten years passed until the company became bigger and we changed it to Teatre de la Claca. Ten years of dressing up of puppets, day after day, with the most diverse audiences, but always with the same puppets the same pieces and with some we ended up playing a thousand times. The hands went by themselves, the character settled itself deeply in one’s soul, the deformed voices were « my » voices coming from the innards. That was my school, my university, my doctorate and for this reason I have always seen myself as a puppeteer.

2- Would you dare to give a definition of a puppeteer?

It’s very strange, as puppeteers we spend our lifes defining what is a puppeteer, this is a weird practise, which I don’t see among my paintor and writer friends, I don’t know why puppeteers do this. Maybe because puppeters could be so many diffferent things, also opposing ones, as each of them wants to line his own pockets. Well, whilst the definitions are not too exaggerated, they appear amusing. I for my part am bad at defining and an avid admirer of Barthlevy, thus « I’d prefer not to ».

3- During your career, you always tried to enter innovative fields, engaging yourself with complex projects in which theatre, puppetry and fine arts interacted on equal terms, like your different collaborations with painters. Undoubtedly, here you must have had important gains in skills and know-how. Could you summarise these? What lines of further development you believe to be laying ahead for the puppet theatre?

When I think of those experiences you mentioned, I get excited about how lucky I was. Luck I had to work for, sure enough, but it was enormous. Having worked with Miró, with Saura, with Tàpies, Brossa, Mariscal, Matta and others, has been wonderful and though the years go by, these experiences are always present, very close. In fact, my studio is full with their sketches and photos because I see them as the maestros who are always at my side.

I learned a lot of things from them and could talk about each of them for hours, but some things they all have in common and these are three gifts: the first, the craftmanship, perceived as methodical, repetitive, insistent, and personal work, the old thought that nothing can be achieved without effort. This is something said very easily but extremely difficult to do, it requires concentration, humility and conviction. Craftmanship is the basis for art because it allows the ego to draw back on a second level and it allows the work to be done by itself and through ourselves, so we are only a support. All great artists speak about this feeling, the clear feeling that the work is done by itself, through ourselves. But this feeling is immense in the performer, the artist acting live and with puppets in his hands, it’s incomparable. This may seem a rhetoric statement and a little pedantic, but I believe that many puppeteers know it, the feeling that the puppet takes possession of you, accompanies you, provokes you, but it is the one alive. I believe, as the puppeteer does not act with his own body, but between him and the audience there is a humanised object, that it causes this brilliant instrument to charge up with power and becomes a scape goat for the primitive rituals which renew his life in every performance and plays a cleansing part, a very amusing and very healthy one.

The second lesson-gift from the maestros was generosity. To be an artist one has te be generous in the most complete sense of the damned word. To say it without much formality, the artist works for the world to look good. The bad looks come already by themselves, already they are coming in constant and insistent waves without anybody calling for them and without anything that can stop them. I am speaking of hunger, violence, illness, of the really bad looks. But the good ones have to be sought, have to be created, pursued and built up gradually. This means generosity with life, commitment to experience, to knowledge, to communication. Miró said that the work isn’t important in itself, important are the seeds which let the work germinate inside the people.

And the third thing is radicality, going for the roots, the bottom of things. In the roots is the primary energy, the exchange of juices with nature, that what’s springing forth from the dark, from the underground. Radicalism is what counts, the compass. It is a personal attitude, a constant feeling.

Brossa said that novelty is not necessarily interesting by itself, novelty can sometimes be very vulgar and very dead, interesting is originality and originality comes from origin. The artist has to go to his own origins to pass it on to the tribe, it’s his job, giving, sharing, churning up the bottom to cloud the waters and to clear up the heart, immersing oneself in a continuous and insistent invention of the most ancient originality. The original is ancestral and radical, every person is very different from all others in his origin, in his roots.

And answering the second part of your question, I believe that puppeteers have as much ahead of them as the other arts, inexhaustible and in a very special way. I always liked to think that the puppets in the theatre – not those of the movies and television, which have some obligations of codification, impoverishing them excessively – are to the actors in the theatre like poetry to a novel: a different world, made from the same words, tightened by the same grammar, but of a totally different experience. I don’t know how to put this in writing, I have no words, but to me it appears that in poetry the pulsating of life seems more pure, more burning. Poetry can only be explained in poetic words – you tongue in my mouth like the flower of the dying – , so much of the same happens to puppet theatre, that it’s pure poetry and its habitat is the universe, olé!

4- After forty years in your profession, what would you save from your beginnings? Which of these do you value most? Within the context of your long career, what are your actual and future artistic goals? Do you believe that a puppeteer grows with age and experience, and in what sense?

As you know, our friendship goes back to those times long ago, my beginnings were with the van and shows and of these I keep invaluable memories. I enjoyed myself and learned a lot. What remains most with me from this period is the contact with different audiences and the enthusiasm of the people in those sixties and seventies, when everything seemed possible to us. Those were ten years of learning, tough and nice. But all my professional life has been full of illusions, joys and friends, I don’t feel any nostalgia for one particular moment.

Presently, I’m into the project of setting up a new company and to go out again on the international circuit, from which I have distanced myself somewhat in the last years. I am preparing a spectacle, Zoé, about a brazilian girl who commits a terrible murder. It’s a spectacle with various puppet scenes and I like it because for many years I was involved in directing and painting and did not practise as performer. At the same time I’m preparing an installation with paintings and video screens as well as other upcoming projects. My projects always have long gestation periods and are overlapping each other.

About growing with age, I don’t know, what do you expect me to say? Of course, one gets old, That’s for sure, nothing can be done about that and on the way one learns things, true, but the value of experience is very relative. I don’t think that experience would be better than inexperience, which could be an instrument with great strength. Every moment in life has its angel, its magic, the flower as Zeami said, first because one has the power and then because one has more smartnesss, I do’nt know, once bitten, twice shy … What really interests is the process, the continuous development and refining the instruments. The best of having had a long trajectory is in looking back and being able to smile.

JOAN BAIXAS to TONI RUMBAU

1/ You have gone through almost all aspects of the profession: performing, writing, managing a theatre and a festival, entrepreneur, cultural activist, if you would have to choose, with what would you stay and why? And also, would you advise the youngsters to make sure that they get to know those different areas or do you think that specialization is better?

If I had to choose, without doubt performing, it is the best this profession has given to me. Acting as a puppeteer is an experience once tasted, you‘re hooked. I think for two reasons: the cleansing aspect which all performances with puppets have (split personality, plurality of the languages used, which go from the most immediate straightness to the most sophisticated reserve) and the fact of connecting with age-old practises which take “possession” of oneself though you don’t like it. This happened to me when by chance I began to participate in Portugal in the campaigns for cultural revival with the Portugese army, during the Revolution of Carnations.

Therefore, as one persists and feels obliged to be what is usually called a “professional”, one gets gradually caught into the clutches of the profession and, before you know, yound find yourself one day to be an entrepreneur, another day a “cultural activist”, then suddenly “director of a festival”, later on theatre director, and of course you write a big part of your works, some are even doing all and making everything, from the puppets to set design. I would even say that one of the characterictics of this profession is, especially at the start, that one does all, or better, “one dares to do all”, this is often perceived as its most worthy charms. Of course, in some cases it is, in others not. In this there is all the variety you want and the freedom of choice is, undoubtedly, the greatest. The career of a puppeteer varies between the soloist who is autonomous in everything – and who in some way, embodies some of the essentials of the earliest puppetry – and the one who sets up a more or less complex company. I have gone from one category to the other and the truth is that where the best things happened to me and where I found myself most at ease, was in my role as a soloist. In fact, these days I am getting involved in a new solo project. Although I must also to say that of the two operas I did, the experience and the memories I have from both are wonderfully positive. Regarding my experiences in management, I disliked it much, especially with regard to the dealings with government: pure hell and nightmare. The youngsters I’ll tell, that if they’re able to focus on creating, there is nothing better. I think that in these days the new generations of puppeteers know this quite well and are able to distinguish the essential from the superfluous, and look for appropiate support – good agents, technicians, actors etc. – when needed. Thereafter, as is well known, the turns of life will take them from one extreme to the other.

2/ In your book about professional memories you held back, with elegance and discretion, an anarchistic spirit of devastating conventions, but after reading it, I was left with wanting to learn more about this aspect of your thinking, would you mind telling more about it?

Well, yes, I see myself as someone they called in the past a “ drawing-room anarchist”, though later in life the “anarchism” I practised was not wrong, surely more driven by chance and necessity than by ideological conviction. It is a pity that anarchism has gone so in disuse an has such a bad press. And, nevertheless, I have a strong feeling that the present situation – the one trying to find ways of solution for the deluges of the crisis which has come upon us – is in many things resorting to a more remote anarchistic gold mine. Especially in fighting tooth and nail, as is done today, for personal independence or for “individual sovereignty”. I very much agree with these demands. It is just that the present and the future are full with contradictions, and together with the defense of the individual and his independence, today also the global perspective in resolving problems and conflicts is necessary.

In other words, independent individualism on one side, globalization of the problems and their solutions on the other side. The anarchism I would like to exist is the one which could accept these paradoxes and contradictions between global and local, the individual and the collective, respecting the extremes in their most resounding radicality.

Coming back to puppetry, I believe that the, let’s say “classical” or “romantic”, person of a puppeteer embodies in some form, par excellence, some anarchistic qualities: doing your own thing, do what you like, settling down wherever, live from what people give you directly, be independent in the set-up, organisation and execution of your work etc. Some puppeteers have even raised the anarchistic flag as a sign of identification – we have the clear example of Pepe Otal, almost a model example of “anarchistic puppeteer” to whom we have to add the bullfighting archetype of the “torero” for his special relation with this person of death, or for example Javier Villafañe, Paco Porras, and many others. In fact, when you hear some already somewhat older puppeteers say: “I’m going back to do shows, that’s what matters and is so good in this profession …” (you and me, for instance …), actually we’re expressing our love for this vital spirit and anarchism of puppetry.

And aren’t perhaps Pulcinella, Punch, Polichinelle, Karakoz …., some old anarchists, somewhat over the top and oldfashioned, the ones who fiercely defend the values of praising individual anarchism, whatever the cost? Undoubtedly they immediately get the favours of the audiences, projecting in them their dreams on what they could be and could do, like punching the actual bosses, as there were the sociological ones (policemen, bankers, rich kids, shopkeepers etc.) or the metaphysical ones (demons, monsters or death itself). Thus, characters embodying the anarchistic archetype, made en vogue in the Renaissance and in the urban cultures of modern age.

3/ One of the things which surprise me most in the art of puppetry, are the paradoxes one notes with only a little bit of careful analysis. Let’s look at some examples: puppetry has been popular entertainment in the course of centuries, but paradoxically it has at the same time given rise to very significant philosophical and speculative lterature. Another paradox: the most popular puppets in the past century have been the ones in feature films (Alien, King Kong, Star Wars), nut nobody, when speaking of puppetry, refers to these. And one more: puppetry is considered as a theatrical craft, but in all cultures where powerful examples of traditions in puppetry exist, in all times and in all continents, they made use of the technical refinements, the most sophisticated technologies in each culture, for their performances, from Chinese string-puppets to the cartoons from Antúnez, from Bunraku to mechanical puppets. What do think of all this?

I think that the paradoxes about which you speak in the beginning of your question (grandeur/misery, popular/cult, tradition/avant-garde …) are the most interesting qualities, on the sociological level as well as in symbolism and language, of the puppet-theatre. Going to a festival and able to see performances varying from the ancient shadows of Bali to the most daring and innovative experiments, it’s all first rate and a continuous lesson in modesty and openmindness. That’s why I believe, that festivals wanting to be modern and renounce traditions are mistaken – like what happened in Barcelona, where they so much wanted to modernize and sophisticate, that all vanished into thin air, and vice versa, of course.

What you say about the film characters is true, they are the most popular chracters of the 20th century, but I think that because of their identification with films, they loose part of their character in theatrical puppetry. This is like saying that the best music of the 20th century is film music, defended by many theorist, but then difficult to maintain when talking to musicians, programmers etc. The reality is that film and the whole image-industry have gobbled up many arts and visual specialties and put these to their use, that is, serving the cinematographic language which embraced them, whereas the theatrical quality, albeit with puppets or actors, is the live performance, which

has nothing to do with technical reproduction. You have to understand this distinction without any intentions of valuation (undoubtedly, film would “score better”), but as a simple technical differentiation, of language. That’s why only scholars refer to “film puppets”, whereas professionals mostly forget about these. But you’re right that “they exist”, of course.

4/ What could be the reason for us to continue regarding puppetry as a craft and that we generally perform our shows in restricted and minority circles?

I believe that considering puppetry as “craftmanship” is an old habit that sometimes leads to a fight, in distinguishing it from “Art” with a capital A. There are some who think the word is derogatory, but there are others praaising it. If we think of puppetry as theatre, applying the word “craftmanship” to it doesn’t stop it from being consistent as a defining specification, in the sense that “theatrical language” uses it for doing more with the hands than with the voice, or with both simultaneously, in a way that it gets to signify something like “theatre made with hands”. Moreover, today, the aspect of “craft” is highly appreciated in productions – in the sense that it’s done with ease and with an affectionate contribution of many hands. In the same sense, one could say that big-stage opera is in itself pure theatrical craftmanship, because the work involved in the sets and scenic decoration is tremendous.

And the same can be said of a puppetry performance: if it’s a complex one, it’s craftmanship because of its complexity, if it’s simple, in a popular style, it will be because of the characteristics in having done something fully with one’s hands and by oneself. In all cases, the word craftmanship describes it well and praises the values of what it defines. I like to use it, not too much though, as insisting much on it, is like relying on the semiotics of the language, with its directness. Let’s say that craftmanship was and is good, but less you see it, the better. Sometimes it’s important to reveal it. In others it’s better to hide it. In the end, every puppeteer uses his hands. And we could also speak of the “craftmanship of Picasso” in the creation of his paintings, or of Barceló modelling his painting mass. And I don’t believe they would feel insulted. And having come this far, we could well say that the main difference between Art and craftmanship is, apart from the purpose, is the price paid for it: much for the first, little for the second. A puppeteer who wants to be part of Art, will surely earn more than one who isn’t. Etcetera.

Of course, there’s sometimes a “craftmanship-complex” of the puppeteers, not having the nerve to fill big stages and attract big audiences. As if craftmanship would justify the small and, thus, for minorities. These complexes exist, it’s also said that in the theatre pyramid we occupy the lowest and marginal sector. Although, as you said yourself, there are positive values here, as it’s fantastic to be in “small letters”, looking for the informal and direct relation with the audience, coming down from the pedestals etc. In this I absolutely agree with you. Modesty doesn’t diminish significance, on the contrary, it should accentuate it, and in accordance with the law of paradox and contradiction, the smallest must strive for becoming the greatest. I believe that Puppet Theatre has this enormous potential in its innermost parts, a field still to be explored. I would put all emphasis in its qualities of Synthesis: the more synthetic and concentrated, the more universal and explosive. It’s like the atom: in the smallest space – a puppet, an atom, a tableau … -, an immense charge: the time-space of public attention is whirling around him and his “gravity” (ability to capture the spectators) goes off. Here is the secret of the puppet, this little actor – or great, but artificial, one – who, like brands, charge themselves with content and attributes. Something which happens with the simpliest puppet theatres and with the most avant garde ones. Puppets = Synthesis = Explosion.