Dear UNIMA Management,

 

I am here writing a letter of motivation which is above all an occasion for reflection.

I decided to enroll my puppet company to be less invisible on the national and international scene but also to put things in their "proper place".

 

A need of order similar to that of those who go to the library and who, looking for a zoology manual, find themselves in the midst of international law texts and hydraulic manuals. Well yes, these times confuse me and unfortunately I think I am among the architects of this confusion.

 

In the 90s I was a young artist and I was convinced that painting had to come out of museums and galleries to be within everyone's reach. I painted on the walls of the streets (without using spray cans) I exhibited my paintings in taverns and restaurants.

I worked with a regular contract at the Teatro delle Briciole where with determination I encouraged my "older" colleagues to take the theater out of the theater, sometimes succeeding (the long experience of the permanent laboratory Teatro al Parco went in this direction) and then I made my own prose company with which I shot outside the theaters.

 

I won the Scenario Award with a monologue of mine that I took most of the time to non-theatrical spaces. Well, all this did not change the world, quite the contrary.

Painting, debased, furnishes restaurants and hairdressing shops while street art is for the use and consumption of the councilors of culture.

 

We have been witnessing for some years the success of a genre, street theater which has educated to have an attention of a few minutes and has led to the sad habit of bulimic programming. While street theater needs a lot of attention from those who organize it, and fortunately and for merits, this sometimes happens.

 

And the puppets?

Since 2001 they have become my travel companions, and this thing of keeping things in their place made me understand it immediately: birthdays and private parties only if they pay really well and then you make the effort. Places to avoid, for the same reason as birthdays: we cannot be guests. We can't crash parties and demand attention. We are not the icing on the cake. Then we have to act with the handbrake on. The fact is this: it is the spectators who go to find the puppets, and not the other way around. And to come and see you without being invited, the puppet party must be a public party, not a private one.

 

Thanks puppets, you were clear, as always. As a puppeteer of the middel class, however, I have to add something not insignificant: to see you, guests must find you, you must have an address to be able to have the party, whether it is a park, a square, a theater, a museum. You have to have a concession, some help.

The carousel needs maintenance and then if you press the button it goes without saying. The Puppet Art Theater also needs maintenance but has no buttons to press. Perhaps one day the puppets will have their own space in Italy too, I don't know if UNIMA will take care of this ideal Park of Wonders where the wooden heads could offer the threads to start weaving a community story, a story to go out again. from the labyrinth. In that case my company and I are honored to be part of it.

 

Patrizio Dall'Argine