PuppetPlays contributed to:

• develop tools and methods for the Digital Humanities through the creation of an online platform with a database, an anthology of texts, as well as several documentary and pedagogical resources for researchers, artists, teachers, students...
• enhance research on the very little known topic of playwriting for puppetry with the production of a conclusive monograph Puppetry and Dramaturgy – Western European Plays for Puppet Theatre, 1582-2020 (Palgrave Mcmillan, to be published 2025) by Didier Plassard ; peer-reviewed publications ; a special issue of the Cahiers Élisabéthains focused on "Shakespeare and puppets" and the organisation of two international symposiums: L'écriture littéraire pour marionnettes en Europe de l'Ouest (17e-21e siècles) and Portrait du marionnettiste en auteur published in open source ;
• stimulate and support young researchers in this field by awarding research grants to two doctoral students (Francesca Di Fazio et Sophie Courtade) and six post-doctoral fellows (Jean Boutan, Manuela Mohr, Yanna Kor, Anna Leone, Francesca Di Fazio, Cécile Decaix).

Access to all published results and all resources of PuppetPlays will be open and free.

The central hypothesis

The central hypothesis of PuppetPlays is that puppet theatre, which during the 17th and the 18th centuries was essentially a practice for circumventing the prohibitions on the actors' theatre, gradually became a specific theatrical medium. It keeps alive fashions and genres that the actors' theatre has abandoned; it gives life to specific characters deeply rooted in local and regional identities; and it explores experimental forms of playwriting.

Taking into account puppet repertoires in the history of dramatic literature can thus lead to certain revisions of the field: this will make it possible to introduce more diversity and complexity into the traditional linear succession of poetics (Romanticism after Classicism, Symbolism after Realism, Post-Modernism after Modernism, etc.), which does not reflect the variety of theatrical productions within the same era.

This question of a specific dramaturgy arises particularly when we examine contemporary playwriting. Why do some authors choose to compose plays for puppets, shadows, and all kinds of animated objects – sometimes as the only performers on the stage, sometimes mixed with live actors?

When puppeteers require texts for a new production, what specific imaginary of puppetry do these playwrights develop? It seems that the introduction of artificial performers on stage broadens the spectrum of dramaturgical possibilities: writing is freed from the "laws" of realism and plausibility; but it can also lead to speaking of (or to showing) the inexpressible: explosions of violence, cruelty (let's remember the old Punch and Judy show!), or obscenity. Birth, illness, disability, old age, and suffering can be portrayed on stage, with empathy but without the risks of excessive or forced pathos.

Because they represent the human through the guise of an object, the arts of puppetry are undoubtedly the best adapted instrument to tell stories of dehumanization and rehumanization: it is, in any case, one of the main hypotheses that PuppetPlays proposes to test.