In the fifth century BC, Herodotus described the marionettes as “figures animated by small ropes” carried during processions in honor of Osiris to pray for good crops. This shows how long is the history of marionettes. 

     The marionettes theatre preceded for long that of real actors. In the Antiquity, in Asia, playing the character of someone else was considered to bring misfortune. So wooden characters were being used instead.

     By the end of the 7th century AD, Christian priests would use them in medieval religious drama. Later, they would entertain Italian princes and the French bourgeois.

Many techniques are being used in marionette’s art, handled thanks to strings, a rod or a girdle, they always bring us into a marvellous world. Marionette’s theatre plays an important sociocultural part. It’s an amazing way of communication, transmitting traditions, melting the past to actual issues like the fight against aids.

     The puppet-master brings his logic and his art, his ideal and his imagination. He is a “Master”, that is the one who has the power to give Life. This symbolism is the strongest in Africa, notably during initiatory rites of young boys and for the ancestors’ cult. The marionette then represents the ideal matrix between man and nature. It dances to make the rain fall.

     Not only wars and tragedies of the 20th century have killed the artists, but they have, in the best cases, spread about thousands marionettes around the world. Indeed, it becomes more and more difficult to find them, and when they are discovered, they are often in such a pitiful state that they need important restoration work. Only we must have information about their symbolism and use, of the traditions to which they refer.

Marionettes earn the right to their own museums as well as the other arts for they gather them all, from sculpture to painting, from mime to multiple speech, going through ancient Chinese martial arts.

It is important to realise that the pupeteer and their characters belong to an “endangered species”. They remain the guardians of age-old practicies and of the richness of our cultural heritage.

Nowadays, the marionette is at a crucial point of its history. Tensions in the world, destitution, political and religious splits relegate it to a position of least importance. However, the marionette can help man in his education, his emancipation, give him back his dignity, and make him exist as a human being in his whole right, whatever his country. 

For every country, these craftsmen and their creatures represent

“THE MEMORY OF HUMANITY”