jaah 11 (1+2) pp.

149–155 Intellect Limited 2020

Journal of Applied Arts & Health

Volume 11 Numbers 1 & 2
© 2020 Intellect Ltd Miscellaneous. English language.
https://doi.org/10.1386/jaah_00027_7
Received 3 April 2020; Accepted 13 April 2020

ANDREA MARKOVITS
Puppets in Transit

Puppet theatre: A way to tell

what cannot be told and to
face pain

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Processes of artistic reparation and memory recovery are spaces created for puppets
victims of state terrorism and family members of the disappeared in the context puppet therapy
of the military dictatorship in Chile (1973–90). Puppet therapy was utilized as post-memory
a methodology by the company Puppets in Transit with participants drawn from dictatorship
Integrated Health Services in Chile in relation to reparation projects. This process memory
of intervention with puppets seeks to restore social bonds, to enable an intergener- trauma
ational dialogue and to transmit fragmented memory. The puppet, an expressive,
symbolic and mediating object, stimulates a collective dialogue to create collective
performance related to participants’ memories. All those mentioned in this article
have given permission for their stories to be mentioned; we use only first names.

PUPPETRY CONFRONTS UN-MEMORY

To safeguard memory is a moral and urgent imperative. How can we combat
the growing wave of denial that has been imposed on society by neoliberal-
ism in Chile and its accompanying slogans urging us to forget and to carry
on? Memory is thus relegated to distant temples of other people’s memories,

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causing a rift in society between those who remember and those who forget.
Carmen Hertz (2000) comments that ‘people who were detained and disap-
peared are a fact of our present and future and should be part of our collective
memory, so that the legacy that we leave to the new generations will not be
one of impunity and un-memory’ (2000: 51).
When considering the uses and functions of art, one of these is to respond
to the emergency that faces us: not to forget the past. We have an ethical
imperative to educate, re-educate, sensitize and mobilize people towards
states of conscience and empathy with the memories of those ‘others’, as
Susan Sontag (2003) describes: ‘before the pain of others’. This scenario brings
us to think about the power of the puppet as a strategy of artistic reparation and
as a mouthpiece for those who are no longer with us.
Where psychotherapy has proved insufficient, puppets offer themselves in
the service of reparatory actions, as a creative therapy amongst those called
complementary therapies. In the representation of pain, not materialized in
the body of a family member or friend who has disappeared, a double rupture
is created: on one side the loss of the person, and on the other side, the
absence of the body of the person, which enables the ritual of the farewell;
pain remains, which is inconclusive and ongoing.
This work of activating post-dictatorship memory was set up in a context
in which trauma is ongoing, where increasing denialism in the region, impu-
nity, scant justice and absence of truth impact upon survivors and victims of
political violence, which leads to a state of desperation and frustration.
In 2012, we created a performance in Israel, Concert for Peace, about the
trauma caused by political violence. This project inspired us to undertake
research into puppet workshops as reparatory actions for victims of state
violence, and we began these workshops on our return to Chile from Israel,
in 2014. They were aimed at survivors and family members of those who were
detained and disappeared. The workshop project took place between 2015
2017 and was funded by the Ministry for Culture, Arts and Heritage.
Verónica, who participated in one of our ‘Puppets and Memory’ workshops
in 2017 in Concepción, noted:

When we talk about reparatory actions, we become involved with

the expression of painful stories and processes. Puppets worked with
people’s stories and what we noticed within the puppets and memory
project was that people began to share experiences and situations that
are not usually talked about or which are only talked about in pain; they
are not discussed as personal history, anecdotes, talking about how my
brother was, or my father […] these processes mean that the victims are
humanised, as are the detained and disappeared, and those executed for
political motives. A face is given to them, they have a history and this
enables a different means of expression, since over many years, even
today, verbal expression of these traumatic processes has been very little
recognized; there has been no intermediary to listen. In this context,
therefore, people held on to their stories, hid them privately, didn’t share
them with their neighbours, friends or others; in this project the puppets
enabled the pain of these stories to be externalized in a very gentle way.

The use of puppets in their expressive and therapeutic capacities, as reparatory

actions for psychosocial trauma and ongoing grief, promotes an active kind of

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Figure 1: Concert for Peace by the company Puppets in Transit, 2014.

Photography by Andrea Markovits.

work that enables the participants to open up those memories that have been
silenced by those in power and to activate the empathy that puppets generate.
This project Puppetry and Memory is guided through nine stages:

• activation of collective memory;

• work with personal significant objects;
• mapping of personal memory;
• identification of the memory to recreate;
• work with materials and their links to memory;
• physicalizing of grief in the constructed puppet;
• organization of memories for group narration;
• work with silence and movement;
• finally, the development of performance material about painful memories
or traumatic memories.

Puppet therapy was conceived as a methodology within artistic or crea-

tive therapies that include dramatherapy and art therapy amongst other
complementary therapies. Puppet therapy uses puppets, a metaphor for the
human, as an expressive and intermediary object in the elaboration of images
of internal worlds, towards the construction of projected material based on the
processes that enable the elaboration and re-reading of trauma. The work is
guided through group decision-making, via the relationship of each partici-
pant with their puppet, and through silence; we do not use spoken words.
We guide this process so that people are able to work through the puppet
and express the inexpressible and to mobilize feelings through the silence of
the puppet and show what cannot be spoken. We break the shell of silence to
speak words through the delicate movements of the puppets. We use active
and participatory methodologies to develop a sense of trust within the team;
this is the first thing that is necessary in order for the group to open up and
speak of their unresolved grief.
One of the nightmares related by Primo Levi, a survivor of the Auschwitz
concentration camp in his book If This Is a Man (1959), was that he was going
home and telling what had happened to his friends and relations, but they did

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not take him seriously. So for Levi, the nightmare was not going back to the
concentration camp, but the terror of not being believed, of not being heard;
this was the sensation that he felt in his nightmares; that no one listened to
him. What Levi describes is the pain of desolation. In our workshops, therefore,
one of the premises that we used is radical listening and deep understanding
of the pain of others, developing within the creative workshops a high level
of empathy.
Before beginning the process of creation, our main task was to ensure that
the groups felt that their grief was understood and empathized with. This is
also a crucial premise that we transmit to those professionals that we train in
Muñecoterapia; that without empathy, it is impossible to undertake reparation
through art.
We hope that their ideas, thoughts and traumas can be transformed into
puppets; into dramatic objects; that their ideas can be converted into an inte-
gration of materials to later bring movement to them, and drama with an
aesthetic meaning full of content; to set up an aesthetic distance and re-signify
them and eventually physicalize this pain in the material: in the puppet. The
work of creating the puppets is directed towards a rebuilding of their memo-
ries, like self-examination based on memories and not a mechanical composi-
tion of materials.
Testimony of Carolina, a participant in the puppetry and memory work-
shops held in the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. This museum is a
space designed to give visibility to the human rights violations that took place
during the dictatorship in Chile between 1973 and 1990. Carolina’s father was
executed for political reasons in 1973; her childhood was marked by this. She
tells the group that she has gone through different processes and therapeutic
interventions and that she has not been able to find answers or any way to
resolve this pain. When it was put to Carolina that she could participate in
the workshop with her testimony, she suggested that the experience could be
beneficial in three phases.

I was uncertain at first about participating in the workshop, knowing of

my need for healing in relation to the experience of the dictatorship and
its implications. Going through the workshop helped me to get to know
myself and to look for my father … and through this growth I allowed
myself to look even deeper internally and explore that time in my child-
hood with my father, through the puppet. The second phase was the
time when we built the puppets. I felt very glad to be able to bring that
past that I wanted to rescue from my life into my present […] I wanted
to recover anything I could which would help me to move on and open
up what held me in grief. The third phase was for me. I began the work-
shop for my father, he was the reason I took part, the crux of it. I wanted
to look for him, find him, call him, see him, reach him, imagine him […]
I believe it was like this but not like I thought it was going to be. As I
was making the puppet I felt very focused on myself (as a child); I felt
that this child had helped me to destroy images of a very painful past
[…] now I wanted to hold her, protect her, and that is what I did, and it
gave me a lot.

Testimony of Javiera, a participant in the Puppets and Memory Workshop; her

father was detained in the National Stadium, where thousands of people were
held; many of them were tortured and disappeared.

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 Puppet theatre

Figure 2: The final performance of the ‘Puppet and Memory Workshop’ at the
Museum of Memory and Human Rights. Photography by Víctor Robles.

When I was fifteen I found out that my dad had been detained in the
National Stadium. This was the answer that I had been looking for […]
I had had to build my father’s story from silence, which I assumed was
the way he had to protect us and permit us to live without the fear that
he and my mother felt. When I was 27, the same age that my father was
when he was taken, I made a comparison between my life and his, and
decided to overcome my misgivings and speak to him about this part of

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Andrea Markovits

his life. My motivation for participating in the puppetry and memories

workshop was based on the fact that the detention and torture that he
was submitted to had not been atoned for […] the wounds had instead
been kept silenced and hidden. I threw all of this into the materialisa-
tion of my puppet, who tells, through writing, some of the events of my
story and his story on its clothes.

Javiera’s testimony as the daughter of a survivor is what is known as post-

memory, where the silencing of previous generations has repercussions in
new generations; cloaked in trauma, it emerges through images and memo-
ries. This is explained by Hirsch when she says that ‘[a]cts of pre-cognitive and
non-verbal transference occur through familiar language and are frequently
converted into symptoms’ (Hirsch 2012: 59). It is thus in family contexts that
this silencing prevents new generations from creating their own visions with-
out being closely linked to what they have received, directly or indirectly, from
their family members.

FINAL REFLECTIONS
The use of the puppet as a visual, expressive and metaphorical object,
suggested here as a non-verbal resource, enables the participants to enter into
a safe work space, where their memories are mobilized silently, while they
are accompanied and mediated by the subtlety and delicacy of the traces of
the movements made by these objects born from their memories. It is to be
hoped that this project will be able to be repeated with new agencies working
on memory, via the training initiated by Puppets in Transit with our Diploma
in Puppet Therapy, a pioneering independent training in Chile. We work with
psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, actors and puppeteers to develop an
annual programme that trains healthcare professionals, educators, thea-
tre workers, social workers and therapists in therapeutic interventions using
puppets to focus on memory, human rights, disability and vulnerable child-
hoods. This therapeutic and artistic resource seeks to use the puppet as an
expressive and therapeutic medium in the field of memory, an object of inde-
pendent study different from other therapeutic means. These experiences are
projected into three areas: firstly, as a model of intervention in public mental
health; secondly, as a training programme for change-makers in the field of
memory, and as a research project in the area known as ‘third theatre’, defined
as such by Barba (as cited by Watson 1995) as a theatre in the margins and
where the social dimension becomes more important than the aesthetic.

REFERENCES
Hertz, Carmen (2000), Políticas y Estéticas de la Memoria, Santiago: Cuarto
Propio.
Hirsch, Marianne (2012), The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual
Culture after the Holocaust, New York: Columbia University Press.
Levi, Primo (1959), If This Is a Man (trans. Stuart Woolf), New York: Orion
Press.
Sontag, Susan (2003), Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador.
Watson, Ian (1995), Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret,
2nd ed., London: Routledge.

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 Puppet theatre

SUGGESTED CITATION
Markovits, Andrea (2020), ‘Puppet theatre: A way to tell what cannot be told
and to face pain’, Journal of Applied Arts & Health, 11:1&2, pp. 149–155, doi:
https://doi.org/10.1386/jaah_00027_7

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Andrea Markovits is the artistic director of the company Puppets in Transit,
which is based in Santiago, Chile. She has previously worked as a drama
teacher for special needs and worked as a volunteer therapist with child
victims of the Syrian war. She is studying for a Masters in Art Therapy at Finis
Terrae University in Santiago, having previously studied dramatherapy in
Chile and puppetry in Israel. Currently, she is the coordinator and teacher for
the Diploma in Puppet Therapy in Chile.
Contact: Puppets in Transit and Muñecoterapia, Chile.
E-mail: andrea.markovits@gmail.com

Andrea Markovits has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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