TEHRAN – The specialized session “A Stage for a Dream,” taught by the renowned French puppeteer Philippe Genty and his assistant Eric Lambla de Sarria, will be held on Friday at the City Theater Complex in Tehran as part of the 21st Tehran-Mobarak International Puppet Theater Festival.

This session offers an opportunity to explore Philippe Genty’s creative approach to puppet theater. Through movement, puppetry, objects, and visual imagery, participants will experience new ways to craft poetic narratives that transcend words, Mehr reported.

Philippe Genty, the 88-year-old French artist and director, conducted research and documented puppet theater worldwide for UNESCO between 1962 and 1986. In 1968, he founded his own theater company, achieving worldwide acclaim by creating innovative visual theater that blends puppetry, dance, mime, light, and music. In the mid-1970s, he also became famous with the television series “Gertrude and Barnabas”. Genty considers himself, above all else, a “dreamer.”

Originally trained as a graphic designer, Genty began his career with a trip during which he discovered puppetry throughout the world. His film, “Puppets Around the World,” received the prize for originality at the 1965 Bucharest Festival.

While his work was at first influenced by cabaret, it was already possible to see future forms, especially in the technique of black theater, where, by controlling the use of side beam lighting, the puppeteer gives the illusion that manipulated objects have a life of their own.

Starting from 1980, his regular creations for the Théâter de la Ville (Paris), followed by highly successful world tours, brought a new dimension to his artistic production. In “Round Like a Cube” (1980), “Parades of Desires” (1986), and “Drifts” (1989), the movements of materials and forms created fantastic illusions during performances in which theatrical elements had great flexibility. The puppet as object progressively expanded into a scenic object for which Genty used dancers and a choreographer to put into motion.

Genty continued to immerse himself in fantasy worlds with “Don’t Forget Me” (1992), “Motionless Traveler” (1995), “Stowaways” (1996), up until the creation of “Maze” in the main courtyard of the Palais des Papes at the 1997 Avignon Festival.  

His fame brought him to undertake projects such as “Oceans and Utopias” for the Lisbon World Exposition in 1998, and “The Incredible Concert” in the Great Hall of Evolution at the Paris Museum of Natural History in 2001, in which the show was created from a dramatization of the space (filling the site with sound, light, and projected images).

Genty rarely uses text in his productions, confirming Genty’s penchant for journeys into individual psychoses and the subconscious. These preoccupations can again be found at the heart of “Vanishing Points” (2001), where the “puppet” language is based on a manipulation of space and its perception, as well as on anthropomorphic figures (doubling and mirror games), in a theatre of imagery and illusion.

The 21st Tehran-Mobarak International Puppet Theater Festival, directed by Poupak Azimpour Tabrizi, will take place in Tehran in October 2026, continuing the festival's tradition of promoting puppet theater as a platform for artistic innovation and international cultural exchange.

Since its inception in 1989, the Tehran-Mobarak Festival has established itself as a prestigious cultural gathering in Iran, attracting puppet theater troupes from around the world. The festival not only showcases international talent but also promotes the rich tradition of puppet theater.

SS/SAB