About Giant Puppets

Adapted to the scale of our cites, well-known from Gallic ceremonies, the carnival of Flanders or Catalonia as well as the protest creations of the Bread & Puppet Theater, giant puppets abruptly send us back to our childhood: they are roughly the size of an adult for a four-year-old child. Their excessive magnitude calls for collective creation and teamwork all the way to manipulation and gives them maximum visibility. Those who carry and animate one suddenly enjoy new respect: people look at them differently.

The giant puppets that we build display several qualities: they are an instrument of scale, a measure of the city, they make it possible to look with a new gaze at the architecture and urban landscape. They remain visible in the middle of a crowd and evoke universal myths. The specificity of giant puppets is that you don’t choose to look at them. They force you to look. They peacefully invade each person’s space. They shout out. While playful objects, they are also impressive vectors of thought-out fantasies. They amuse, they fascinate, but they also disturb. They give unusual volume and movement to our mental representations. Humanly, they are a powerful symbol of collective practices and teamwork, objects of encounters and exchanges, of highlighting complementarities. They give wide visibility to the communities that have built them and that animate them. They especially change the regard of the passer-by, of the neighbour, not only about their neighbourhood but also about the people that operate the puppets.