Creative approach

Our source of inspiration
With our production Inuussia the seal woman, we explored certain characteristics and traditions of the Inuits and to our delight we found strong cultural similarities between them and certain peoples of Africa, particularly the people of Senegal and Mali. Are these similarities linked paradoxically to the extreme climates? We investigated their connections to the storytellers, the shamans and the belonging of the children to the entire village and not only to the parents. We also investigated their initiatory rites and their constant references to the elders, as well as the importance for these people to pass on their values and their knowledge, essential to their survival in the new generations.

The basis of this story is the history of a baobab in which were locked the souls of the griots, the storytellers of the African villages. A young boy is brought to take a rite of passage, which will help him discover his previous origins, and link these to his destiny. We wanted to create a show using puppets made with African percussion instruments. Characters are built in front of the audience and serve to help to provoke the fate of the young boy. The text is inspired by traditional African stories like the griot stories by Congolese author Kama Kamanda and was written by Hélène Ducharme and translated to English by Leanna Brodie.

Our aesthetics
The aesthetics and our research were based on the three following subjects: the «percussive» puppet; the "live" musicians who at the same time are ambiance creators and puppeteers and the scenography, which integrates the shadow theater linked with various materials like sand and couscous.

The « percussive » puppet
Some African musical instruments already look like characters. During this stage of exploration we used their tones and developed a puppet mechanism to give them life. Several instruments such as the kora (sometimes called the African harp); the balophone (a xylophone-like instrument of Mali), the thumb piano, the "shakers" and the bolon (stringed instrument from West Africa) were used as parts of the puppets.

Musicians/puppeteers
We wanted to integrate live music on stage along with the actors and the puppeteers. In our production of Inuussia, the seal woman, we experimented with a form of interaction between the musicians and the puppeteers, but this time we wanted to integrate it completely. As a matter of fact the musical instruments used on stage can serve as parts of the set while at the same time being future puppets themselves. The actors will also sometimes play the instruments and the musicians will become the puppeteers.

The combination of both scenography and shadow theatre
We designed a scenography using raw materials such as sand, couscous, wood and wood by-products. Based on an African market place, we used various types of baskets and containers as well as a variety of seeds, beans and cereal for their tone and color. We also explored the possibilities of using them as shadow screens and accessories. A huge baobab is installed in the centre of the stage to be used as screen shadow as well as backstage space.

Shadow aesthetics
We will use one of our favorite finds which is a curtain shadow screen made of sand, couscous or rice. A piece of plexiglas lit underneath and covered with sand or with couscous enables us to project drawings being drawn in the sand. We also deepened our research first approached in Inuussia, the seal woman, by having the puppeteers manipulate the projectors on sight, giving three dimensional life to the puppets and shadows.