Exhibition

A project supported by prestigious partners

Under the Punches’ Canvases is an iconographic exhibition devoted to booth puppetry in Europe, from the Middle Ages to the 19^th century. It presents a selection of 120 images — engravings, paintings and drawings — chosen from a large corpus of digital reproductions assembled over three years of research.

These works document a singular practice, widespread across the centuries and across the countries of Europe: the puppet booth performance in public space. The exhibition invites visitors to look at the show in all its inseparable parts: the stage, the puppets, the musicians and showmen, the audience, the performance space, the economy and the making. It also invites a look beneath the canvas, at the hidden side: the puppeteer, the manipulation, the staging.

The Installation

The reproductions are presented on four display structures of different sizes, built as puppet booths. Visitors are invited to slip inside them and take, in turn, the place of the puppeteer, the showman, the spectator or the passer-by.

The Invariants of a Practice

The Punches

The protagonists share physical and social characteristics recognisable across the whole of Europe: a prominent nose, a mask or a face in bright colours, humps, bells. They embody extraordinary, carnivalesque and subversive figures, close to the role once held by the fool. Above all, they share one voice: an artificial voice produced by the swazzle, held in the puppeteer’s mouth, which gives the character the essence of its personality.

Audience and Space

The performances are always depicted within their setting: town, countryside or fair. The audience stands, gathered together — some thirty people from every social background, children and adults alike. The performance space is part of the show itself.

The Economy

The show lives on the generosity of the audience. Because the puppeteer performs hidden inside the booth, one figure becomes almost constant at their side: the showman. He watches over the booth, plays music, sells remedies, performs tricks. He is at once the draw, the go-between and the collector.

Making

An itinerant art, performed without fixed licence or permit, the puppet booth is light and portable, designed to be carried by one person. Booth puppetry rests on an economy of made-to-measure: the puppets are carved and sewn for the hand that will animate them, the booth built to the span of the puppeteer’s reach. Before industrialisation the skills it called for — wood carving, sewing, painting — were common trades, and the puppeteer was a craftsman too.

The Team

Exhibition produced by Compagnie UEUEUE
Curators: Anastasia Puppis & Léandre Simioni
Scientific committee: Cristina Grazioli (University of Padua), Anna Leone (EHESS, Paris), Didier Plassard (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, ERC PuppetPlays project)
Puppet booths built by Paolo Saldari, Compagnia l’Aprisogni

Calendar

• 1 April – 17 May 2026: Théâtre aux Mains Nues, Paris
• January 2027: L'Hectare, Centre national de la marionnette, Vendôme, as part of the Avec ou sans fil biennial
• April – July 2027: Musée Théâtre Guignol, Brindas