As part of the 21st 'Tehran-Mobarak' International Puppet Theatre Festival in Tehran, a specialized session titled 'Stage for a Dream' will take place. This session will be held on Friday at the Complex of City Theatres and will be led by the renowned French puppeteer Philippe Gent together with his assistant Eric Lambla de Sarria.
The session offers an opportunity to learn about Philippe Gent's creative approach to puppet theatre. Participants will be able to experience new ways of creating poetic narratives that go beyond words, using movement, puppetry, objects, and visual imagery, as reported by Mehr.
Philippe Gent, an 88-year-old French artist and director, researched and documented puppet theatre worldwide for UNESCO from 1962 to 1986. In 1968, he founded his own theatre troupe, achieving international recognition through the creation of innovative visual theatre that combines puppetry, dance, pantomime, light, and music. In the mid-1970s, he also gained fame with the television series 'Gertrude and Barnabas.' Gent considers himself primarily a 'dreamer.'
Initially trained as a graphic designer, Gent began his career during a trip where he discovered puppetry around the world. His film 'Puppets Around the World' won an originality award at the Bucharest Festival in 1965.
Although his early works were influenced by cabaret, they already showed future forms, especially in black theatre technique, where, by controlling the use of side lighting, the puppeteer creates the illusion that the manipulated objects have a life of their own. Starting in 1980, his regular productions for Théâter de la Ville (Paris), and later highly successful world tours, gave a new dimension to his artistic output. In works such as 'Round as a Cube' (1980), 'Parades of Desires' (1986), and 'Drifts' (1989), the movement of materials and forms generated fantastic illusions during performances, in which theatrical elements possessed great flexibility. The puppet as an object gradually transformed into a stage element that Gent used alongside dancers and choreographers.
Gent continued to delve into fantastical worlds in projects such as 'Don't Forget Me' (1992), 'Silent Wanderer' (1995), 'Smugglers' (1996), up to creating 'Labyrinth' in the main courtyard of the Palais des Papes as part of the Avignon Festival in 1997.
His fame allowed him to realize projects such as 'Oceans and Utopias' for the Lisbon World Fair in 1998, and 'Incredible Concert' in the Grand Hall of Evolution of the Paris Natural History Museum in 2001, where the show was created by dramatizing space (filling the venue with sound, light, and projections).
In his productions, Gent rarely uses text, which confirms his inclination towards journeys into individual psychosis and the subconscious. These themes reappear in the work 'Disappearing Points' (2001), where the language of the 'puppet' is based on the manipulation of space and its perception, as well as on anthropomorphic figures (games of doubles and mirrors) in the theatre of images and illusions.
The 21st 'Tehran-Mobarak' International Puppet Theatre Festival, curated by Poupak Azimpour Tabrizi, will take place in Tehran in October 2026, continuing the festival's tradition of promoting puppet theatre as a platform for artistic innovation and international cultural exchange. Since its founding in 1989, the 'Tehran-Mobarak' festival has established itself as a prestigious cultural event in Iran, attracting puppet theatre troupes from all over the world. The festival not only showcases international talent but also supports the rich tradition of puppetry.