Shaman acting, puppet acting : at the roots of a theatrical culture
Around the shaman or the puppet master, links be forged to face up to disorder thanks to a speech in motion. They inspire a life, credible because simulated and bearing the living dead's paradoxal energy, to a human or animal representation, to a ritual-caracterized animated object. China keeps the deep mark of the shamans' culture : a spirit is brought into the character to "play the gods". In Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia will strenghthen this idea : myths and rituals are reduced to formal rules... or recover life and have a hold over the current events again. The wooden or clay character appears, in African myths, like a secret brought back from the world of the dead or of the spirits. In New Guinea, in Africa, in Europe, the scarecrow, the dummy, the effigy allow bypassing sexed reproduction in a symbolic way. In the Middle Ages in Europe, maumet (for puppet, ghost, scarecrow) and its theater, deserve being looked for behind the "chantefable", in "fabliaux", in the origins of the farce. Platon would have fetched among barbarians relationships between the body and the soul. This search will lead us to numerous definitions of "I" among Papuans, with fernando Pessoa, in puppet masters' practice, in the modern myth of Pinocchio, with the puppet master who experiences "several lives". XIXth century drama is dying, worn out by actors ego or emptied of its meaning by a puppet in search of naive realism, the Great War brings about discovering the prosthesis, the simulated life, the mechanical actor, the effigy. Between the dummy's absence of consciousness and the god's infinite consciousness. The shaman-puppet master van decide to act according to his own game rules