About this site and who runs it

This is a personal project run by one person. I build the puppets, photograph the pieces, research the texts and write all three language versions. It is not a company site nor a theatre company's site — it is a working notebook opened to the public.

How it started

It started from a frustration familiar to anyone interested in puppetry in Brazil: the information is scattered. There are good academic books, usually out of print; videos by foreign performers; and plenty of web pages repeating the same three sentences about Ancient Egypt without ever saying where they got them. What was missing was a place that brought together history, craft and practice while being honest about sources.

The practical side came after the curiosity. I began carving small heads with a knife and a piece of soft wood, getting joints wrong, remaking control bars, discovering by trial that a knee bending the wrong way destroys the whole illusion. Every mistake became a note, and most of those notes became the technique page.

The workshop and the method

I work on a small scale with hand tools. The pieces in the showroom are carved mostly by knife, without moulds or copying, which means two puppets of the same model are never identical — the face changes with the grain of the wood. I prefer light, pale woods, because excess weight is the enemy of performance: a heavy puppet answers the control bar late.

Every piece goes through four stages: drawing and proportion, carving the parts, assembling the joints, and stringing. The last stage is always the longest, because that is where the marionette stops being a sculpture and becomes an instrument.

Editorial standards

• Declared sources. Historical claims rest on the bibliography listed in the Library. Where scholars disagree, the text says so.
• No copying. Every text is written for this site. English and Spanish versions are reviewed by hand, not machine-generated and published blind.
• Credited images. Photographs of my own pieces are identified as such; third-party historical images appear only with a compatible licence and visible credit.
• Corrections welcome. If you find a factual error, write through the contact page. Relevant corrections are applied and dated.

How the project is funded

The site is free and has no paywall. It is supported in two ways: advertising served through Google AdSense and the occasional sale of handmade pieces. Ads only load after your explicit consent — see the Privacy Policy for details.