Who’s pulling the strings? The politics of puppetry in the Théâtre du Soleil’s Tambours sur la digue

This article explores the relationship between form and politics in French theatre company the Theatre du Soleil's 1999 work Tambours sur la digue (Drums on the Dam), scripted by feminist philosopher Helene Cixous. It examines how the Theatre du Soleil's reinterpretation and experimentation with the traditional Japanese puppet theatre, Bunraku, as well as Cixous's reflections on this aesthetic, facilitates ideological critique, and invigorates a political dialectic around contemporary global geopolitics and power relations. I argue that the multi-layered, intercultural form of Tambours sur la digue takes inspiration from the Bunraku aesthetic most effectively as a politicizing device that exposes the tensions between subject and object, living actor and puppeteer and broadens debate around ethical questions of political agency and manipulation. Far from being purely formalist, the multimodal aesthetic of this play is in keeping with the company's broader social and political activism that has worked to mobilize and politicize spectators for over 50 years.