Títeres, escritura y dibujo: Javier Villafañe y la recolección de voces infantiles

Abstract

For more than five decades, the poet and puppeteer Javier Villafañe traversed towns and cities in Argentina, Latin America and Spain with his tableau “La Andariega” presenting puppet shows. One of the characteristics of this experience is the construction of a device center on the representation but capable of exceed that moment: at the end of the performance, he asked his audience to draw or write. Villafañe later compiled these children’s creations in different books. Those creations, despite the variety of supports and formats, have in common being the product of children’s hands as well as narrating and witnessing their uniqueness. In this sense, the work carried out by Villafañe for almost half a century can be understood as the construction of an archive of children’s voices and testimonies. We aim to recover a part of the history of puppet theater of the 20th century thanks to Villafañe’s adventures, his collection construction labor, and its subsequent publication, concentrating on the first two compilations, El Gallo Pinto: can- ciones de Javier Villafañe ilustradas por niños argentinos (1944a) and Los niños y los títeres (1944b) appeared in the same year and work in a complementary way, by bringing together drawings, the first, and letters and plays, the second one.