Joan Baixas

Joan Baixas is a Spanish puppeteer, visual theatre director and performer from Barcelona who fundamentally reshaped how puppetry and painting could meet in live performance. Growing up in a family connected to painting, he began making theatre in the 1960s and in 1968 co-founded Putxinel·lis Claca with Teresa Calafell, a group that would become Teatre de La Claca. The company's early work drew on Catalan puppet and street-theatre traditions while testing new materials and performance formats, gradually expanding into an ensemble-based visual theatre practice oriented toward international collaboration.

Baixas wrote, directed and performed while working with major visual artists including Antoni Tàpies, Antonio Saura, Eduardo Chillida and Roberto Matta. Rather than treating painted imagery as scenery, La Claca treated it as material to be inhabited, animated and transformed by performers moving through and inside it. This principle reached its fullest expression in the collaboration that began when Baixas approached Joan Miró in 1976. Miró painted sets, masks and giant body puppets developed with La Claca for *Mori el Merma*, a politically charged response to Alfred Jarry's Ubu that premiered in 1978 and toured internationally. The work placed painted surfaces into motion through actors working inside and around monumental figures, making the visual universe spatial, wearable and time-based.

Baixas led La Claca for roughly two decades before the company closed around 1988–1989. He subsequently pursued solo work combining painting, animation, objects, projection and performance, while teaching at Barcelona's Institut del Teatre. Throughout his career, his practice has retained a central conviction: an image becomes dramatic when a body gives it time, resistance and change.