My father was born on the border with Russia on the edge of a very large lake, very often in the summer we went there on vacation.

I remember the sensation of what we called fishing nets : the rays of light on the bottom of the lake when we took a bath.

For me it was something really fascinating.

And then I remember in Helsinki when we went with my mother to wash carpets by the sea, I was four, five years old.

The women washed the carpets, talked, argued, the carpets were colored, then we all squeezed them together.

And then I remember, when I was seven, eight, my father had a boat, which was called Tuli , which means the "fire" .

We could sleep in it, we could go on excursions to the islands sleeping one or two nights in there: sometimes it was very windy and we threw up, sometimes it was completely calm and it felt like we were sliding on the water.

How does all this relate to theater afterwards?

I think it was a trigger anyway.

When I arrived in Paris in 1985, there was an exhibition of Asian puppets in the Louvre and that's where I discovered that there was a form of water puppet .

Five years later I entered the Charleville school, where I was able to see several videos of Vietnamese performances, and in Reims, I was able to see a live show.

When we started working on the graduation project, I looked at Finnish history and my childhood and thought of a Finnish romantic painting called Lemminkainen's Mother , which is a bit of a shamanic hero, a kind of Don Giovanni. shaman.

In those years in Charleville there was a three month stage design course and one of the students, Olivier Defrocourt, was interested in my work, so I showed him some of my research and he said: "I want to do my diploma too. on this!".

Olivier's idea was that the important thing was the surface of the water, so the inside walls of the pool had to be reduced so that it looked like there was more water than there actually was.

The cut of the tub was a kind of triangle that meant that if the water overflowed it would go back under to collect it.

For me it was very important to use the reflections of the water, to remember my childhood , that magic of fishing nets, because I had seen that the Vietnamese did not use reflections at all: they used the lights to illuminate the puppets but they did not use water as an element of reflection.

I also found it interesting that in the Kalevala  the first lines are about 1000 years old and apparently even the water puppets are about 1000 years old; the Kalevala is composed in octosyllables and the Vietnamese songs for water puppets are also in octosyllables, so there was this correspondence, entirely and purely theoretical.

The year after graduation I met Jean-Christophe and he probably has Vietnamese blood. ( Jean-Christophe Canivet, co-founder of the Illusia-Aurora Company, ed )

So I said I wanted to go to Vietnam to see how they did it and so we left, I was four months pregnant and we went there for a month.

It was funny because we had Jacques Félix's phone numbers for UNIMA Vietnam, we had the number of the House of World Cultures, because they had come to teach in Charleville, but when we arrived in Hanoi we discovered that there were three digits in less in any phone number.

Here we are without any contact in Hanoi.

We started going to the Ministry, to the offices: "Do you know? Does anyone know where there is a person called that? Is there anybody like that?", And then one day, we were in an office, we were asking, and a guy walking by in the corridor he says: "Ah, are you looking for him? He is there!".

I put the road map in his hand and said: "Mark me here where!".

Hanoi is quite large and by the time it was all under construction the street names had changed.

So in the end, we didn't just have a book with technical drawings.

With the money we had earned by organizing small puppet shows for the French school carnival, we were able to order an outdoor water puppet show, in a village, because it was not the season to see these kinds of shows.