Out the Box Festival - African Puppetry Hit

Having just wrapped up the biggest festival of Puppetry and Visual Theatre on the African continent, Out of the Box continues to inspire and attract new puppeteers. Not only does UNIMA South Africa host the festival but it also ensures there is a developmental aspect - such as ongoing education in the field of puppetry.

At the opening, The Handspring Puppet Company, made the unprecedented announcement that they would be handing out annual awards for productions at Out the Box at the end of the festival.

The festival included an adult and a family programme bursting with local productions and international offerings from Israel, the Netherlands, Mozambique and Belgium.

Highlights included Inua, a production by Jori Snell from Denmark and the Netherlands. Snell's physicality is astounding, as is the production's magical realism in its storytelling and use of music as she looks for the essence, the 'Inua' of things, through creative use of light and shadows. Out the Box 2010 provides an inspiring journey into the rich world of puppetry and visual performance that South Africa has to offer. I'm only sorry I couldn't be there for it this year!

UNIMA 2008 Festival Website goes live!

Finally the UNIMA 2008 Festival website goes live today! The festival features some fabulous international productions such as Sofie Krog Teatre in the photo (Denmark) who's production of Diva was one of the highlights when I caught it at a festival in Denmark last year; Polyglot Puppet Theatre & Ilbijerri Theatre Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, an Australia production of Headhunter, which is a new Indigenous tale set firmly in the present but one that honours the importance of the past. For all the news and events, keep posted to the new website up here!

Puppet Festival in South Africa

Out of the Box Puppet Festival is once again happening in Cape Town, South Africa. Opening on 10 September, the Out the Box Festival will feature mostly South African talent with groups like Sogo Visual Theatre's Violet rose Bite and The Paper Body Collective's international success La Lobo. For more information check out the website or contact the Festival Director, Janni Younge. If you plan to be in South Africa in September, you shouldn't miss it!

Puppets Parade in Calgary

The puppet parade just took place at the University of Calgary as part of the Puppet Power 2007 Con-
ference. Last night the great debate about the uses of the puppet as a agent for social change began. I was privileged to be invited to be opening speaker and gave a background on puppetry in social change in my life and specially showed a video clip of our recent Paper Playback Workshops taken in Europe. The debate taking place this afternoon is the role of art in political action - facilitated by Colin Funk, the manager of the Banff Centre Leadership Learning Lab, in a little town west of Calgary, where we'll be doing a workshop next week. You can view our new Paper Playback video here!
To view a report in the Calgary press on the conference, see here!

Calgary Conference and Snow

Arriving in Calgary we were greeted by a snow storm this week. We were expecting Canadian summer, but down came the snow! On Thursday morning Calgary was white and for foreigners like us, we thought it was Christmas. Puppet Power Conference organiser, Wendy Passmore is gearing up to open the conference this evening with a weekend of activities centered around 'Puppetry as Agents of Social Change', with workshops, lectures, discussions and performances. Stay tuned - I'll be writing more about the conference over the weekend...

Puppet Festival opens in Germany

The 15th International Figurentheater-Festival in Erlangen, Nürnberg, Fürth and Schwabach will open today here in Germany and run till 20 May.
One particular production which caught my eye on the programme, particularly because of our Monster project, was by a group from The Netherlands, Hotel Modern who are producing a piece entitled 'Camp'.

An enormous scale model of Auschwitz fills the stage. Overcrowded barracks, a railway track, the gateway with the words “Arbeit macht frei” and thousands of small puppets. In an attempt to imagine the unimaginable, the actors move through the set like giant war reporters, filming the horrific events with miniature cameras; the audience becomes the witness. For this the group uses a medium they call 'live animation'. This involves us filming scale models, with digital cameras and mini cameras, and projecting the results live on a large screen. In the models we can suggest characters with, for example, puppets and voice-overs. Using a mixing table to go from one camera to the other enables them to edit in a filmic manner to bring a cinematic, illusional reality to theatre. You can see their work here!
You can also watch a short film on the attack on the Twin Towers in NY. With the help of juice cartons, clay dolls and cardboard furniture, the viewer sees through the eyes of the hijackers, the aeroplane passengers and the people in the towers. See here!