Over its 10-year history, PuppetLink has created a range of festivals both big and small with local, national and international partners.

Dynamics Festivals

The primary aim of the dynamics festivals is to programme puppetry, in its diverse forms, that is entertaining and accessible to a broad audience. The work is presented across the West Midlands by working in partnership with promoters and venues, thereby reaching people in the local centres of their communities.

The success story of dynamics 07 was the relationship with the four touring circuits of the West Midlands – Black Country Touring, Live & Local, Arts Alive and Shindig. From the earliest stages of programming all four committed to a core booking of 12 shows between them, and later were inspired to also programme other of our shows, from Turkey, Hungary and the UK. These shows were usually a delight for the artists as they often played to packed venues, with audiences enthusiastically showing their appreciation for the quality of the work. In addition to one-off performances across the region, dynamics 07 also offered the Puppet Extravaganza at mac and the Museum of Cannock Chase Family Day. Both of these involved diverse programmes of free shows and puppet-making workshops, particularly benefiting from the contrasting views of the Punch tradition offered by English, Russian and Turkish artists.

The international programming of dynamics 07 moved into a new direction through a new relationship with the Festival of Muslim Cultures. Starting with recommendations from PuppetLink’s esteemed colleague at Royal Holloway College, Dr Matthew Cohen, and also from the Festival of Muslim Cultures’ Director, we ultimately programmed a new puppet play from Pakistan (by Rafi Peer Theatre Workshop) and traditional Karagoz shadow puppetry (by Cengiz Ozek) from Turkey. This programming also helped to bring about new venue and funder partnerships, with The Drum, Hereford Courtyard and Worcester’s Huntingdon Hall with financial support from the Elmley Foundation.

Other international programming was based on personal knowledge of the companies and their work by the programming team. Our Russian visitors, Tut I Tam, provided the artistic highlight of the festival with their intimate, magical re-telling of The Little Hunchback Horse using ceramic puppets that doubled as musical instruments. Previous dynamics visitors, the Anton Anderle company, provided a reliable and popular pairing of shows across the region, along with other European artists well known to PuppetLink, Marc Beuten and Daniel Raffel, with their excellent street-based performances.

Ciroka Puppet Theatre were another first for dynamics, travelling across the region bringing their sophisticated and entertaining exploration of Picasso’s paintings, with original and unconventional musical accompaniment, delighting young children and adults alike.

Programming of UK artists included the established, high quality companies – Lempen Puppet Theatre Company, Puppet State Theatre, DNA, Garlic Theatre and Travelling Light Theatre Company. A relative newcomer was the interesting addition of Thingumajig Theatre with their mask and puppet theatre for teenage and adult audiences. In addition we programmed home-grown talent Blue Sky Theatre, About Face Theatre, Clive Chandler and his puppets (all involved in outreach programmes as well as performance) and the Punch & Judy shows of Glyn Edwards and Clive Chandler.

For dynamics 07 PuppetLink delivered an outreach programme of 40 performances over 20 days at the Museum of Cannock Chase. This was part of an education programme based on their toys and games gallery and made use of Punch & Judy as presented by Prof Glyn Edwards and Prof Clive Chandler.

The St Wilfrid’s School in Birmingham benefited from an extensive period of outreach activity, co-ordinated by Clive Chandler. The project began with a performance in school of A Punjabi Tale by About Face Theatre Company, one of a handful of professional theatre companies in the UK that employs actors with learning difficulties. From that inspiration, and with input from Clive on shadow theatre and musician Rocky Amoo on percussion, the children developed their own show. This was performed to a packed school hall in a double bill with Anton Anderle’s marionette show.

Bromsgrove District Council worked with dynamics on creating an under-fives package of performances and workshops. Clive Chandler and his puppets provided two shows to reception classes in Bromsgrove schools, and Jo Williams’ LittleBigTop brought the Sunflower Show to two Bromsgrove nursery schools.

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