Open: 17:00 - 17:45 hrs
Tickets: € 0
On Puppets, Politicians, and Totalitarian Regimes
Join the talk to explore puppetry as a weapon against totalitarian regimes and flawed politicians. From World War II to the present, puppeteers have challenged oppressive rulers like Hitler and Putin, provided sharp critical commentary on current events, and created spaces for survival. Through satire, grotesque, and allegory, puppets have played a crucial role in political dissent, shaping the narrative of resistance.
Kasia Lech
Kasia Lech, with a PhD from University College Dublin, is a scholar, actor, storyteller, dramaturg, and puppeteer with twenty years of conservatory and university teaching experience in the UK, Ireland, Poland, and Netherlands. This is enhanced by two decades of applied arts projects and interdisciplinary research collaborations with diverse communities and non-academic organizations worldwide. Her research and creative practice – supported by Polish, British, Irish, and Canadian organizations – explore theatre through practice-based and traditional scholarship and primarily focus on verse, multilingualism, translation, migration, and cross-cultural encounters. These areas bring to the fore the dialogue between historical and contemporary performance practices in the multivoiced world and theatre within it. Kasia published Dramaturgy of Form: Performing Verse in Contemporary Theatre (Routledge, 2021), which received outstanding reviews for its content, critical quality, and decolonizing scholarship on verse. Her second book Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre is forthcoming with Palgrave. She is currently researching how verse stages marginalized artists’ responses to socio-political-cultural contexts worldwide. Kasia is also part of funded research projects on mapping Polish migrant theatre worldwide, on historical and present violence in Polish theatre, and on creating multilingual European theatre ensembles performing for young audiences. Kasia performed internationally and co-founded Polish Theatre Ireland – a multilingual theatre company based in Dublin. She is an Executive Director at TheTheatreTimes.com, a global theatre portal which seeks to decolonize theatre criticism. She co-convenes the Translation Adaptation Dramaturgy working group at the International Federation for Theatre Research.
Queering Puppets Festival Amsterdam
From April 3 to 7, Plein Theater presents the Queering Puppets Festival Amsterdam together with Cat Smits Company!
Since 2022, Queering Puppets Festival Amsterdam has offered a stage for genre-transcending forms of visual theatre, object theatre, puppetry and queer perspectives. In the safe space that puppetry creates, everyone can be whoever he, she, them is. Plein Theater and Cat Smits Company defy the norm with this festival full of colorful visual outbursts Queering Puppets is LGBTIQA+ friendly, feminist, activist and above all standing out in queerness! In this third edition from April 3 to 7, 2024, the theme is Weapons of the weak.