About the Festival 'Puppets for Peace'
The Wellington Puppetry Festival manifesto is to inspire our local community with creativity and nurture the growth of puppetry arts in Aotearoa. We believe in the power of puppetry as a tool for transformation and it feels highly appropriate that this years festival is dedicated to the cause of bringing peace to the world. No act towards this cause can ever be too small!
Made by the community, for the community
The Wellington Puppetry Festival is a community-led celebration of puppetry in all its forms: traditional and contemporary, tiny and giant, for toddlers and adults alike. We are proud to bring the city together for a free, welcoming, imagination-filled weekend.
This year we formed a Trust to keep our festival growing, so that we can make puppetry, one of the oldest, strangest and most joyful art forms, accessible to everyone, especially local families who might not otherwise get to a puppet show. With the help of some generous funders, and the aroha of our fabulous Artists, we have manged to keep our ticket prices low and offer our Saturday morning free: no ticket, no barrier, just turn up and join in.
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In the footsteps of Rose Beauchamp
Wellington's love of puppetry owes an enormous amount to Rose Beauchamp. A pianist who never set out to become a puppeteer, Rose fell for the art form and went on to help organise the very first national puppet festival, the NZ Puppet Parade that filled Lambton Quay in 1986.
She turned shadows into art, and art into activism: her internationally renowned shadow puppetry made audiences laugh and cry, but also educated and spoke out against the injustice she saw in the world. The Wellington Puppetry Festival carries that spirit forward, puppetry for everyone, in the city she helped fall in love with the art.
“Puppets are exciting, they make us laugh, and understand other cultures as well as enriching our own lives.”
