Pop Up Puppets in Stockholm 2024

Pop Up Puppets 2024, despite the ephemeral-sounding title, is a puppet festival with large, splendid and grounded performances. In its third iteration, the growing success of the festival has made marks upon Stockholm’s cultural landscape and makes future festivals look highly likely to continue and grow. This year’s shows were magnificent, complex, some studded with well-known names, some less well-known but equally splendid performers. I saw 8 shows in two days. Each one blew me away with its storytelling, atmosphere, power or technique.

I have chosen not to discuss each show separately (the shows that I saw came from Ireland, Brazil, Sweden, Lebanon, Finland, France, Israel and Belgium) but instead to remark on the overriding power, intelligence, fear, desperation, sometimes resignation and glory that marked this year’s festival, through what I believe was an unwitting similarity of theme and style: the shows were perhaps not chosen to mirror each other in style or content, but rather to showcase excellent adult puppet theatre in a range of different genres. The dominant themes that emerged, perhaps accidentally, however, were startling. Climate change: not through any didacticism but through visible and visual reckonings upon animals, humans and landscapes; lonely wanderings through bleak landscapes wracked by extremity and the powerlessness of the human being to survive, let alone control their world; the ephemerality of the human condition: effigies; traces, busts, shapes, marks upon sand, gravel and clay. Poker-faced archaeologists digging, brushing and unearthing the remains of civilisations upon civilisations through multiple layers; the inevitability of time: of memory; of the futility of work, effort and endeavour. Futility, because in the end, everything; every effort, structure, discovery was destroyed and submerged in clay, sand, plastic, or swept away by water, wind and wild nature; ancient myths jumbled with 21st-century psychology; dystopia met mundanity. But above all, the performances marked the long walk of the human race to be, to show, to mark-make, to construct, to vanquish, to try again, and again, and again, only to be met with insufferable pointlessness, despite occasional glimmerings of hope. A phrase from one of Isabel Allende’s short stories haunted me over the course of the festival: And of Clay are we Created. The characterless puppets (not a criticism, but a style) were more often emotionless, passive and unmoved. And all, or almost all of these puppets were statues, effigies, usually unarticulated in their design and inarticulate in the lack of comprehensible words. Narratives were drawn through ritual; music, soundscapes, painting, placing, poetry and wildcat storytelling so fast you could barely catch the meaning. I have painted the vision as bleak; and the vision of the fate of the human race was indeed desperately bleak and hopeless in a way that I have never seen in a group of shows together. I felt perhaps for the first time in puppetry the raw and primeval terror felt at the knowledge – ignored through stubborn impassivity – that we are Too Late. Too Late to save the world; Too Late to save ourselves and Too Late to be anything more than relegated to skeletons and bones that future creatures – unlikely to be human – will discover and study in landscapes stripped of trees, living creatures and of meaning. The strangled roar of the polar bear; the destructive print of the human hand upon the clay-painted wolf pack – or were they bears – the drilling rattle of the mining excavator. Sisyphus, Ariadne, Garcia Marquez; the references were rich and the expressions imaginative; but the message at times dreadful.

The festival, however, was never desperate or tragic; the magnificence and power of the performances was glorious. They bound us as audiences closer as we remind ourselves that the only way to be in this dystopic world which we created knowledgingly, is to be closer and together-er. And despite the fact that we are Too Late, something about the performances suggested that it Doesn’t Matter: that nature, the planet, all other life, time, is taking back its own. That at last humans are facing their own insignificance, and that that is really, really OK. Perhaps hope is in the very realization of our insignificance.

Two shows slid out from this palette of end-of-worldness. Two self-reflective pieces about self, identity and recognition dwelt upon transhumanism, medical experimentation, sexual abuse and redemption (Yael Rasooly and Duda Paiva, both headliners at the festival).

The hand of veteran genius Neville Tranter was strong in this festival. Having directed at least two of the shows, his techniques were visible elsewhere, the relationship between puppet, puppeteer, power and satire emerging in several pieces. The deceptively simple but hard-won skill of talking for your puppet whilst playing alongside your puppet, and in relationship with your puppet, was astounding in all shows. The storytelling techniques, which mixed, amongst other techniques, clay painting, live feed and knitted puppets, eschewed any sense of figurative form and instead immersed us in a world where material, more than ever, speaks. The festival was remarkable, and puppet theatre is changing. In this festival, nowhere was the human dominant. The human, or puppeteer, was with, in every single show, in such a complete way that I have never seen before in an entire suite of shows.

The now-regular festival is the brainchild of Helena Nilsson, Artistic Director of Marionetteatern, which is a well-established building-based puppet theatre within Kulturhuset in the heart of Stockholm city. Marionetteatern has been part of the Kulturhuset’s City Theatre (Stadsteatern) since 2003 but boasts its own stage and artistic management. Helena has been campaigning for a puppet festival in Stockholm for many years and it is largely to her credit that the reach and scope of puppet theatre is now being seen across the country. The next festival will take place in August 2026.

© Cariad Astles 2024