Queering Puppets Festival
The international Queering Puppets Festival Amsterdam will once again provide a stage for visual theatre, puppetry, and performance at Plein Theater from 1 to 6 April. The theme of this 5th anniversary edition, ‘The Nature of Things’ offers a radical response to Eurocentric and colonial perspectives on sexuality, gender, and racial framing, while questioning the assumption that humans stand at the centre of nature.
Queering Puppets Festival Amsterdam is queer, feminist, activist and above all stands out in quirkiness. It is the only festival in the Netherlands that links puppetry and object theatre for adults to queer imagination. In the safe space created by puppetry, everyone can be who they, she or he want to be. Expect a challenging mix of bodies, stories that refuse to conform to existing dominant structures, visual and erotic outbursts, edgy performances, stimulating lectures, queer food, and clubby afters.
The festival aims to break with binary thinking. Man versus woman, human versus animal, nature versus capitalism, and normal versus deviant. These boundaries are implicitly violent, oppressive, and never neutral—they are instruments of power, linked to exclusion, discipline, and destruction.
But the nature of things cannot be pinned down. It is fluid, changeable, rebellious. It reveals itself in bodies that do not fit into a single category, in biodiversity that refuses to be silenced, in voices that have been suppressed for centuries.
Visual theatre makers and performers from across the world will come together during the festival to present bold, imaginative and pleasantly unsettling shows and performances in which puppetry and object theatre break through the boundaries of identity.
Come to the Plein Theater and embrace the magic, not as an escape, but as resistance, as a collective source of strength.