The world is now just a week away.
Stratford’s streets and parks will be taken over by songs, books, puppets and more as the Springworks Festival’s ‘World in a Weekend’ kicks off its 2024 event on Thursday, Aug. 1. The action continues through the weekend at various venues across the city, and festival organizer Eileen Smith is excited to unveil this year’s robust lineup.
“We are thrilled to host our international artists, and what I find so amazing and magical about puppets is their ability to create whimsical fun and bring insight to complex topics,” Smith said. “Migraciones/Migrations, joining us from Mexico via Minneapolis, was created ‘in honour of all the people whose needs push them to migrate far away from their homes forever’. San drawing, life-size and shadow puppetry, projection and live music provide an hour’s worth of richly layered storytelling.”
That’s just one of the new features at this year’s festival, and Smith didn’t stop there. Arriving from Spain, Pipa is a delightful glove puppet who invites the whole family to join in the fun - those shows will be hosted for free at Veterans Park. Another new add-on to the festival will be workshops with a slate of touring artists.
“No experience required - you can learn about sand drawing and shadow puppetry, or consider making a pop-up book to go along with a song or story,” she said. “It’s led by a beautiful songstress coming from Montreal who creates a lovely, delicate and intertwining of song and paper puppet magic in her performance work, Song/Book.”
With puppetry being one of those art forms that people in this part of the world don’t experience often, Smith is excited to bring even more exposure to the local audience. Sure, the Muppets and Friendly Giant are one thing, but World in a Weekend offers a vastly new and different way to experience it.
“Now we can also share shadow puppets and long string marionettes and rod puppets and stilt-walking puppet creatures and so much more - we are very excited,” she said. “We have been privileged to meet some amazing artists at other international festivals and look forward to inviting puppets from around the world to our home in Stratford. We’re also hoping to create our very own resident magical giant puppet(s) that can come out to delight our family, friends and visitors not just in the summer but over the course of the seasons.”
World in a Weekend’s full schedule of events and locations (complete with a mobile calendar link) can be found here.
