Saturday 24 March – Saturday 14 April
We’re delighted that on our 35th year we are presenting 165 events in over 90 venues across Scotland and the North of England!
For our 35th anniversary we have created a programme of performances, workshops and animated film screenings, featuring an exciting mix of work from all over the UK. We are pleased to welcome back long established favourites Clydebuilt Puppet Theatre, Vision, Mechanics, The Folding Theatre Puppet Company and, for the first time, NUDGE Puppets,Asylon Theatre and Tenterhooks.
We’re also pleased to welcome We’re also pleased to welcome leading English companies ndigo Moon Theatre, Half a String and Lyngo Theatre, creating interesting and innovative performances featuring films and live puppetry.
We’re excited to be heading as far North as Lyth Arts Centre in Wick, down to MacArts in Galashiels, far west to An Talla in Tiree, far east to Bleachingfield Centre in Dunbar and the North of England at Kirkgate Arts. As part of our ongoing strategic engagement, we are ocused on engaging meaningfully through performances and workshops with audiences in areas of multiple deprivation and geographic isolation.
Our Puppet Animation Festival is the UK’s largest and longest established annual performing arts event for children, celebrating its 35th anniversary in 2018. Since 1986, the festival has programmed more than 4,700 puppetry performances, workshops and animated film screenings which have reached over 500,000 children, family members, participants and pupils.
In the last four years alone, the festival has toured to more than 140 venues throughout Scotland and the North of England.
Celebrating 35 years of puppetry productions, workshops and animated film screenings for families
across Scotland.
Our children’s festival is a dynamic and continually evolving partnership with local authorities, organisations and venues throughout Scotland. Every Easter over the past 34 years puppeteers have presented their work to large and enthusiastic audiences in city centre theatres, urban community and art centres and the smallest of village halls across the nation.
Our festival is the single most important annual focus for puppetry in Scotland. It helps to maintain the professional sector in this country through substantial employment opportunities, as well as showcase the work of our leading companies.
Each year we also programme productions created by puppeteers from the rest of the UK and, on occasion, from the rest of the world.
Another aspect of the Puppet Animation Festival’s content and offer which has steadily grown in importance and prominence over the last decade, particularly for our rural audiences, are our programmes of animated feature films and short films selections, combining the occasional Hollywood blockbuster with many less well-known films to which most audiences in Scotland would have no easy access to.