Six years ago, the Out the Box Festival of Puppetry and Visual Performance was a one-day experience. This year it’s nine days of collaboration, innovation and inspiration.
The festival is a multidiscipli-nary event that provides a platform for performing and visual artists to push boundaries and blur the lines of their discipline to create provocative and groundbreaking work.
“We see Out The Box as an event magnet for Cape Town,” said festival director Yvette Hardie at the recent launch.
The festival includes:
l The Adult Festival features 30 local and international productions from cutting-edge artists from Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy and others.
l Family and Schools Festival – equal weight is given to high quality artistic experiences for children and youth in terms of performances and interactive workshops.
l Out the Box goes green this year, working with Copart and Greenpop to raise awareness about climate change. This platform will be situated at the Magnet Theatre, the Theatre Arts Admin Collective and other sites around Observatory.
l The Moving Things Film Festival showcases some of the best puppetry and stop-frame films made in the past 100 years.
l The one-day Thinking Out the Box conference programme will feature Mozambican masks, medical puppetry and the Handspring Puppet company.
l Unima SA’s training and development programme will give underdeveloped artists a chance to participate in the festival and vie for a place in the Active Puppets mentorship programme.
l The sixth Out The Box Puppetry and Visual Performance Festival takes place from September 3 to 11 in Cape Town and Observatory.
films sought
The Out the Box Festival of Puppetry and Visual Performance is calling for stop-motion and puppetry films for the third Moving Things Film Festival.
Films will be screened at the Labia on Orange and the festival will host workshops and master classes with stop-motion animators.
A maximum of five films an artist will be considered and the deadline for submissions is July 15. Contact the festival office at 021 462 5811 for more information.