The healing power of puppetry

Why has the puppet been attender of man from ancient times on? What is it on it that people can not be without it? Is it maybe that it cannot die or that it is freed of basic fears that overwhelm people? Puppets walk along the thin path between being and not-being and see on both sides – the one that we can see, and the other one that is invisible to us. People take them into their hands that they could touch the worlds that are not within their reach. The one that touches macrocosm, where people could meet gods, and the other that embraces microcosm of man, and shows them mysteries of their own being. Puppet as a material being is borrowing our lives in order to live its own. People give loan of thoughts and emotions, words and sighs to the puppets. Whenever a puppet cries, tears run out of puppeteer’s eyes. They might be seen even on spectator’s cheeks. That’s partly the reason that puppets are not present in the theatre only. They can be met in our everyday life. And also in psychotherapy.

Unterrichtssprachen:
Englisch/Slowenisch/Deutsch in gut und leicht verständlicher Art und Weise!

Jelena Sitar Cvetko
stage manager (dramaturg)
Has been a puppet director, animator, publisher and pedagogue. She has directed more than 40 puppet shows in professional theaters, edited the central Slovenian puppet review Lutka for several years and has been the artistic director of LGL, the main puppet theater in Ljubljana. Her chief researching and productional project is Zapik theatre, in which she is successful together with her partner Igor Cvetko for almost two decades. Since 2010 she is lecturing puppetry, theater and media as a docent (senior university teacher) at the University of Primorska in Koper, Faculty of Pedagogics. In the field of psychosocial interventions with puppets she has participated in three European projects.