International puppet company pays visit to refugee kids

The Aegean province of İzmir is hosting the 11th International Puppet Festival until March 19. One of the world's most recognized puppet festivals, it is hosting 40 puppet theater companies from 20 countries, who will perform 42 shows 176 times at 45 indoor and outdoor venues this year. The festival welcomes art enthusiasts with a colloquy alongside three exhibitions. A total of four workshops, two of which are for professional performance artists and two of which are for children, enrich the festival program.

As a part of the program, Slovenian puppeteer company Teatro Papelito launched an exclusive event for Syrian refugee children in İzmir's Torbalı district. The theater company visited children living in tents and offered them an exciting show. The children of war, who were seeing puppets for the first time in their lives, were able to forget about their troubles for a few hours. Teatro Papelito visited refugee children guided by one of the locals who is known and appreciated for his initiatives that aim to make life easier for refugees. Despite the heavy rain, the children enjoyed the show and took interest in the puppets.

Teatro Papelito's performance "Watch the Birdy!" is a nonverbal 40-minute performance. It is classical puppetry, which means creating something from small paper pieces objects by cutting paper figures in front of the audience. In the performance, which does not have a particular storyline, the artist is accompanied by rhythmic background music and plays with the puppet forms in a simple yet creative way and transforms them into various objects.