About The Festival

“Small scale, small audience and intimate space-- the three major elements of the Close To You International  Puppet Festival bring their audience a special experience of connecting life and theater.   

It seems like a pout to react against the framework for hardware of regular performance art, yet it actually declares that beside the habitual way to observe the “big, more, and distant,” we’d like to pick up those fabulous ideas of the “small and exquisite”, which, in the past, was due to the lack of resource but seemed to be even more kaleidoscopic. The little, exquisite and agile of an object (puppet) is just right to present the characteristic for the “small.” Flying-group Theater has been using the “puppet” as it’s main element to create works, and therefore everything seems to click with each other through this concept when it collects, induces, and explains the “puppet” to the audience.

If we have the “small” as the theme, then the unique feature of Close To You International Puppet Festival is to look for and create the “small things” that we might miss by carelessness. Therefore, we’d like to walk with the audience from this “small” theater to the next “small” theater. Since there are many tiny details around following the process of walking, it becomes an important spirit of Close To You Festival to “walk to see the show, and keep walking after the show.”

In terms of going to the theater, “ watching by walking” could be also considered as an extended show of Close To You International Puppet Festival. You can move among streets and alleys and take intermission as a free and easy stroll. The guide would introduce the history of the areas along the way, and share the private-home-cuisine sights and the observation of the inhabitants’ lives. What’s even more is that you might see an out-of-the-theme “show beyond show” on the way. Through the intermission carefully designed, the audience has the opportunity to ruminate about the “small” and “life.” Our program for this year is base on the connection between “Puppet and object.” We’ve invited several masters from the abroad, and we also have some experienced theater directors in Taiwan who leap over the framework of their previous works and make utmost experimental brand new works.

Considering the over-all condition, there seems to be an imbalanced cost-benefit in Close To You International Puppet Festival. It is well worth observing that, in the future, how to have a dialogue with the trend of industrialization of art, how to transform organically, and even more, how far that Close To You Festival could move forward under our cultural values. 

Pei-yu Shih, Curator
Flying Group Theatre