The Ljubljana Puppet Theatre (LPT) is the main Slovenian puppet theatre staging puppet and drama performances for children, youngsters and adults. Established as a public institution in 1948, it is also the caretaker of a precious theatrical heritage displayed at the Museum of Puppetry in Ljubljana Castle.
The theatre manages five regular and several smaller, occasional venues. At these venues, which offer seating for approximately a thousand people, it produces fifteen premieres a year and is visited by around 110,000 spectators.
Variety of visual expressions
Its programme presents a fusion of both traditional puppetry knowledge and bold exploration, enabled by the development of modern technologies and new materials. Its performances offer a variety of visual expressions, re-examine the proven puppet practices and confirm the endless and unimagined possibilities of puppet expression. Staged in our theatre are popular stories from national and international literary treasure trove and also some less known original stories, conceived by Slovenian and foreign theatre makers and their collaborators with their very own performative expressions. In recent seasons the theatre’s programme has also been co-created by some acknowledged foreign top creators, such as Fabrizo Montecchi (Gioco Vita) and Chiara Guidi (Societas Raffaello Sanzio) from Italy, Jiři Havelka from Czech Republic, Brazilian artist Duda Paiva, Ulrike Quade from the Netherlands and Anja Suša from Serbia ...)
Regularly preserved within our programme are also some 35 repeat performances from previous seasons. Doctor Faustus is a marionette miniature from 1938, conceived by Milan Klemenčič – the pioneer of Slovenian puppet theatre –, whereas the classical marionette performance Žogica Marogica (Spotty the Ball) by Jan Malik, directed by the founder of modern Slovenian puppet theatre Jože Pengov, remains continuously on our repertoire since its premiere in 1951.
The Ljubljana Puppet Theatre also pays special attention to cultural and artistic education in all its dimensions and at the national level cooperates in the endeavours to strengthen the standards and systemically place quality cultural content in the programmes of educational institutions. Every two years, it therefore joins forces with the Slovenian Theatre Institute and Cankarjev dom in organizing the Golden Stick Festival, a national festival providing an overview of theatre performances for children and youth.
LUTKE International Puppet Festival
The second festival organized by the LPT, which takes place every even-numbered year, is the LUTKE International Puppet Festival. This festival brings to Slovenia the best foreign puppet productions and promotes all kinds of contemporary interdisciplinary and genre developments. In addition to its regular programme, the LPT has in recent years developed a special programme profile for emerging artists and forms named BiTeater. This programme includes experimental productions that enrich the medium of puppet theatre with other artistic registers. BiTeater traces the limits of LPT’s performative variety, which ranges from cultivating the marionette tradition to contemporary problem plays for youth.
The LPT is a member of the International Puppetry Association UNIMA, ASSITEJ – International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People, the Slovenian Puppetry Artists Institution, Small Size, an international association focused on productions for early years (under six years of age), and one of the founding members of NEECPA, a network of puppet centers joining primarily the key players from Scandinavia, the Baltic region and Russia.
Activities of LPT are representing complexity and richness and will be enriched with a few new breakthrough productions of the 2016/17 season. This is why we suggest that you follow us on our path – you will not regret it.
