Regional Women Lead Master Classes and Professional Development Opportunities.

We’re thrilled to be able to offer these opportunities to local artists as part of Femme Folks Fest. All Master Classes and Opportunities are offered to participants at no charge and are a core mandate of the festival. We are grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts for their support of Regional Women Lead.

Regional Women Lead Master Class in Puppetry

Led by Viktorija Kovac

1pm-5pm March 17

Visitor Centre/Old Train Station
10 Father David Bauer Drive Waterloo, ON N2L 6M3

Viktorija Kovac is a theatre director-creator and producer, with Cosmic Fishing Theatre, based in the Waterloo Region. She is a graduate of the Banff Puppet Theatre Intensive led by the Old Trout Puppet Workshop. That workshop explored the creation and performance modalities connected to the work of the Old Trout’s as well as additional, abstract approaches to the art of puppet and mask-orientated performance through collaborative consensus-based ensemble practice. She holds a Joint Honors Degree in Drama and Speech Communication from the University of Waterloo and has trained in direction with Richard Rose, Joel Greenberg, and Anne-Marie Donovan. With the primary goal to increase diverse representation on the regional stage, Viktorija builds balanced creative teams to produce intercultural, experimental, and evocative theatre, with increased participation and visibility for female artists. Recent credits include: an adaption of King Lear, experimenting with aesthetics of large-scale/human size puppetry; and a devised creation, called The B Party, which is a semiotic exploration of Barbie. Next, she will be directing Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King, in association with MT Space associate artists, and creating DiSCoVeR, a futuristic puppetry play for a the very youngest audience (36 months and under).

Viktorija will lead participants to collectively explore and discover object manipulation and to consider the possibilities and the importance of incorporating puppetry into contemporary theatre and performance creation. Participants will be directed through a set of physical theatre-based exercises and encouraged to devise a “scratch” performance using puppetry. This is an inclusive workshop for artists with all levels of experience and cultural backgrounds. 

Why choose puppetry in a technologically driven world? Puppetry is a specialized art-form within the Performing Arts and has a deep root in contemporary and experimental theatre, and it is an ancient craft. By animating puppets, the performer denies themselves the vanity of presenting themselves and predominantly communicates using objects. The performer can create themselves a new and be perceived themselves a new. Puppetry has the capacity to reflect our world through the image and the illusion it creates, and this reflection can somehow be better received than the uncomfortable truth we live in. In this way, puppetry can serve politicized ideas and narratives, but also emote complexities and imagined worlds, through stylization and aesthetics, offering us a unique vision of the world we wish to live in. Through interpretation, synchronisation and animation, objects such as puppets, or raw materials, can build into an experiential whole in the imagination of the audience.