site.btaInternational Ankara Puppet Festival Director Marina Yuce: Interest in Puppet Theatre in Turkiye Grows

Puppet theatre is gathering a growing following in Turkiye, Marina Yuce, Director of the International Ankara Puppet Festival, told BTA's Nora Cholakova.

The 10th edition of the festival (October 13-20) is organized by Yuce, who was also manager of Theatre Tempo. The event has been held every year since 2015.

Puppet theatres from nine countries, including two from Bulgaria, took part this year.

Yuce talked to BTA about the characteristics of this year's festival, the growing interest in puppet theatre in Turkiye, and the difficulties encountered by puppeteers.

How are things going at the festival this year?

Things are great, even though we lost our theatre (Tempo) last year. It was housed in a privately owned building which had to be sold. This made things somewhat difficult, but this year we have great sponsors - DenizBank again is our general sponsor. Something else happened in 2024 that has not happened before - the town halls provided premises for the festival. It actually became the Ankara City Festival, held in different halls, in different parts of the city.

This year we have not given special awards. Still, each show of every theatre - from all nine countries - won awards. The children also responded wonderfully. During the week we had performances in schools, with shows for adults in the evenings. Everything is going very well.

This year we also held an international online forum, ten more countries joined in on the topic of "Puppetry, Classical Education and the Path of Its Development". Professors, teachers, actors and theatre directors participated in it. The forum was organized by the St. Petersburg Institute of Performing Arts, the National University of Astana, and we also partnered with Bursa Uludag University (Turkiye).

We dealt with the entire organization of the forum. Uludag University will print reports in Turkish, English and Russian in a book or a magazine where one can get information about puppet theatre. This is very important because there is no  puppet theatre education in Turkiye. There has been no such thing until now.

Are people more interested in the festival this year?

Notably, the adults are showing interest now - something we have been trying to achieve for ten years. Children do not choose a show, it is the adult who takes them there, and the adult needs to understand something about art so as to take a child to a good show. That is why it is very important for us that adults should understand the beauty of this art. This year Ankara Municipality advertised our festival on big screens and the halls are full. The performances are extremely good. We organizers have been very busy as our staff is very small, but I think everything is great.

Do you still face many difficulties in Turkiye or is working in puppet theatre somewhat easier now?

There always are difficulties. This year there are many people. For instance, this is the first time we have had a troupe from Georgia. There are 92 participants this year. We haven't had a festival like this before.

Last year we not only lost our theatre, we also lost our troupe because the economic situation in Turkiye keeps getting more complicated as prices are rising. Amidst this scary inflation, we could not keep our employees, even though they had been working with us for a long time. And now we have four people dealing with the organization of the festival.

What about your plans?

I cannot say what we will do next because everything changes so quickly in Turkiye, and the world has changed so much after the pandemic. It is really difficult to plan anything.

We used to start organizing everything a year in advance. But now everyone tends to react very late, which complicates things. There are situations like this, but we want to develop in this direction. We want to continue showing all these wonderful productions to the people of Ankara.