The winners of the second Handspring Puppetry Awards were announced at the closing ceremony of the 2011 Out the Box Festival of Puppetry and Visual Theatre, held on Sunday 11 September at the Little Theatre on UCT’s Hiddingh Campus.

The Handspring Puppetry Awards were launched at the 2010 Out the Box Festival by Handspring Puppet Company’s Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, with five categories carrying a R7,000,00 prize for each winner. The Handspring Puppetry Awards will run over a period of five years; the first three years identify artists at Out the Box only and thereafter the competition is open to any persons producing puppet theatre in the Western Cape.

The jury this year was chaired by Handspring’s Basil Jones who said that with 55 productions on the festival this year, the competition was always going to be very tough. He added that the judges were looking to celebrate the people who are expressing themselves most emotionally and intellectually through objects.

We want to inspire people to do new work and continue working in the field,” he said.

Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler co-founded the Handspring Puppet Company in 1981 and have travelled the world with their magical stories. They are the brilliant creators behind the puppets used in several productions in this country and abroad such as Tall Horse, Woyzeck on the Highveld and more recently, the outstanding War Horse, for which they received a prestigious Special Tony Award in June this year, acknowledging their superb work. Apart from stimulating a broader debate on puppetry, Handspring also aims to raise the quality of this theatre-making genre with this annual contest. Says festival director Yvette Hardie,

The Out the Box festival is a space that celebrates the highest quality in puppetry and visual performance in South Africa, pushing the boundaries of theatre consciousness and opening awareness of new theatrical languages. The Handspring Puppetry Awards is an important and prestigious acknowledgement of work that inspires both artists and audiences, and we are very grateful to Handspring for their support of the festival’s work through this award.”

The awards were handed out by Jane Taylor and Saths Moodley and the citations were read out by Chuma Sopotela and Janni Younge, who joined Handspring Puppet Company earlier this year as an Associate Director. The inclusive definition of Puppetry used for the awards was “an object manipulated on stage by a person in front of an audience”. The Nominees and Winners for this year’s awards are as follows:

The Best Puppet Production:

(This is the only category for which visiting, non-African performers or companies are eligible.)

• Nominees: Anubis (Germany), Punch & Judy in Afghanistan (Netherlands), Sadako (South Africa)
• Winner: Sadako (Family Festival) presented by the Hearts and Eyes Theatre Collective combines video projection, puppets and live actors to tell the story of Sadako Sasaki and the legend of one thousand paper cranes.

The Best Visual Theatre Production:

• Nominees: Benchmarks, Door, Inua
• Winner: Inua (Adult Festival) presented by Jori Snell and the Baba Yaga Theatre is a search for the essence (the inua) of things spiritual, emotional, physical.

The Best Puppet Design:

• Nominees: Cristina Salvoldi for Benchmarks, Hillette Stapelberg and Illka Louw for Isangqa/Sirkelpad, Gavin Younge for After Cardenio
• Winner: Gavin Younge for After Cardenio (Adult Festival), written and directed by Jane Taylor in collaboration with Gavin Younge, Aja Marneweck and Paper Body Collective, is an imagined reworking of the historically archived “missing” play, Cardenio, one of the last pieces Shakespeare wrote.

The Best Puppet Manipulation:

• Nominees: Benchmarks, Massacre de Mueda, Sadako
• Winner: Benchmarks (Adult Festival) presented by FTH:K is about three desperate and lonely individuals who get drawn into an unlikely relationship that will lead them on a journey of discovery, companionship, tragedy, and reconciliation.

The Best Puppet Debut:

• Nominees: Adolf en Sy Papier Poppe, Inja Ka Vuyo, Isangqa/Sirkelpad
• Winner: Inja ka Vuyo (Family Festival), presented by Isibane in association with UNIMA SA, is performed in isiXhosa and tells the story of a small boy with big dreams.

Special Mentions were made of the following productions:

Excellence in Theatre for Children
Mentions: Bye Moon by Pantalone Theatre, Just a Bit of Paper by Libellule Theatre

Excellence in Puppet Manipulation
Mention: The Strings of Music by Antamapantahou (Greece)

Excellence in creating inspirational Eco-theatre
Mention: Planet B by Wellworn Theatre Company, Fresco, Dark Laugh

Excellence in Physical theatre and Clowning
Mentions: Hats by Boschwhacked Productions, Vecinas by La Caravana

General Excellence
Mentions: Elev(i)ate2 by Athena Mazarakis, Madame Touxflouwe by The Space Behind the Couch, Migritude by Mwenya Kabwe, The Ogreling by FreeVoice Productions, Butcher Brothers by Dark Laugh.

UNIMA South Africa’s annual Out The Box Festival of Puppetry and Visual Performance is a 9-day multidisciplinary event celebrating innovation, diversity and sustainability. The festival provides a platform for performing and visual artists to collaborate, to push boundaries and to blur the lines of their disciplines in order to create provocative and groundbreaking work. The focus is visual performance that creates diverse imagery, using puppetry, objects, video, art, dynamic multimedia, poetry and physicality. The festival offering is wide-ranging, incorporating productions and events and shows for families, adults, the Moving Things film festival, the green platform, Thinking Out the Box conference, the Handspring Awards and more. This 6th edition of Out the Box, the largest festival of puppetry and visual theatre in Africa, attracted artists from SA and around the world and captivated audiences of all ages.

SPONSORS 2011

Confirmed sponsors for 2011 included The National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (NLDTF), The Nussbaum Foundation, Artists Project Earth (APE), Arts and Culture Trust (ACT), Cape Tercentenary Foundation, Handspring Puppet Company, Pro Helvetia, Goethe Institute, Royal Netherlands Embassy, Embassy of Belgium – Delegation of the Flemish Government, the Consulate of Greece (Cape Town), the Palestinian Embassy and the British Council, Joubert Tradauw private cellar.

In-kind sponsors and partners include Copart, Greenpop, Magnet Theatre, The Little Theatre, the Labia Cinema, GIPCA, Iziko South African Museums, ASSITEJ South Africa, Fire & Ice Protea Hotel, G&D Live, Go2 Productions, Coffee Beans Routes, International Puppet and Mime Festival of Kilkis, Observatory Community Association (OCA) and Observatory Improvement District (OBSID).

UNIMA SA is sponsored by the Department of Culture, Arts and Sports (DCAS) and some of this sponsorship contributes to the participation of the ACTIVE programme in the festival. UNIMA is also developing strong relationships with Cape Town Tourism and the City of Cape Town to build the brand of the festival into the future, and with The Learning Trust, to support the development and employability of young artists.