Out The Box Festival

The Out The Box Festival claims to be the largest puppetry and visual performance festival in Africa.

Also billed as Out The Box Festival of Puppetry and Visual Performance or simply as Out The Box

International festivals using this name

The South African event is not to be confused with a number of other international festivals using the more familiar title Out of the Box, including a children's theatre festival held annually in Queensland, Australia[1], The 100Hands company's Out of the Box Festival 2.0 in Breda, Netherlands[2] and the more recent Dutch music festival presented at De Kuilen in Langenboom, Netherlands[3] and a bi-annual festival in French-speaking Switzerland, which aims to rethink the relationship between art and disability.[4].

The festival

Instigated by Janni Younge in 2005, the Out The Box Festival of Puppetry and Visual Performance developed under the leadership of Aja Marneweck and Janni Younge. It is run by UNIMA (The International Union of Puppetry South Africa) the annual Out The Box Festival of Puppetry and Visual Performance is a 9-day multidisciplinary event which celebrates 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.[5]

History

Out The Box began as a highly experimental one-day event of performances and workshops at the Little Theatre in Cape Town that grew exponentially within two years into the largest, and only, puppetry festival in Southern Africa. What makes the festival unique is that it is run and created by puppeteers. The festival holds a large focus on experimentation, multidisciplinary crossovers and artistic development in fringe venues. Many international companies have performed on the festival including: Theatertjie Magische (the Netherlands); Théâtre des Alberts (Réunion); Neville Tranter (the Netherlands); La Ribot (Switzerland); Beth MacMahon (Australia); the Kenya Institute of Puppet Theatre (KIPT, Kenya); Les Grandes Personnes (France); and Drew Colby (Great Britain), amongst others. In the initial period of its development, it also separated itself into two components – the adult festival and the children’s festival. This differentiation was designed to deliberately highlight the legitimacy of puppetry as an art form relevant to adult audiences.