World in a Weekend Festival returns for third year

A festival that has become a Stratford summer staple will soon be back for its third year.

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The World in a Weekend Festival: International Puppet & Music Festival, presented by SpringWorks~PuppetWorks! in conjunction Stratford Summer Music, will bring together talented puppeteers and musicians from across Canada, as well as Spain, Boston and Mexico (via Minneapolis), when it returns on Aug. 1-4.

While SpringWorks has been offering puppetry since it was founded in 2011, it’s still a performing art that is not particularly well-known in southern Ontario, artistic producer Eileen Smith noted.

“Puppetry is an art form that’s well-known all over the world, but we in North America, and certainly in parts of this region, have less knowledge or access to puppetry. So we are bringing all kinds of different things that you might not have known,” Smith said.

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Among the many offerings will be Les Kakous, large creature puppets that seem to be straight out of a fantasy story. These enormous strolling puppets can be seen next Saturday and Sunday walking around downtown Stratford, Market Square and Veterans Drive.

“They are sort of a cross between a seahorse and a dodo. They’re 12-feet tall and incredibly beautiful,” Smith said.

The four-day festival will offer a wide variety of both free and ticketed events. This includes shows suitable for all ages and a few intended for more mature audiences. One show that’s tackling a more serious topic is Migraciones/Migrations (for ages 10 and older), which will present the story of migrating refugees through multiple mediums, including life-sized puppets, sand drawings, shadow puppetry projections, live music and poetry in English and Spanish. This 50-minute show presented by Paradox Teatro and featuring puppeteers Sofía Padilla and Davey T. Steinman, will have several shows at Factory 163.

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“It’s talking about why people would leave their home forever. (It’s) a beautiful, sensitive look at the complexities of border crossing, in particular the American-Mexican border. I saw this work at an international festival a couple of years ago, and it’s quite beautiful,” Smith said.

Stratford Summer Music will also be presenting four ticketed concerts during the weekend. These include Toronto-based Viva Mexico Mariachi; Friday Night Live at the Revival House, featuring some all-star jazz artists; Gregory Oh’s Lessons in Failure; and Tio Chorinho, an ensemble performing Brazilian choro music.

Over the course of the weekend, festival attendees will have the chance to learn how to do some puppetry themselves through several engaging workshops. These include sand-drawing projections and shadow puppetry, once again with Paradox Theater; Make Your Own Song/Book with Alexandra Gorlin-Crenshaw; and Making Puppets Work for Children and their Grown-Ups, with Théâtre des Petites Âmes.

Putting on a four-day festival that’s chock full of engaging events can take a year or more of planning, Smith explained.

“It’s a full-time job on the part of the administrative leadership, plus marketing staff, plus grant writing, plus fundraising. So putting on free programming is actually not great. We have to raise all the money to pay for the free offerings, as well as international artists,” she said.

“We keep it a fulsome and entertaining engagement,” she added.

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