2025

We started the year by developing our latest family outdoor show, Upstream, with support from River Chess Smarter Water Catchment. This included running some workshops at Chiltern Open Air Museum where we gathered sound bites of the natural environment to use in the show.

In March we had a fun week puppeteering on an advert for Wilderflowers, our first ad of the year directed by Matte Cooper, before getting started on a very excited project. We were delighted to receive Arts Council Funding to finish and premiere our indoor show Three, our first show combining puppetry and mask. Our project grant gave us the time and resources to bring the show to life, with masks, set, puppets, shadows, music and a strong level of access support for the whole team.

We previewed Three in July to audiences at Farnham Maltings, before taking a break for another busy Summer season of outdoor shows. After premieres in June at Riverside Festival, Upstream was up and running for events and festivals. It was great to return to some favourite familiar locations, and meet some new audiences too. In August we were back at Little Angel Theatre for another week of Spectrum Youth Theatre, this time delivering a full five day residency which went down very well. We also managed to shoot a couple more adverts, a follow up for Ikea (from 2024) and one for Snapple too.

In October we returned to working on Three, and remounted the show ready for premieres in Tonbridge, Hertford and Folkestone. We had a great run, the highlight has to be the sold out show at Quarterhouse to an audience made up of older adults and teenagers (and their teachers), followed by a lively Q&A.

As Winter began to get going, we decided to escape the cold and took Kinder to ZiguZajg Festival in Malta at the end of November. It was a joy to share the work with international audiences and hear their responses, (the sunshine and ice creams were pretty good too).

Once we were back home, we worked on a commission to design and build two lifesize puppets for Velvet Riot Productions and Slate 32 Productions, a young dragon called Ari and a girl called Charlie. Once built we joined for a couple of days R&D at Theatre Deli in London, it was a lovely way to round off the year.