WORLD UNIMA CONGRESS, RIJEKA

Motif: Small stylized puppet stage The 19th World UNIMA Congress will be held in Opatija (7th to 11th June 2004) and the accompanying International Puppetry Art Festival will be held in Rijeka (6th to 12th June 2004). Puppetry is a very popular branch of art in the world, and puppeteers are lively, organized and mobile. UNIMA is the oldest international theatre organization in the world that celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. It was founded in Prague in 1929 as the Union Internationale de la Marionnette or UNIMA, and presently has 59 member countries and 5854 members from all over the world. UNIMA is a non-governmental organization affiliated to UNESCO, with the goal of bringing together all those who can contribute to the development of puppetry art. UNIMA realizes this goal by organizing congresses, conferences, festivals, exhibitions, courses, workshops and by stimulating professional education and training and intensify historical and theoretical research and puppetry itself as the means of ethical and aesthetical education. There is a tradition of holding world congresses of UNIMA and presenting to the congress participants recent stage performances of puppet theatres from all over the world. Thus, together with the 19th world congress and the 75th anniversary of the founding of UNIMA there will also be held a representative puppetry festival with 27 performances from 18 countries. Among the chosen ones are also five Croatian performances, and the others come from Vietnam, Mexico, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovenia, Spain, Japan, Italy, Hungary, The Netherlands, The Czech Republic, Bulgaria, The Russian Federation, Germany, France, Canada and Norway. Part of the performances will be played in the Town Puppet Theatre in Rijeka. The greatest part of the programme, though, will animate other theatre venues: the Croatian National Theatre Ivan Zajc, the hall of the Croatian Cultural House in Suąak, the KUC Kalvarija and others. Performances will also take place in other, non-theatrical venues – squares, parks, city streets, and this street art will turn Rijeka, a town with a rich tradition of puppetry (with the first puppet group appearing here in the 30s of the last century), into a lively, huge stage, with jugglers, stilt walkers, clowns, acrobats, street-art artists, puppets and puppeteers of all sorts. As the town of Rijeka cannot be detached from water, the sea, and water is a characteristic feature of this region, it was decided that the theme of the International Puppetry Festival should be water itself, in all its literal and metaphorical meanings, which does not exclude performances that touch upon other themes. The International Puppetry Festival in Rijeka will be dedicated to the first president of the Croatian Centre of UNIMA, Dalibor Foretić, the 75th anniversary of UNIMA and the 130th anniversary of the birth of Ivana Brlić-Maľuranić, and on this occasion the Croatian Centre of UNIMA will publish the English translation of the “Stories from Ancient Times”.