Puppet Power 2025 - Saturday Day Pass

Saturday Day Pass – October 18, 2025
For those unable to attend the full conference, the Saturday Day Pass provides an inspiring in person one-day experience at Puppet Power 2025 for just $55.

This pass includes:

• Four live-streamed watch parties hosted by a knowledgeable facilitator, featuring insightful presentations and performances. WP Puppet Theatre is also proud to offer the watch parties in English or Spanish.

• Three guided mini puppet-making activities designed to spark creativity and provide hands-on learning opportunities. Puppet making will take place in between the speaker presentations.

• Boxed lunch catered by Ethnicity.

The Saturday Day Pass is an excellent option for participants seeking a focused, meaningful engagement with Puppet Power’s programming in a single day.

Party 1:
Saturday, October 18th
9:15am - 10:15am - Miguel Albi Araujo and Vida Oliveira - Portugal

Cegonha – Bando de Criação is a puppet theatre group founded in Brazil in 2017 and is now based in Portugal. Led by Miguel Albi Araujo and Vida Oliveira, Cegonha weaves diverse artistic languages to tell non-hegemonic stories, collaborating with artists, curators, and institutions on innovative puppet-based creations.

In 2019, Cegonha – Bando de Criação created What’s My Name, Mom?, a puppet theatre show about refugees and immigration. Inspired by Kate Milner’s My Name is Not Refugee, Sebastião Salgado’s Exodus, and interviews with refugees, it premiered in Brazil and was later adapted to film during the pandemic. The screen version featured in UNHCR’s 2021 Refugee Day celebrations and was recognized by the Prague Quadrennial as a major Brazilian puppet production (2019–2022). At this conference, Miguel will share the creative process, exploring the show’s impact, challenges, and lessons learned to inspire future puppetry work.

Party 2:
Saturday, October 18th
11:00am - 12:00pm - Fedelis Kyalo - Kenya

Fedelis is a Kenyan puppeteer, educator, and director. He leads Puppets 254, founded Krystal Puppet Theatre, and as of May 2025 serves on UNIMA International Executive Committee. Through workshops and performances, he uses puppetry to address health, governance, and environmental issues across Kenya and internationally.

Showcasing Tears by The River: Fostering Understanding and Empathy Through Puppetry from an African Lens, Fedelis presents a poignant puppetry session exploring African migration stories. Focusing on young migrants crossing from Morocco to Spain, it highlights the dangers, hardships, and hopes of their journeys. He also shares his work at Kakuma Refugee Camp, where puppetry workshops helped South Sudanese refugees process trauma and share their stories. Beyond migration, Fedelis demonstrates how puppetry is used across Kenya and East Africa to address critical issues like health, governance, and environmental conservation. This talk powerfully shows how puppetry can foster empathy, ignite conversation, and promote meaningful social change.

12:00pm - 12:45pm - LUNCH

Party 3:
Saturday, October 18th
12:45pm - 1:45pm - Karim Dakroub - Lebanon

Dr. Karim Dakroub, theatre director, puppeteer, psychologist, and professor, founded KHAYAL Association and merges theatre with psychotherapy. His acclaimed puppet plays support healing, education, and social change globally.

Puppetry as a medium of psychosocial animation

Karim's presentation, Puppetry as a Medium of Psychosocial Animation, outlines his intervention model using puppetry as a tool for expression and communication in crisis and displacement contexts. It focuses on training activists—social workers, psychologists, and artists—who work with refugees and displaced people of all ages. He will share practical training steps and techniques, drawn from field experience and informed by various theoretical frameworks, including the psychosocial approach (IOM), Embodiment-Projection-Role (S. Jennings), and transitional phenomena (D. Winnicott). This multidisciplinary approach highlights how puppetry can support emotional resilience, storytelling, and healing in vulnerable communities facing trauma and transition.

Party 4:
Saturday, October 18th
2:30pm - 3:30pm - Sonia González - Mexico

Sonia has over 40 years’ experience as a puppeteer. She is a Literature graduate, and founder of Teatro Naku Mx. She has written/directed 25+ acclaimed plays, showcased at festivals across Latin America, Asia, and Europe. Also, a poet, teacher, and screenwriter, she leads international workshops on puppetry and playwriting. Sonia’s life across Venezuela, Italy, and now Mexico has shaped her deep interest in migration. She works to harness the powerful, consciousness-raising potential of puppet theatre to explore and express migration's personal and social dimensions.

As a migrant herself, her work is deeply rooted in lived experience. After arriving in Mexico, she created a lambe-lambe show about migration called Equipaje Mínimo, which has been performed several times to great success. It was awarded the Maleta Abierta prize for migration-themed work in 2024. Sonia also led workshops for migrant women focused on making cloth dolls and will share both of these powerful and positive experiences—the play and the workshop—and reflect on how they’ve connected art, storytelling, and healing.