Queering Puppets Festival

Queering Puppets Festival Amsterdam offers a stage to genre-transcending forms of visual theater and puppetry since 2022. A fusion of craft and technology, where traditional categories vanish in front of the eye of the beholder.

Plein Theater and Puppetry Workspace defy the norm with this festival full of colorful visual outbursts from NL and abroad. QPFA is LGBTQI+ friendly, feminist, activist and above all standing out in queerness!

The Feminine & Nature

This year the focus is on the themes of femininity and nature in relation to society. The festival and it’s program is pro connection and emancipation, anti war and power, pro strength and intuition, and pro the unseen and untold that is considered subordinate in society.
Femininity, the creative, the vulnerable ánd Mother Earth.

 HAG  Cézanne Tegelberg & Company

During the performance HAG – Cézanne Tegelberg & Company, you will wander as an invisible spectator through an intimate ritual in the Chapel
of Hotel Arena on Sunday 2 April.

The term ‘hag’ ’ is used to oppress, to stigmatise, to curse, but she is so much more, the witch. She is the wise woman, the untamable, the clear one. She who refuses to adapt to our systems. She is the primal force, the razor sharp intuition from which many a modern woman shuts herself off in fear of being declared insane. Not this time. Not if it’s up to her. She is appearing everywhere,  everywhere, and she shall be free. 

With this performance we delve deep into the ocean of our collective memory in search of the primal female, the hag in all of us. In search of a song we have long forgotten. As invisible witnesses, we travel through a moving labyrinth and find ourselves ridiculously close to an intimate ritual of refinding and reclaiming. It is time we remember. It is time we return home. 

Opening QPFA2023
& 40 year anniversary Plein theater 

The festival opens on March 28 with the exhibition Vulva Variety by Meike van de Akker (theatermaker/ceramist) and the performance #17 by The Paper Ensemble in Plein theater.

This not only kick-offs the second edition of the Queering Puppets Festival Amsterdam, but also the celebration of Plein Theater’s 40th anniversary!

“Queering is something we do,

rather than something we are

(or are not).

Even the term queer itself can be queered, because much of queer theory involves working to fight against normalization even in the field itself.”