Six European Theatres Linked Under the Transport Project

The three-year project Transport, led by the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre and involving the Maribor Puppet Theatre and Estonia’s Eesti Noorsooteater, Lithuania’s Klaipėdos Lėlių Teatras, Poland’s Białostocki Teatr Lalek and the Czech Republic's Divadlo Alfa Plzeň puppet theatres, has been awarded a €1 million grant in the recent call for cooperation projects under the Creative Europe Programme, funded by the European Commission.

Six producers will create six small independent productions directed by Tino Grabnar by next September. The productions will explore how means of transport shape the pace of our lives and the imprint they leave on the environment. They will address different aspects of the global interconnectedness of a world in which we can no longer live in isolation from each other. The individual independent performances will interact and connect with each other on several levels, both structurally and thematically. The successive viewing of the different performances under this project will thus create a new dramaturgical whole. It is therefore a theatre series or a puppet omnibus, which is why the focus of the second part of the European project is on touring to different European festivals, where several performances of the Transport project will be held concurrently. 

The Transport project is committed to sustainability not only in terms of content, but also in terms of production. The partners are working on small and mobile performances—one of the most important issues raised by the project concerns the future of theatre touring. The production of sets and puppets started in May at the Maribor Puppet Theatre, where masters of different profiles from the partner theatres participated in the theatre's workshops and exchanged their knowledge. On 16 September this year, the Maribor Puppet Theatre will host the first premiere of the Transport project: Cargo. The performance will also be presented at the end of September in Ljubljana as part of the Puppets 2024 festival. The entire omnibus will be presented for the first time to the Slovenian public in October 2025 as part of the European Capital of Culture GO! 2025, where it will be presented by the partner organisation CTA Gorizia at the Alpe Adria Puppet Festival.