One of the most important European festivals of (contemporary) puppetry LUTKE 2026, bijenalni festival koji donosi nove i svježe ideje tog najpropulzivnijeg izvedbenog izraza u stalnim mijenama. No, festival LUTKE je puno više od tek pažljivo odabranih predstava – one su mjesto susreta ponajboljih lutkara, redatelja, ravnatelja i festivalskih voditelja. U prepletu predstava, izložbi, okruglih stolova, predavanja te formalnih i neformalnih druženja, LUTKE postaje mjesto stvaranja čvrstih veza između kazališta, nezavisnih družina i pojedinaca, festival iz kojeg izviru koprodukcije i projekti koji oblikuju lutkarski izraz sutrašnjice.

This year’s LUTKE programme included the largest European puppetry project of the previous year – Transport – which replaced animation, as the basis of puppetry, with stop-motion animation, showing that puppetry, in its take-off towards the new, no longer needs even its own solid foundations. We also saw the currently most sought-after puppetry performance Tempo, created as a co-production of Finland’s WHS and Ljubljana Puppet Theatre. In this performance, an invisible hand animates actors, carpets, chairs, metronomes and the entire stage world, playing with common sense and the basic laws of nature and, through this play, bringing the audience to a point where utter astonishment and boundless enthusiasm meet.

Third-year students of Acting and Puppetry at the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, together with several Erasmus students, were guests at the festival as spectators and participants in round tables. They met numerous puppeteers, famous puppetry professionals, managers of puppetry festivals and theatre directors, which could be important in their future professional work.

The group was led by assistant professor Igor Tretinjak, PhD, who carried out research into the connections between Slovenian and Croatian puppetry, with an emphasis on Zlatko Bourek. The research was conducted as part of the institutional research project “Culture, Identity and Sustainability: New Scientific Paradigms of Traditional and Contemporary Cultural Spaces (KultID)” of Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek and the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU. Tretinjak also represented our academy at the festival’s formal meeting of guests where he initiated discussions with numerous colleagues about future collaborations and their participation in the second scientific and professional conference “Visual Languages of Puppetry” which will be held in Osijek in June 2027 as part of the KultID project.