Absurd, surreal, slippery and mythic, Bristol Experimental Puppet Festival is excited to bring you a triple bill of shows in one evening!

✯ Flawed Mandrake Theatre ✯

Flawed Mandrake Theatre present 'Today' - a glimpse into the life of Daniil Kharms, a Russian surrealist writer persecuted for his work, arrested and died in prison in 1942. This is an exciting chance to see this preview, and will eventually be an hour long piece of multi disciplinary puppet theatre involving crankie, table top, shadow, and projections. Suitable for: people interested in history, politics, Russia and absurdism.

Duration: 35mins

✯ Acoustic Fovea, Baby ✯

Somewhere between a puppet show and a science experiment, ‘Acoustic Fovea, Baby’ is a non-linear exploration of intimacy, interspecies translation and the erotic. It’s the sediment passing between boulders, as they lean on one another in a constant state of transformation and exchange.

Working through sculptural storytelling and live music, the piece drifts between the feral and the ridiculous, centring the figure of the selkie whose voice becomes a site of transformation, flirtation and entrapment. Seeing all matter as animate and erotically charged, the work uses Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as an intentionality that can permeate all aspects of life.

What does it mean to speak as the other? To desire, to listen or to consume? Drawing on ongoing research from The National Oceanography Centre and Ursula Le Guin’s theoretical field of therolinguistics, the work invites us to imagine translation of a voice that is not quite human, not quite animal, but something in between. Glossy, tender and strange, it summons a slippery, mythic language that courts the tension between care and capture, between intimacy and control.

Performed by: Ronay Peele and Mallika Joy
Live music by: Kat Pegler

Duration: 30 minutes

✯ Beanpig Puppets X Liquid Library ✯

Local Bristol absurdist puppeteers transforming reality with squishy riddles encrypted in puppet realm fables, empowering the audience to dream beyond what they thought was possible and to break the boundaries of real/not real. In collaboration with Liquid Library, improvising a soundscape of normal music for harmony and disarray. Join them in dreaming of other worlds where everything has the potential to change and transform, and the puppets decide how the story ends.  

Duration: 30 minutes

✯ There will be an interval in between each show, with more surprises in the bar and the garden! (Surprises tbc) ✯

One ticket for the whole evening, tickets are sliding scale / pay what you can  - we want to offer as many low cost tickets as possible but they are still limited, so if you can afford to please consider choosing a higher tier ticket.
No one turned away for lack of funds - please email us at [email protected]

For more information about Bristol Experimental Puppet Festival please visit https://bristolexperimentalpuppetfestival.com/

Unfortunately The Cube is not wheelchair accessible due to stairs into the venue and throughout the building, for more info please see https://cubecinema.com/pages/about/accessibility/