Every year, the Puppet Power Conference tackles a new social issue through puppetry by using the abstractions and familiarity of the art form to delve deep into the complexities of that year’s topic.
The 2025 Puppet Power Conference, being held at the Centre for Newcomers on Oct. 18 and 19 and hosted by WP Puppet Theatre, is set to help participants with one of the thorniest current social issues in Canada: Immigration.
“Our mandate as WP Puppet Theatre is to use the power of puppetry to impact positive social change,” said Wendy Passmore-Godfrey, Founder, Artistic, and Executive Director of WP Puppet Theatre.
She said the goal for this conference was to bring together a diversity of puppetry practitioners, newcomers to Canada, people with lived immigration experience, and people looking for professional development to develop skills on how to use puppetry to better tell stories.
“The power of the storytelling and the abstraction and the metaphor and the bridging, all of those are helpful in navigating, communicating complex social issues,” said Passmore-Godfrey.
“Humans always animate our world, to make sense of it, and so that’s part of its power. Then on a really kind of pragmatic level, I call it kind of a quilting syndrome, where, in the old days, when you would get together and everybody was just doing something with their hands, but then they would chat, they would talk… they were just talking, but it wasn’t so confrontational.”
Jon Yee, vice president for external relations with the Centre for Newcomers (CFN), said that it made sense for the conference to be held at CFN given that the art form allows for newcomers to speak plainly and safely about starting over.
“It puts hard truths like war, discrimination, and unsafe housing on stage without putting the speaker in the spotlight. Puppeteering also brings culture and tradition to life through characters, rituals, songs, and proverbs, allowing the audience to immerse themselves in traditions and cultural expressions while building empathy and understanding across communities,” he said.
The presenters for this year’s conference were a selection of artists and experts from around the world, said Passmore-Godfrey.
“Karim Dakroub, he’s a psychologist and he’s been using puppetry in Syrian refugee camps and in using it is doing programs with people that are in war zones, and particularly for the Lebanon War,” she said.
Other examples of speakers included Sonia Gonzales, a puppeteer from Mexico who created an award-winning show about migration called Equipaje Minimo, and Nina Vogel from Brazil, whose multidisciplinary artistry includes using animated costumes.
Passmore-Godfrey said the lineup includes Calgary-based artist Ewa Sniatycka, who is an artist and art therapist exploring identity and belonging, Syrian Oud musician Aya Mhana, who became a Canadian citizen in 2016, and Jonathan Perkins, the founder and CEO of TEDxCalgary.
“In fact, I’m quite pleased that Jonathan Perkins is our animateur, which is a position we created as a person who watches from outside, and then brings it all together, summarizes it, and creates a call for our participants,” she said.
She said that the call would be for the participants to be able to connect through the conference to create new works of art that would themselves inspire further ideation.
“We would love to make sure we have immigrant voices themselves there too. If they’re in a position of financial challenge, then we have a bursary program. So, we’re very willing to offer complementary registration for people who have financial difficulties,” she said.
For more details on the 2025 Puppet Power Conference, see www.wppuppet.com/puppet-power.
