Puppetry Fest suspended due to funding shortfall
Team hoping for quick return
There is to be no Newcastle Puppetry Festival this year due to a lack of funding, say the organisers at arts charity Moving Parts Arts.
The announcement on Facebook, introduced as ‘The Bad News’, states: “Against all of our best efforts as a tiny team, we have been unable to secure Arts Council England funding to be able to make the 2026 Newcastle Puppetry Festival go ahead.
“We wish to say a huge thank you to the 250+ artists who took the time to apply, especially the shortlisted artists who have held the dates for close to a year.
“Also a big thank you to our venue and community partners, and other funders, for backing the 2026 festival proposal.
“The journey does not end here though – we will try again next year.”
An optimistic note on the Moving Parts Arts website advises pencilling in the dates April 3-11, 2027.
Last year’s festival, the sixth, took place during the Easter school holidays, from April 19-27, beginning with a parade and free performances on Northumberland Street.
The 2024 festival attracted around 28,000 people, including visitors from around the country and even overseas, enabling the organisers to describe it as “one of the largest and (most) celebrated events of its kind in the UK”.
This week’s announcement added under ‘The Good News’ that funding from other supporters would enable a programme of Easter holiday activities to go ahead from April 4 to 12.
These include the first ever Moving Parts Puppet Film Fest at the Tyneside Cinema; a week of puppet-making workshops for adults; 12 free performances of A Treasury of Tyneside Tales to be performed on the grass in front of Great North Museum: Hancock, which is also to be the site of a community installation called Wind Garden (with workshops for participants taking place from February 16 to 20; and exhibitions featuring work produced during community workshops.
Moving Parts Arts was founded in 2017 by creative producer, musician and theatre maker Kerrin Tatwood, now artistic director, and Will Steele who left last year to focus on his own Life and Limb Puppets, based in Gateshead.
Newcastle Puppetry Festival has involved many people in making puppets, supervised by professionals, and opened the eyes of audience members to the many possibilities of a wide-ranging and popular art form.
It added greatly to the cultural fabric of Tyneside and those who have learned to love it will be hoping that those 2027 dates can be inked in before too long.