АННА ИВАНОВА-БРАШИНСКАЯ

Hello and welcome to my website!

My personal relationship with puppetry began when such creative titans as E. G. Craig and Tadeusz Kantor revealed to me what a puppet can be. For a long time my interests remained purely research-based. I wondered why human culture had produced so many various types of puppets and, searching for the answer, I wrote my PhD dissertation about the philosophical aspects of the puppet technology.

After 10 years of teaching Puppet Theatre History and Theory courses at the St.-Petersburg Theatre Arts Academy, (and running the Puppetry Department at the same time), I was invited in 2001 by Ari Ahlholm to Finland, to the Turku Arts Academy, where together we have built the only regular education system for puppeteers in the Nordic and Baltic countries, and invented an unique project-based method of teaching puppetry.

My pedagogical experiments have in time inspired me to express my own ideas artistically, and in 2009 I have begun a career as a director. I have directed visual-theater shows in Finland, Poland, and Lithuania, most of them based on the original dramatic material.

In 2005, along with my Finnish colleagues we established an independent artistic association for promoting puppetry in Finland – The Turku International Puppetry Connection (The TIP-Connection), and since 2010, we are hosting the Turku International Puppetry Festival – The TIP-Fest.

Thanks to puppetry I have discovered a lot of impossible things about human nature and humankind. And still, I am absolutely certain that “somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known” (Oscar Wilde).