It may have been a desire for immersion in another world that prompted my journey to Montreal’s Festival International de Casteliers, a week-long celebration of puppetry in all its manifestations. The wide-ranging art form remains fairly marginal in Toronto, but in Montreal, there’s significant and growing interest — you can visit buildings dedicated to puppetry development and performance, or even complete a two-year specialized diploma.
Curated by Louise Lapointe, Casteliers’ founder and outgoing artistic director (Myriame Larose stepped into the role last fall), the festival’s 21st annual lineup showcased 11 productions from Quebec and western Europe. The programming sated my thirst for new aesthetics, thanks to a forward-thinking definition of puppetry in which performers manipulate a panoply of substances from pencils to paper to light. Exploration was also a frequent narrative anchor: most of my favourite shows — both in English and uncaptioned French — depicted protagonists leaving behind their regular life for alternate, more puppet-filled realities.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice is an iconic traveller of surreal dimensions, and in Une Traversée, a loose adaptation of Through the Looking Glass, Belgium’s Compagnie Tchaïka places one of her treks against the backdrop of an unnamed contemporary war. The sound of bombs sends her into a chess-themed fantasy, where she’s a pawn crossing a board to become a queen. Each square is a different location: a bumpy train, a treacherous underwater path, a mercurial forest.
The touring production, which played at Théâtre Outremont, is technically exquisite. Co-directors Natacha Belova and Tita Iacobelli tell Alice’s story through their own puppet design, with three black-clad performers directly manipulating her full body of lifesize limbs (the puppeteer casting rotates). Her slouched body language, wrinkled red puffer vest, and messy mullet imply she’s an ordinary Gen Z adolescent. Soon after Alice enters the chess world, a string-operated queen towers far above, her layers of black fabric ruffling cheerily up and down. (A recorded Iacobelli performs the characters’ voices in French, with great specificity.)
Alice occupies a state of emotional numbness. Her journey involves no defeats or victories; she just drifts steadily forward. By the end of the hour-long runtime, she’s traversed several unique worlds, but seems unchanged. While this frictionless quality imbues the narrative with a certain slipperiness — I don’t think every play needs explicit character development, but there’s a reason it’s so common — the show’s ethereal visuals left me firmly stunned.
Une Traversée is recommended for ages 10 and up, but most of the productions I viewed were aimed at adult audiences. The Impossible Light, from bilingual Montreal company Surreal SoReal, made for an especially mature counterpoint to Une Traversée: instead of a girl retreating from adults’ brutality, it’s a man running from fatherhood. (Presented at Centaur Theatre, the play is mostly in English, with French surtitles.)
Writer-director Jon Lachlan Stewart plays Callen, a caustic, overworked tech bro, whose pregnant wife wants him to stop conference-hopping. For reasons including untreated ADHD, childhood baggage, and toxic masculinity, this request launches him into a cavern of doubt — literally.
A lecture on the 2018 Thailand cave rescue complements a highly complex scenographic representation of Callen’s sunless mental prison. Carol-Anne Bourgon Sicard’s set frames Stewart between two canted ovals, which serve as canvases for bursts of illumination from sundry sources, including flashlights maneuvered by puppeteer Lori Pifko, who also sometimes dons fabric to embody geologic features (wearable puppets designed by Alizée Millot and Claire Seyller).
This dance-like interplay of glow and gloom defines the show’s distinctive aesthetic, which virtuosically captures Callen’s sprinting thoughts (lighting design is by Claire Seyller). The Impossible Light builds a generous window into its protagonist’s mind. But his heart feels more distant — in part because it’s difficult to connect to eyes shrouded in darkness. Once, a spotlight hit Callen right in the face, revealing his out-of-breath distress. There you are, I thought, with a sharp inhale of my own.
I see reflections of Callen’s and Alice’s journeys in Réalités Parallèles, a world premiere from Montreal’s venerable Théâtre de la Pire Espèce, presented at Théâtre Aux Écuries. It’s a hallucinogenic anthology of three stories themed around that titular notion of parallel realities. The first carries shades of Une Traversée: a young boy, living in Germany during the Second World War, dreams of elephants gliding through oddly quiet streets. (This narrative is based on the memoirs of Felix Mirbt, who grew up to become an influential puppeteer in Quebec.) And, like The Impossible Light, the second part follows a troubled man spiraling into a deadly underground labyrinth — this time as part of a hotel-set narrative inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Co-directed by Olivier Ducas and writer Francis Monty, the show offers a contemporary riff on paper theatre, a style of live animation that was popular in the 19th century. In full view, performers insert cut-outs of characters, objects, and settings into two small puppet theatre booths; cameras capture both, and on a screen above, live footage alternates and overlaps, creating stop-motion collages (set/model design by Julie Vallée-Léger). Actors deliver most of Nicolas Letarte-Bersianik’s sound design in real time, foley-style. These marvellously coordinated technical elements combine to hypnotic effect: the dreamlike production put me in a mighty trance.
VIVA!, a touring two-hander from the Pyrenees-based La Loquace Compagnie, grapples with less fantastical parallel realities. Speaking in French with snatches of untranslated Spanish, co-creator Dani Olmos recounts his grandfather Pepe’s experience of Spain’s civil war and the 36 years of Francoist rule that followed.
Olmos used to be a lawyer, and in this piece of object theatre — performed at the Paul-Gérin-Lajoie-d’Outremont High School auditorium — he animates Pepe’s story with office supplies from a vintage wooden desk. When the war begins, Spaniards must choose a side, so Olmos sorts a motley selection of pencils into red and blue dossiers, transforming the citizens of Pepe’s town into two monochromatic groups of pencil crayons. A blue nationalist convoy soon carts away many of the reds (republicans like Pepe), and the group undergoes execution — by way of pencil sharpener. While Pepe survives, he loses his sense of self and hermits away for decades as the nationalists sweep mounds of pencil shavings under the literal rug.
This intelligent formal approach brings playful distance to heavy content. But it’s not the only trick in VIVA!’s drawers. During the show’s second half, French co-creator Lisa Peyron — initially a kind of stage assistant — takes charge of the desk. Peyron imagines the entire story from the perspective of Olmos’ grandmother Maria, whom Pepe physically abused. She had barely figured in Olmos’ account.
Peyron’s feminist retelling draws on a new set of objects, including sticky notes to represent Maria’s possible futures, climaxing in an exaltant trip to Madrid that causes the desk’s top to flip up and reveal a patchwork of different colours as the brilliantly physical actor dances without restraint. Olmos shared in a pre-show speech that it was the creators’ first time in North America. I very much hope the festival’s delegation of lanyard-wearing national and international programmers will help ensure this surprise-packed production returns.
VIVA! takes physical metaphors that may sound artificial or silly — this pencil is a fascist, that rug is his regime — and uses them to confront history. This ability of puppetry to extract truth from seeming falsehoods surfaced in every show I saw, including the aptly titled La vraie fausse conférence sur le théâtre d’objet, which features a group of eight artists who met at France’s Festival Mondial des Théâtres de Marionnettes in 1979 and became major pioneers of object theatre. In the playful, hour-long production, the lifelong friends celebrate the power of an empty space through a series of straightforward, space-transforming games, including one where a large bucket mysteriously refills itself with shreds of paper.
Back home in Toronto, what I keep returning to is a sentiment from Quebecois performer Antoine Laprise’s autobiographical solo Absence des extraterrestres (co-written with director Hubert Jégat) — another play about a troubled child finding solace in fantasy. It’s an eight-year-old boy’s paradoxical but strangely perceptive reading of theatre’s illusionary power: “C’est faux, mais c’est plus vrai que beaucoup de choses plus fausses.” It’s false, but it’s truer than a lot of falser things.
When puppets participate in fictions, it’s certainly false. But then the same goes for humans. At least the puppets are honest about it.
The 21st annual Festival International de Casteliers ran from March 2 to 8, 2026. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Liam Donovan
Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. He lives in Toronto.
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