Exhibitions

This exhibition opens up the behind-the-scenes of making puppets and explores the numerous possibilities of various materials. 

The puppeteer Väno Luup is mostly known from the children’s programmes and television shows of Estonian Television, such as Kessu and Tripp, Hey, Gnomes! and Acorn’s Adventures. Surprisingly, Luup’s journey as a puppeteer began with an advertisement looking for an electrician to the Puppet Theatre. 

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was performed altogether 25 times in the Viinistu boiler house during the summers of 2018 and 2019. In that production, not only the actors but also the puppets – one 7-metre-high and around 200 tiny ones, each of them only about 20 cm high – helped the audience visualise the very different dimensions of the giants and the Lilliputians.

Located in the Old Town of Tallinn, the Museum of Puppetry Arts is home to over 800 puppets that have once performed on stage. With the travelling exhibition opened in March 2023, the Museum of Puppetry Arts reaches various places across Estonia for the first time. The travelling exhibition is a short form of the Museum of Puppetry Arts permanent exhibition and, similarly, offers an insight into the history of puppetry, a chance to play with puppets and to learn about the process of producing a play.