The Puppet Theatre Maribor was founded on 8th December 1973 when two amateur theatres joined forces – the Puppet Theatre KUD Jože Hermanko Maribor and the Small Puppet Theatre DPD Svoboda Pobrežje. The 1974/75 season was the first professional season of the newly-founded Slovene puppet theatre.
The intention was to regularly perform puppet plays for children at the home theatre (first floor of the building at Rotovški trg, where the Maribor Library is located), elsewhere in Slovenia and abroad. As many festival organizers noticed the rising quality of the plays, the theatre gained recognition abroad and performed on numerous occasions and on all continents (except for Australia). The period of the theatre's humble residence above the library still offered children a wonderful world
of imagination, possibilities, promises, consolation and entertainment.
In the autumn of 2010 the Puppet Theatre Maribor moved into the newly renovated building of the Minorite monastery on Lent, which offered bigger rooms and state-of-the-art theatre equipment, allowing the theatre to reinvent itself and expand its programme. One season brings six premieres, all linked up to form a conceptual unity. The age factor has been carefully integrated into the concept, as the plays do not address only children – our most numerous guests – but young people and adults as
well. The repertoire focuses on discovering what more the puppet medium has to offer and combines classical puppet technology with modern approaches. Apart from regular productions, the theatre also offers a wide variety of other pedagogical activities and carries out innovative research projects.
Since 1988 the Puppet Theatre Maribor organizes The Summer Puppet Pier, a popular international puppet festival, and since 2011 offers a high quality platform for a permanent realization of the main national puppetry festival founded in 2001, the Biennial of the Puppetry Artists Institution of Slovenia.
LGM's cooperation with various institutions, independent organizations and individuals enables us to increase the quality of the public services we offer, to bring the content we offer to a wider audience, and to more successfully popularize the art of puppetry. We heavily invest in education and actively developing activities, thereby raising the standards in our field of activity.
At LGM, we sincerely wish to create an attractive and modern puppet centre which – through creative imagination, understanding of the art of puppetry, and a good organization of additional contents – thoughtfully and sensibly addresses even the most demanding audiences of all ages.
