„A művészet a bizonyíthatatlan egész kifejezése (…) a teljesség lélegzetvétele.”

What Should Be in Hungary’s Message for World Puppetry Day 2025?

Silences, joys, embraces, and human gestures resonated within me. The thought by János Pilinszky quoted in the title began to speak—a thought that has accompanied me for many years and continually reshapes within me the answers to the question of why. At the same time, the sentence written in 1934 by Henrik Kemény also proved true: “Love for puppet theater means love for the noble spirit and for the future…”

2025!

We have been living in the 21st century for twenty-five years!

During this time, puppet theaters with distinctive and independent artistic identities have grown significantly stronger in Hungarian puppetry. Alongside the founders of Hungary’s puppet theaters, three generations of puppeteers have come of age. Through intense dialogue they have formed a community of artists whose progressive creative vitality has produced new forms of expression and pushed beyond the traditional boundaries of visual theater. Together they have created a Hungarian community of puppet artists who know and feel that puppetry, as an art form, contributes to the abstract representation of the truths of the world, that it is capable of generating an infinite range of aesthetic possibilities, and that it can—and wishes to—represent a truly interdisciplinary artistic approach.

It is important that in recent decades an artistic and creative community has formed in which everyone knows everyone else. A vivid example of the solidarity among Hungarian puppeteers was their cooperation and mutual attention during the 10th Theatre Olympics in 2023, and the even more visible spirit since then: a willingness to understand one another through the tools of puppetry, a growing solidarity with one another, and a widening professional perspective.

Puppet theater is the freedom of creative processes that arise from material, the organic unity of artistic elements, and a form that brings together imagination and faith, as well as the shared experience of deep individual reflection and collective belonging. Within it, the depths of human nature and existence are revealed. The essence of puppets is that someone creates them. In this process, creators—while exploring the mystery of life—discover the laws of bringing the inanimate to life. Even the use of new technologies and multimedia possibilities does not diminish the enduring validity of our puppet figure who embodies the human comedian: Vitéz László.

The year 2025 is also the centenary year of Henrik Kemény. In the 1940s he firmly established his territory and, with unwavering independence and consistency, served his audiences through puppet theater every single day for decades. The figure of Vitéz László embodies a living vitality that transcends historical systems and eras, surviving every cataclysm and proclaiming an enduring presence. He represents national continuity: a character capable of overcoming death and defeating his enemies—even if that enemy is the devil himself. Through the hands of Kemény Henrik, the world came to know Vitéz László, a figure who tirelessly represents humanity—who, amid the constant rearrangements of life, carries not groundlessness, melancholy, or decadence, but rather the mythic, humor-filled, puritan strength of survival.

Through the work of Kemény Henrik we know that the concepts of tradition and contemporary are not closed or fixed entities but relative and flexible frameworks. Puppet theater is a connective force between cultural fabrics—indeed a human right—framed by the questions of universalism, including how it can meet not only local audiences but also serve as a bridge between people, cultures, social classes, and generations.

Puppet art is the universe of human existence. Puppeteers possess a playful ingenuity, an exuberant and vivid solemnity that lifts the human being above mere existence and into the realm of the spirit. Play with the puppet proves again—at the highest level—the extra-logical nature of our condition in the world: that we can rise beyond the immediate necessities of life, overcome the absolute determinism of the material world, and step into the sphere of autonomy, integrity, and dignity.

Within puppet theater, the ideal equality of opportunities may be created, and the realm of joy without self-interest may come into being.

Long live every puppeteer and every puppet theater!
Long live every audience of puppet theater! 🎭