Art is the expression of an unprovable totality, [...] the breath of completeness.”

What will the Hungarian message of the 2025 World Puppetry Day be? Silence, joy, embraces, human gestures resonated within me. The thought of Pilinszky, which can be read in the title, has been with me for many years has been with me for many years and constantly recreates in me the answers to the questions, but Henrik Korngut Kemény's 1934 statement also gained validity, according to which "the love of puppets represents the love of beautiful souls and the love of the future..."

2025!

We are living in the 21st century, 25 years into it!

During this time, puppet theaters with their own unique identities have become increasingly prominent in Hungarian puppetry. In addition to the founders of Hungarian puppet theaters, three generations of puppeteers have grown up, who formed a community of artists engaged in intense discourse and progressive experimentation and who, by creating new formal languages, and pushed the boundaries of classical visual art. Together with them, a community of Hungarian creative puppeteers has been formed, who knew and felt that puppetry as a genre contributes to the abstract representation of the truths of the world, can create an infinite repository of puppet aesthetics, and can and wants to represent a holistic artistic approach.

It is important that in recent decades, an artistic and creative community has developed in which everyone knows everyone else. A striking example of this was the cooperation and mutual support among Hungarian puppeteers during the 10th Theater Olympics in 2023, and since then, it has become even more apparent that puppeteers want to understand each other through the tools of puppetry, the solidarity that has developed between them, and the broadening of the perspective of professionalism.

Puppetry is the freedom of creative processes that create from material, the organic unity of artistic elements, the form of fantasy and belief, the profound individual and collective togetherness, in which human nature and the depths of existence are revealed. The essence of art is that someone creates it. In this process, creative professionals explore the mysteries of life and formulate the laws of animation. However, the use of new technologies and multimedia possibilities do not weaken the human comedian who shapes our puppet character, Vitéz László's validity.

2025 is also the centenary of Henrik Kemény, who, in the 1940s, firmly established his territory, consistently and selflessly serving his people with his puppet theater every day for decades. The figure of Vitéz László, who transcended historical systems and eras, survived every cataclysm, proclaiming a continuous presence, the embodiment of robust vitality. He is the representative of national continuity, capable of overcoming death and defeating his enemies, even if they are the devil himself. Through Henrik Kemény, the world came to know Vitéz László, a character who tirelessly represents humanity, who, in a life full of constant change, but rather the puritanical, humorous, and all-conquering mythical side of the technique of staying alive.

Looking at Henrik Kemény's work, we know that the concepts of tradition and contemporaneity are not closed and fixed entities, but relative, flexible frameworks. The unifying force between the fabric of the puppet theater human rights, framed by questions of universalism, including how it can reach not only the local community, but also people, cultures, social classes, and generations. Puppetry is the universe of human existence. Puppeteers have a playful ingenuity, a wild and lively solemnity that elevates man above his earthly existence into the realm of the spirit. Playing with dolls proves once again the logical nature of our situation in the world in the highest sense, that we transcend the immediate necessities of life, overcome the absolute determinism of the material world, and thereby enter the sphere of autonomy, integrity, and dignity.

In the puppet theater, the ideal equality of opportunities can be created, and the realm of selfless joy can be realized.

God bless all puppeteers and all puppet theaters!
God bless the community of all puppet theaters!