For the 7th consecutive year, the International Association of Puppet Friendly Cities has launched its mobility grant scheme.
The 2025 International Jury of the AVIAMA Puppet and Mobility Grants was chaired by the City of Iida (Japan), represented by its mayor, Mr Takeshi Sato, and included representatives from the City of Charleville-Mézières (France), the Borough of Outremont (Montreal – Canada), the City of Tournefeuille (France) and the City of Ghent (Belgium), whom we sincerely thank for their involvement.
This international Jury is the guarantor of the guidelines chosen by the AVIAMA member cities: to support the mobility of artists, researchers and players in the field to enable them to carry out their projects in the field of puppetry arts.
This year, the Jury studied 21 applications from different continents and supported by different AVIAMA member cities.
The first two winners will each receive a €1,500 grant, and the next three, ranked ex-aequo, will each receive a €1,000 grant. These grants not only provide support for the project, but also act as a lever for obtaining other grants:
- Gesture to play by the Muppet Queen company (France) / Mobility grant for a research and training project, hosted in residence in Dives-sur-Mer, with apprentice actors.
- I’m always here by the La Neige sur les cils company (France / Lithuania) / Mobility grant for the creation of a show about maternity by a Franco-Lithuanian team.
- Dans ta valise by the Rêve Général company (France) / Mobility support for a project involving training workshops on the art of puppetry and the presentation of the show at the Festival Africain de Théâtre pour l’Enfance et la Jeunesse (FATEJ) in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in December 2025.
- The many stories of puppetry in India by Shilpi Goswani (India) / Mobility grant for a research project on the history of Indian puppetry and European influences on modern and contemporary puppetry in India, during a residency in Bochum (Germany). Shilpi Goswani plans to conduct a series of interviews with emblematic puppeteers, as well as archiving their work.
- Echo(e)s by the Yokai company (France) / Mobility grant to pursue a creation between New York (USA) and Charleville-Mézières (France), combining cinema special effects and puppet theatre. Echo(e)s will give rise to a remotely controlled puppet presented in a special place: the cemetery.
We would like to wish the grant recipients every success with their projects and, on behalf of the Jury, we would like to thank all the candidates who applied this year!
The next Call for AVIAMA 2026 Grants will be published in October.