Our Alumni on Curious Puppets Festival at Rosemary Branch
“For me, the most important aspect of the festival is its strong sense of community. It is not just a place to perform, but a space to meet others in the field, exchange ideas, and learn from one another. Because the festival is so community-driven and hands-on, I have gained insight not only as a performer, but also into how a festival is organised and brought to life. This understanding of logistics and production is vital for me as a freelance artist who creates and manages their own work.
Secondly, at a time when domestic puppetry festivals are being cancelled due to lack of funding, having a platform like Curious Festival in London to share my work with an audience that is equally passionate about the art form feels especially significant. The intimate scale of the festival allows for genuine post-show conversations, where exchanges with audiences lead to deeper reflection on the work. This experience has been invaluable in building confidence. Presenting new or non-mainstream work can often feel daunting, but Curious Festival and Rosemary Branch provide a supportive and inclusive environment where experimentation is actively encouraged.” - Aqiong Zhang
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“The opportunity of being part of the Curious Festival at the Rosemary Branch has been an important opportunity for me as an artist as it allowed me to access stage time and share my work to a very specific audience of people who were interested in watching puppetry specifically. It also gave me invaluable time with my peers within the puppetry community to share work and ideas whilst further honing the work I had to show with industry professionals and senior puppeteers, the likes of whom I would not ordinarily be able to get input from. This is a unique experience blending both crucial stage time showing new work, input from my peers into honing the work whilst further fortifying the puppetry community and all the artists within it. Opportunities like this are woefully rare.” - Emily Morus-Jones
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“Both of the shows I created after I created my company after CSP were birthed at Rosemary Branch… A meeting of peers and an experimental space in which to discover what is going on in puppetry without needing to always make it viable financially - a very harsh reality of the arts in the UK” - Carolene Yawa Ada, Swallows Wings Puppetry
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“Not only does the Curious Festival at the Rosemary Branch provide a unique opportunity to take part in and learn from world class theatre makers, the hands-on support from lighting to stage direction, dramaturgy to puppetry techniques for established practitioners as well as those just starting out creates a rare and extraordinarily inclusive learning environment, while at the same time supporting the emergence of highly creative and original new work. Through this I found and learnt new skills in lighting and sound operation which have provided me with work and experience I would never have had otherwise.” - Hannah White
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“It really felt for those two weeks like we were a collective, invested in making each night run smoothly from beginning to end. With the world the way it is, that’s a rare feeling and I feel blessed to have been a part of what was again an eclectic line up.” - Lee Maeda
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“There was so much attention to detail from everyone who was a part of the shows, there was no feeling that one particular piece was more important than another, everybody jumped at the opportunity to help each other, taking on scene changes and opening doors when needed. Even the little things, like in breaks when someone might make you a cup of tea, or taking it in turns to buy more snacks from the shops. These moments cemented the feeling of ensemble for me. Everyone was just as important as each other and everyone was making sure that we were looking after each other.” - Nico Venables
Photograph from a cabaret hosted by a Curious alumni at
Club Silly in Brixton
Performances at Curious Puppets Festival 2025, Rosemary Branch
Table top puppetry performance at Curious Puppets Festival, Rosemary Branch Theatre 2025
Shadow puppetry performance at a cabaret hosted by
a Curious alumni at Club Silly in Brixton
Photographs from end-of-term sharings
Audiences on Curious Puppets Festival at Rosemary Branch
“I thought it was excellent, such a range of puppetry and the whole event was managed very professionally.”
Audience review Curious Puppets Festival 2023
“Great to see adult puppetry that's not tied to some West End extravaganza. Great show and fantastic pub!”
Audience review Curious Puppets Festival 2022
“Absolutely wonderful. Really high-quality emotional layered performances. So much so that I’m gonna go again.”
Audience review Curious Puppets Festival 2025
“We were just having a pint… people looked excited about going in so we followed! ”
Audience review Curious Puppets Festival 2025
“This was an excellent night out. The best bit of theatre that I have seen all year. Inventive and Engaging and demonstrating the wide range of techniques possible for puppets. Can't wait for their next show.”
Audience review Curious Puppets Festival 2022
About Curious School of Puppetry
Curious is a London-based organisation dedicated to nurturing new voices in puppet-led performance. Founded in 2015 by puppeteer and puppet director Sarah Wright, Curious was created in response to a critical gap in UK puppetry training and has since become a vital force within the sector - fuelling the development of artists, ideas and new work across theatre, film and beyond.
At the heart of Curious is a commitment to collaboration, experimentation and play. The school supports artists, theatre-makers and interdisciplinary practitioners to test ideas, take risks and create bold new work with puppetry and visual theatre at its centre. Our eight week professional training programme culminates in end-of-term sharings, where artists present works-in-progress in a supportive public setting. These moments are central to the Curious ethos: offering space for experimentation, connection and exchange between artists and audiences. This spirit extends into the Curious Puppets Festival at the Rosemary Branch Theatre, which has been running for five years, showcasing innovative puppet-led performance from emerging and established artists and providing a vital platform for new work to be seen.
Photograph from end-of-term sharings 2026
Curious is underpinned by an exceptional network of leading practitioners who teach and mentor across the programme. These include Lyndie Wright MBE (The Little Angel Theatre), Toby Olié (Spirited Away, The Wolves In the Walls), Ronnie Le Drew (Zippy, The Muppets), Stan Middleton (Puppet Theatre Barge), Rachel Leonard (RSC, War Horse), Mervyn Millar (Significant Object), Avye Leventis (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, War Horse) , Liz Walker (Faulty Optic), Rene Baker and Mike Shepherd (Kneehigh). Together, they bring a wealth of experience across disciplines, offering participants direct access to a breadth of contemporary puppetry practice.
Founder and Artistic Director Sarah Wright brings decades of experience and deep sector knowledge to the school. Raised within the Little Angel Theatre and working professionally from a young age, she has built an extensive international career as a puppeteer and puppetry director. Her far-reaching professional network and commitment to the artform underpin Curious’ role as a connector within the industry. Central to her vision is the desire to build a generous, sustainable community of makers - one that supports artists not only to train, but to continue developing, collaborating and sustaining careers over time.
Photograph from end-of -term sharings 2026
The impact of Curious can be seen in the breadth of its alumni’s work across the industry. Graduates have gone on to perform and create on major commercial stages, including productions such as My Neighbour Totoro (West End), Royal Shakespeare Company’s The BFG and The Walk Productions’ international public art project The Herds. Alongside this, many alumni are shaping the future of the artform by founding their own companies and developing new puppet-led work. These include Hopeful Monster, who represented the UK at the prestigious Festival Mondial des Théâtres de Marionnettes in Charleville-Mézières; Swallows Wings Puppetry, whose work has been presented at the V&A; and Life and Limb Puppets, an emerging company in the North gaining recognition for their inventive, visually striking performance work.
Through its training, public platforms and alumni network, Curious acts as both incubator and advocate - strengthening the puppetry sector by equipping artists with the skills, confidence and connections needed to enter rehearsal rooms ready to create. Together, these strands form a vibrant ecology of making and exchange - positioning Curious School of Puppetry as a vital engine for the future of puppetry and visual theatre in the UK and beyond.
“There are very few art forms and practices where collaborators are jointly responsible for a single instrument. To animate a table-top puppet, with 3 pairs of hands operating one puppet, you have to be sensitive to your co-puppeteers, becoming attuned to the most delicate tugs, rotations, breaths, making sure you're sharing enough space behind the table to operate from. By virtue of caring for the puppet, you care for your co-puppeteers too. It is necessarily an ego-less practice.”
Riwa Saab, Curious student 2026
Biographies
Sarah Wright
Founder and Artistic Director
Sarah Wright is a puppeteer, puppetry director and teacher. She is a trustee of Little Angel Theatre and was an associate artist of Kneehigh for many years.
Sarah trained and toured with her family at Little Angel from an early age. She has worked extensively within physical and puppetry based theatre ever since.
Sarah is associate puppetry director for Spirited Away Toho Theatre, Tokyo/London Coliseum. She performs with Improbable: Tao of Glass. Work with Kneehigh includes, as puppet director and/or performer, Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs), The Tin Drum, 946, Wild Bride. She works regularly with director Joe Wright including in Life of Galileo, A Season in the Congo at the Young Vic. Other theatre includes: Shakespeare’s Globe: The Little Matchgirl. Royal Shakespeare Company: Venus and Adonis. Little Angel: A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. Faulty Optic/Invisible Thread: Fish Clay Perspex, Plucked, Les Hommes Vides. Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures: Sleeping Beauty. As Director of Silent Tide: Silent Tide, The Adventures of Curious Ganz (OFFIE winner 2019).
She also works as a puppeteer for film and television including: The Dark Crystal Age of Resistance, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Princess and Peppernose and Cyrano.
Jemima Yong
Producer
Jemima Yong is an award-winning performance maker, photographer and cultural worker. Uninterested in creating anything that she can imagine on her own, she works exclusively in collaboration with others.
Jemima experiments with performance through a variety of mediums such as live theatre, installation, photography and publication. Some work includes: Container written and directed by Alan Fielden: a text and music-based polyphonic performance exploring violence and tenderness in catastrophe; Field 2020 a series of portraits of a public space during the pandemic; Marathon with JAMS (Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award 2018), a performance exploring group hysteria, disagreement and repair and ROOM, an improvised adventure that takes place in the collective imagination.
As a cultural worker, she has worked across many contexts: as a Festival Coordinator at MTN BUSHFIRE, a music and arts festival based in Eswatini; a communications practitioner with Barbican Centre and iniva (Institute for International Visual Arts); as a producer at Curious School of Puppetry. She is Creative Director of the Kneehigh Living Legacy project where she works closely with Mike Shepherd to ensure that Kneehigh’s spirit remains present, compelling and accessible to current and future generations of artists. Jemima is a Clore Leadership Pulse alumni.
Photographer credits:
Images 1-7,9,11 by Mark Morreau
Image 8 by Jemima Yong
Images 12 & 13 by Steve Tanner
