The Polish professor Marek Waszkiel is going to present the new division of the history of puppetry into 3 periods: the old puppet, the old new puppet and the new puppet, focusing on the innovations and the modern in the sphere. During the second part of the lecture, he is going to analyse parts of different performances by famous contemporary artists such as: Duda Paiva, Hôichi Okamoto, Frank Soehnle, Neville Tranter, Yngvild Aspeli, Ilka Schonbein and others.

Marek Waszkiel is a professor of history of puppetry art at the Theatre Academy in Warsaw (since 1978), historian, critic, lecturer, editor. Artistic consultant of the Amber Theatre in Shenzhen (China). He was a vice rector of the Warsaw Theatre Academy, responsible for the Puppet Theatre Department in Bialystok; a head of the Bialystok Puppet Theatre and Animation Theatre in Poznań. Simultaneously he was the president of UNIMA-Poland, a member of the executive committee of UNIMA International. He published many studies on puppetry in Poland, as well as many articles about puppet theatre all over the world.