The new puppet museum in Brno will open in May

photo: AAA Studio s.r.o. (Ing. arch. Oldřich Prokeš)

Brno - The first visitors will tour the new puppet museum in Brno this May. The Radost Theatre, which manages a large collection of puppets, has planned the grand opening of the museum for May 1st. The previously inaccessible collection will find a home in an annex shaped like a ship. Vlastimil Peška, the director of Radost, stated this to ČTK.
    The Radost collection consists of hundreds of puppets from performances that the professional troupe focused on puppetry has staged over the last half-century. The individual exhibits will be rotated in the museum.
    "We plan to change the puppets in the museum approximately every six months. We will not shy away from exchanging puppets from other collections," Peška said. Interesting puppet sets could be borrowed from places like Plzeň or Chrudim.
    The construction of the puppet museum, whose unusual ship-shaped building will be visible to pedestrians on Cejl Street, is part of the final phase of the overall reconstruction and extension of the theatre complex between Bratislavská Street and Cejl. This phase also includes the renovation of studios, facilities for sets, and adjustments to the theatre's atrium.
    The last phase of repairs cost 44 million crowns. "This is the final completion of the construction, which began back in 1999," Peška noted. The motif of a ship runs throughout the theatre complex. The main building with an entrance from Bratislavská Street resembles a captain's bridge. Some elements of the interior are inspired by a ship's deck. Viewed from a bird's-eye perspective, the entire area between Bratislavská and Cejl takes on the shape of a ship.
    The permanent exhibition in the new building will indicate how puppetry has evolved in Radost from the 1950s to the present. All the puppets have performed in various productions. Theatre personnel archive two or three of the best puppets from each play. The exhibition will showcase the variety of puppetry techniques, used materials, and artistic interpretations.