Mississauga’s terrific theatre company, Crane Creations, invite you to the inaugural Bridges Festival from Wednesday March 13th to 15th, 2020.
This is a brand new three day professional puppetry festival presenting the work of the best Canadian puppeteers.

For a full list of programming, click here.

Founder and Artistic Director Andreja Kovac says:
”We are placing Mississauga on the map as a prime Ontario destination for puppetry. Each year, Bridges Festival will present the work of some of the best Canadian and International puppeteers. Bridges Festival is generously supported by Heritage Canada and Celebrate Ontario, and is an initiative of Crane Creations Theatre Company, a Mississauga based, artist-run not for profit theatre company. We invite members of different communities to come together to be inspired and to ignite their imagination, wonder, playfulness and creativity in children and adults alike.”

The Mississauga Puppetry Festival aims to become an annual international event and strives to provide inspiration, interaction and learning experiences for audiences and artists alike.
For them, animation is expressed in various forms of moving/animating inanimate objects. These forms include puppetry, automata, stop-motion animation, film and digital animation and robotics.
They’re curious about the questions of how life is created and impacted by objects exploring human stories and forming relations with humans.
It is their mission to ignite a reflection of the world in our audiences by connecting past and the future and want to celebrate traditional forms of puppetry and the skills of the puppet designers and performers, while expanding the conversation of what is puppetry and animation and how it touches contemporary world.

The festival is starting small at three days but aims to extend the festival over the full March Break and the adjacent weekends to its final form of lasting nine days.
In 2021, they’ll add international shows and expand our reach by bringing artists from other provinces in Canada, as well as offer more opportunities for local artists. The festival aims to become a tourist destination for audiences all over the GTA, Ontario and attract audiences across borders.

Crane Creations Theatre Company is a Mississauga based professional theatre start-up and located in a region with one of the lowest per capita number of artists in Canada.
Their mission to close this gap.
Mississauga experiences talent flight to neighbouring Toronto despite the fact that the city is home to one of the best theatre training program in the country (joint University of Toronto Mississauga campus Sheridan College Drama Program), and that the city is very committed to supporting artists with an increasing amount of grants.
They understand that artists need paid engagements to create, as well as space and support.
Crane Creations Theatre Company is creating a multi level strategy to create jobs for artists, build audiences in Mississauga and engage in meaningful partnerships nationally and internationally.