Puppets and Memory: An interview with Dora Bouzková
- Leah Gaffen
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Compiled by Leah Gaffen, Puppets in Prague
Dora Bouzková is among the most innovative Czech puppeteers. She’s been nominated for a Thalia, the top Czech theatre award, and cited by ASSITEJ for her outstanding work in children’s theater.
We invited her to Puppets in Prague to speak about Puppets and Memory. It was part of “Puppet Recipes” - our monthly series of online workshops about different puppet-related topics.
We met Dora in 2002 when she was a student at the Prague Theatre Academy (DAMU) and a participant in our early marionette carving workshops. She made a ballerina marionette and was part of a show that we toured to Czech castles. In subsequent years, we organized festivals and workshops together, and she has taught many classes at Puppets in Prague. In the fall, she will be teaching with us for our online Miniature Marionette workshop.
Dora’s mother is Mexican, where she lived for the first five years of her life.
Below find an excerpted conversation that took place at our workshop on August 2. A version of this talk was first presented at the DRAK Puppet Theatre in Hradec Kralvoe at their Gaudemaus conference in March 2026.
Photos from the archive of Puppets in Prague
DORA: I am very happy to be here. The Puppets in Prague workshop was where, for the first time, I made a marionette that I carved with my own hands and blood! I was a student at DAMU, the Department of Puppetry and Alternative Theatre, but at that time, there weren’t enough opportunities to make shows with puppets for me.
So I came to Mirek’s workshop, and we made the puppet. Then we performed in castles, which was the first time I had done a puppet show. At the end of the shows, children would come up and touch my puppet. I absolutely fell in love with this form. So this place is very important to my puppet life. Soon after the workshop I founded a company which is still going today, Puppet Beyond Borders. This workshop was my starting point.
Now I am doing a lot of puppet theater, workshops, site-specific projects, and community events. Today I will talk about a few of my projects dealing with the topic of memory.
Puppet Reminiscence - theatre with the elderly
This was a project I worked on from 2010-2013 and it was inspired by a student who I met at Puppets in Prague. She told me about Age Exchange, a British organization which pairs artists and senior citizens. In one project, elderly people told the stories of their lives to visual artists. The artists created small exhibitions of the individual stories in suitcases. Then there was an exhibition of all of these suitcases.
My idea was that I would make puppet shows from elderly people's stories. For 3 years I went to a senior citizen’s center. There I met a psychologist who told me about Reminiscence Therapy, a method of working with stories and memories to help the brain stay healthy. I performed for the seniors using a traditional Czech family puppet theater because most older Czechs know these theaters (I used my father’s childhood theatre). The reaction was beautiful. They were singing Czech songs with me and playing with the little Kasparek puppet character. I did shows with my son, who was very young, and we communicated through fun, stories and puppets. I wasn’t sure why it worked, but it did. We also did a show for my husband's grandmother, and then she used photos to tell her stories to my kids- her great grandchildren. This is a very important part of reminiscence therapy. Stories help us go calmly to death, to resolve our lives and untangle problems.
The Day of the Dead and a story from Dora’s grandmother
The Stories of Young Lupitina Gonzalez is a puppet show that is connected to my Mexican roots. How did it start? In 2004, a small theatre in Prague (Alfred in the Courtyard), was doing a project with Czech and Mexican artists. It was around the time of Dia de los Muertos, and the director of the theater asked me to help out with an event for the Mexicans in a local park. People in the park noticed what we were doing. What’s here? Candles and sugar skulls? Oh, it’s so beautiful to be happy on the day of the dead! In the Czech tradition, on All Saint’s Day, you go to the cemetery and it is really sad. We Mexicans have altars at home, we sing songs, there are a lot of colors… I love this tradition. So I worked with Alfred Theatre and we repeated the event in the park the next year, and then the next year, and then the next year… for 12 or 13 years, and it became bigger and bigger and bigger. We had a lot of lights and food, celebrations, and music.
But we were missing a theater performance about death for kids. So I created The Stories of Young Lupitina Gonzalez. I drew on stories from my Mexican grandmother. When she was 17 or 18 years old she went to see Paricutin, the youngest volcano In the world. It suddenly came out of the ground in 1943, and it started to grow. My grandmother said, Oh, it was wonderful to see the volcano! It was a huge tourist attraction. No one died, as it was very far away, but the lava destroyed three or four villages and people had to move.
I had this story in my memory, and I used it for my show. But I needed a lot of dead people because my show was about Dia de los Muertos, so I changed things a little bit. I made up a story about a family who had died in the volcano. In my show, these dead people throw a happy celebration. The Czech audience really enjoyed this philosophy of death, with colors and happiness and the idea that death is part of our lives. I am still performing the show today. And not only for Czech audiences - I had a very positive response when I performed in Warsaw at a puppet festival for adults (A Puppet is Human Too) and also for Slovak audiences
When the movie Coco came out, it helped - adult audiences started to accept that death is an acceptable topic for children. But children never had a problem with this idea.
A personal story about a half-baked bun
Now I am going from the topic of death to birth - the story of my premature son. In 2012, he was born in week 27, about half-way along. He was very, very little - 1 kilo. For a few weeks, we didn’t know if he would survive. It was very difficult. My two older kids, who were 4 and 2, couldn’t come to the hospital. When I came home in the evenings after spending all day in the hospital, they asked me "Mum, how is Vojta? Tell us everything about him..." At first I wasn’t sure what to say because I did not know if he would survive. I came up with a story inspired by a fairy tale. A half-baked bun jumps out of the oven too soon, and nobody wants to be with him because he smells strange, he’s so white. He is very sad. And then the sun comes up and says Oh, my little boy. Welcome to heaven! And the breath of the sun bakes the pastry, and since that time, he is the moon. It was my personal philosophy that maybe, if my son did not live, he would be the moon in the sky looking over us.
But he’s alive, and he’s now 14 years old. So happy end! My friend created a book based on the story of the half-baked bun and gave it to Vojta on his first birthday. And then, about 7 years later, I made this show.
Community project: the old Waterworks
In my village, which is just outside of Prague, we have an old, beautiful, industrial building that used to be the waterworks. My neighbors and I worked together to stop it from being torn down. We organized exhibitions, theatre performances, concerts and things like that. In 2019, the new mayor raised money to reconstruct the building, and now it’s a community center where we continue to do activities.
To thank the mayor, we made a 17-minute animated film with children about the history of the building. We combined a lot of different styles of animation - pixilation, object animation, drawn animation, claymation. I fell in love with animation. We created the film over two years with many children in the village. It has been quite successful, winning prizes at a lot of festivals.
Maloniny: A disappeared village
Maloniny (or Pleschen in German) is the name of a former Czech village which disappeared in 1946 after WWII.
When my husband was a child, his family used to visit friends living near the German border. When he was about 9 years old, he went into the forest. He found little stones, walls, and parts of houses. He asked his parents about them, and they told him that there used to be villages there which had disappeared. He would sit in the forest, trying to imagine who had lived there - little stories in a child’s imagination. I loved the idea of trying to bring this place back to life.
When I was in school, teachers did not talk about anything after WWII. So it was not until later in life that I found that we, Czechs, dislocated German people - question mark? And about 15 years ago, I read a novel by the Czech writer Kateřina Tučková about the aggressive expulsion of German people - old people, women, kids - by Czechs. There are a lot of similar villages along the border of Czechoslovakia. Around 3 million German people were dislocated.
We did this project exploring the topic of home, not specifically about the question of dislocated German people. The show started in the neighboring village with a walk through the forest. A narrator led the audience, telling them the history of the village. When they got to the place where the village had once been, actors performed what normal village life in the early 1940s would look like. Then an actor playing a German postman entered and read a letter telling everyone that they must leave. They could take only 30 kilos, no money, no jewelry, etc.
The village had been on a big hill. It had a village square surrounded by 15 houses,. Today the square is a grassy area. And around it there are now bushes. We made installations to symbolize each house on the hill. We had little tables, chairs, a cabinet…. The audience could explore the recreated spaces. The actors were there, doing theatrical activities, and we hid speakers in the bushes to play sounds that created the atmosphere of the place.
At one point, the actors left the space. We did this in a symbolic way, with them taking off the costumes of the villagers. Then moved the installations that symbolized the houses as if they were flying. They put small symbolic houses on a balance table, and it was very difficult to keep everything balancing on the table.
Kerstin Dathe, who is the granddaughter of dislocated German people who had lived in Czechoslovakia, shared the story of her family - a positive story, without sadness or anger. She used objects and other materials (little wooden houses, flowers, dirt) using the wooden platforms laying on the grass. Then we hung the platforms between three big old trees. That created a final installation with photos and texts about home.
At the very end we invited the audience to join us for food and drink at one large table. We played musical instruments together, we spoke, we created little wooden houses with the children. We had a good time together. That was the end. Hopeful. It’s necessary to build a world where we feel safe. And home is safety.
It was not my personal story, but I had a connection through my husband’s childhood experience. It was important to me that I didn’t come to some random place to explore German-Czech history. And I also felt connected through my old friend Kerstin and her family story.
During the project, we also created our own small community. We had the children, and three elderly women who lived close by were acting with us. So in one moment there were four generations together in the landscape, putting little wooden houses on the balance table, trying to make sure that they don’t fall down. We were building a village together. I think this is the message. For all of us to be in balance.
My kids played in the show and were there for the entire two weeks. And they discovered the stones, and the houses, the stories. This is the hope - to bring stories back and not to forget them. So maybe we don’t do it again. I hope.
For me it was similar to what I did in my village, building a community. Peter Brook argues that people involved in art are more important than the artist’s results. If you don’t have a good dynamic, what is the art? You have to communicate with your heart. And we did that in Maloney. We slept in tents, without running water. We were in the forest for two weeks. It was wild.
Dora is one of many Czech artists using puppets, objects, symbols, unusual spaces, and alternative approaches to tell stories. At Puppets in Prague, we try to bring different perspectives on theatre-making to our students. You can learn about other artists doing this in our “Puppet Recipes” workshop and discussion monthly series.
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