Karin Schäfer

Karin Schäfer (born 21 September 1963) is an Austrian puppeteer, theatre director and visual artist. She is the founder and artistic director of the Karin Schäfer Figuren Theater – Visual Theatre Productions, a Vienna-based company that has toured in more than 45 countries. Building on techniques of classical marionette and puppetry, she developed a form of staging she calls "Visual Theatre" , which combines puppetry with dance, live music, masks, animation and projection and largely dispenses with spoken text. Since 2003 she has also been the founder and artistic director of PannOpticum, a biennial international puppet theatre festival in Neusiedl am See, Austria.

Early life and training Schäfer was born in Mödling and grew up in Vienna and in Neusiedl am See, in the Austrian state of Burgenland. After completing secondary school in Vienna, where she also studied art history, German studies and Spanish, she moved to Barcelona, Spain, in 1987 to train in marionette construction and performance under Harry V. Tozer at the city's Institut del Teatre. She remained in Spain for several years, working with several ensembles before returning to Austria in 1993.

Return to Austria and "Visual Theatre" (1993–2002) Schäfer returned to Vienna in 1993 where she created and directed Über das Marionettentheater ("On the Marionette Theatre"), a puppetry and dance piece based on the essay by Heinrich von Kleist. The production was subsequently invited to festivals in Austria, Germany, France, Greece, Italy and the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, as well as to the International Festival of Experimental Theatre in Cairo. Schäfer was a prizewinner of the Burgenland-Stiftung Theodor Kery, the Austrian state of Burgenland's cultural foundation, in 2010 for her work on PannOpticum. IBERIA was also a finalist for "best large ensemble" at the YAM Awards in 2018, an international award for theatre for young audiences, among more than 60 entries from 27 countries.

In 2024 her production Crazy Old Me, a solo piece reflecting on ageing as a performer and puppeteer, premiered as part of PannOpticum. Coverage of the 2024 edition of PannOpticum appeared in Der Standard.

Critical reception Reviewing a 2004 performance of Es war zweimal ("Twice Upon a Time") at the Lambert Puppet Theatre in Dublin, The Irish Times critic Gerry Colgan described the production as "puppetry of a very high order", praising its mix of "almost Beckettian dialogue and visual creations verging on the hypnotic" as "masterly". A 2018 profile in the Wiener Zeitung described Schäfer's puppets, objects and stage forms as becoming "lively, memorable and ambiguous images" in productions where live music forms "an equal counterpart" to the visual action.

Personal life Schäfer lives with her partner, who is also her manager, in Neusiedl am See, Burgenland, and in Vienna.

Awards and honours

1994 – Jury Prize, Festival International de la Performance d'Acteur, Cannes (with Santi Arnal and Jordi Bertran), for Poemas Visuales 1999 – First Prize, First International Festival of Solo Puppeteers, Łódź, Poland 2003 – Best Performer, First International Festival of Solo Puppeteers, Łódź, Poland 2003 – Premio Villanueva (best foreign production), Festival Internacional de Teatro de La Habana, Cuba, for Stringtime 2009 – Prizewinner, Dr.-Lorenz-Karall-Stiftung, Burgenland 2010 – Prizewinner, Burgenland-Stiftung Theodor Kery, for PannOpticum 2011 – STELLA award (outstanding stage/visual design), for Zheng He – als die Drachenschiffe kamen

Selected productions

Piccolo Forte Pianissimo (1989, with Per Poc) Poemas Visuales (1992, with Jordi Bertran and Santi Arnal) Über das Marionettentheater (1993) Post für den Tiger (1993–94) Stringtime (1997) Peter and the Wolf (2001) home@anywhere (2002) Da ist der Wurm drin (2004) Skywalker (2005) Bilder einer Ausstellung / Pictures at an Exhibition (2005) Wind und weiter (2006; re-staged 2008) Zheng He – als die Drachenschiffe kamen (2010) IBERIA (2015) Parade (2018) Crazy Old Me (2024)