Practitioner focus: Theatre-Rites

The late visual artist and theatre maker Penny Bernand founded Theatre-Rites in 1995, inviting puppetry expert Sue Buckmaster to create a joint vision for the company, re-evaluating what children's theatre might mean. From 2001, as artistic director, Sue Buckmaster pioneered her puppet whispering technique and established Theatre-Rites' reputation for creating ground-breaking object-led theatre and site-specific experiences.

In the book Theatre-Rites Animating Puppets, Objects and Sites, it is noted that ‘theories of child development in psychology have underpinned Sue Buckmaster's puppetry direction, teasing out the unique capacity of animated objects to act as symbolic markers for different kinds of attachments and rites of passage’. The child development theories of D W Winnicott and Sir Ken Robinson have been particularly influential, as have Melanie Klein and Adam Phillips' theories of object relations.