puppet

Who we are
Vilawan Svetsreni, a lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Chiang Mai University founded many puppet troupes, specialised in adapted traditional puppetry and puppets for education. Most members are students and graduated students from University and Colleges in Chiang Mai. She is, at present, the producer and artistic director.

What we do
We are quite active and making appearances on special occasions and by requests. Our sets are mobile units which enable us to participate in many types of activities.

The troupe that performs the adapted traditional puppetry is called "HobbyHut". For our usual performance we need 8 puppeteers, 3 singers/narrators and 5 musicians. HobbyHut has 5 set of puppets/stories. The performances usually accompanied by live traditional Northern music. The dialogues are in Northern dialect with intermittent English. The storyteller usually gives the synopsis of each scene in English. Please refer to our for more details.

Another troupe goes under the name of "Khru Mai Puppet Troupe" which mainly focuses on the performance for education purposes. We also organise a workshop about making and performing puppet show for young children.

Why "Khru Mai"?
"Khru" means "teacher" in Thai. In the realm of performing arts, the instructor is always a "teacher". Also for most young children, Vilawan is too difficult so her nickname "Mai" is used instead.

Why "HobbyHut"?
In the year 1998, Vilawan Svetsreni rented a disuse garage near her house and set up a little weekend activities for young children and thought "HobbyHut" was a good name for it.

While fewer young children and parents joined HobbyHut for weekend activities, more young people especially University students, expressed their interests in puppetry and were keen to show what they have learned. So, Vilawan started to write the scripts and designed the scenes. She also gathered the musicians and singer to compose some music for the show.

HobbyHut became a full puppet troupe and had their first performance in October 1998, in the same rented disuse garaged near her house.
Several years later, Vilawan created more sets of puppets, together with her former student, Apiwat Thanyanond. One of the set called "Kinnaree Yungkam" went to France with her when she received the UNESCO - ASHBERG grants to be a resident-artist and researcher at the International Institute de la Marionette in the year 2000.

With more public interest and support, the HobbyHut was moved to use the open space at the CMU Art Museum in late 1999. Since then, they held their performances professionally every weekend during the period from October to April for almost 2 years.

In the year 2002, HobbyHut Puppet Troupe discontinued their performances at the CMU Art Museum and became a mobile troupe.