About

Kris Fleerackers is a puppeteer, puppet builder, performer, director and filmmaker. He grew up in Flanders, Belgium, a quirky little country with strong traditions of art, comics, pageantry and puppets and now lives among bears, raccoons and eagles on traditional Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) territory in British Columbia, Canada.

Kris has worked as a theatre director, actor, dramaturg, writer and educator; he has performed with Bread and Puppet Theatre, The Postmodern Camerata and several European theatre companies, and has collaborated with Vancouver’s Public Dreams Society. His live-action puppet short film “IDOL,” shot on top of a kitchen table using puppets and sets made from recycled cardboard, has been shown at festivals around the world and has won several awards, including Best Experimental Film, Best Story and an audience award. He has also taught theatre workshops, built and animated puppets for community events, and created puppets, props, sets and costumes for the stage as well as for television, including gangster matryoshkas, an Ice Age cave wall and prehistoric slippers.

For many years, Kris pursued a daytime career as an editor, video journalist and producer of Canadian public television. In Europe, before moving to Canada, he worked as an actor, director of experimental theatre and educator.

His education includes a graduate literature and theatre degree at the University of Antwerp, as well as an MA in Performance Studies at New York University under the tutelage of Richard Schechner; the program included seminars and workshops with such groundbreaking artists as Jerzy Grotowsky, Augusto Boal, Eugenio Barba, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Laurie Anderson, Mary Beth Edelson, Donna Hennes and Spalding Gray. More recently, he took puppetry intensives at the Banff Centre and at Toronto’s Humber College, as well as puppetry and puppet-building courses, workshops and masterclasses with Galia Levy-Grad, Ingrid Hansen, Jessica Gabriel, Chloe Ziner, Jeny Cassady, Darren East, Bernd Ogrodnik, Puppetmongers, Théâtre de la Pire Espèce and many others. In addition, he has received training in mask work, clowning and shadow theatre, writing and story editing, as well as early music, sword-fighting, and dance.