No Strings Attached — Puppet Theatre Festival Mainz

No Strings Attached is the only specialized puppet theatre festival in Mainz and one of the important platforms for contemporary puppet theatre in western Germany. The organisers are the Mainzer Kammerspiele — a small, highly professional theatre institution in the Malakoff Passage on the Rhine embankment — in cooperation with the Institut français Mainz and the Kultursommer Rheinland-Pfalz.

The title No Strings Attached plays on the English double meaning: without (puppet) strings — meaning non-traditional puppet theatre beyond the classic marionette — and without conditions, meaning open to all forms of puppet play. This sets the programmatic direction: the festival showcases contemporary puppet theatre in its full breadth — puppet and object theatre, hybrid forms of theatre and dance, performance with materials, Nouveau Cirque with puppet elements, acrobatics with mask play, manual animation art.

The 2026 edition is expected to take place from late October to early November — the annual festival window of recent years. The exact dates will be announced by the Mainzer Kammerspiele in late summer 2026. In 2025, the festival ran from October 24 to November 2; a similar timeframe can be expected for 2026.

The venues are the Mainzer Kammerspiele in Malakoff Passage (Rheinstraße 4) as the main venue with two stages, the Institut français Mainz (Schillerstraße) for Franco-German cooperation programmes, and individual public spaces in Mainz city centre for outdoor performances and participatory formats.

The programme typically includes 8 to 12 productions from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, and occasionally other European countries. The international focus is a hallmark: the Belgian and French puppet theatre scene is considered the most innovative internationally, and the Mainz festival leverages its proximity to France (Institut français as a partner) to develop a special profile in this direction.

Accompanying events include discussions with the companies, workshops for theatre professionals and interested amateurs, a family programme with performances for young audiences aged 6 and up, and outdoor performances in public spaces.

The festival is part of the Kultursommer Rheinland-Pfalz — the statewide festival series that takes place annually under a common theme — and is integrated into the region's supra-regional cultural programme.