After the death of his wife, Amy Luckenbach in 2009, Swietlan Kraczyna spent the next three years working on a memorial for her and her life’s work as a master puppeteer.
Amy decided before her death that she did not wish to be buried and instead was cremated. Her ashes were then released back into the world in four different locations, all of which were important for her – Florence, Barga, the Czech Republic and USA.
As Swietlan says in the conversation recorded in his studio this afternoon, this made it impossible to create a headstone or monument to remember her by and so the book of her 35 years work with puppets would fulfil that purpose.
It is a way of recording her work and allowing people to browse through the fifteen productions that Amy created from her first puppet performance in 1976, Where the Wild Things Are, which was staged in Florence and then how she went on to perform around the world, winning the UNIMA (world organisation of puppeteers) award at the International Puppet Festival in Bulgaria in 1979, and collaborated with renowned international puppeteers, musicians and poets until her death in 2009.
She will be remembered especially here in Barga for her show, A-Ronne and Novissimum Testamentum at the Festival Opera Barga in 2004, many images can be seen here and another production in 2008 which can be seen here
