Sylvia Wanke

Sylvia Wanke studied sculpture and figure design as well as art education at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, and German studies at the University of Stuttgart. With a one-year scholarship from the DAAD, she studied puppet theater scenography at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, which was still unknown as a course in the West at that time.

Since becoming an artistic freelancer, she has shown her extensive work of movable objects and toys, sculptures and small figurative sculptures in public and private museums and galleries and summarized this aspect of her work under the term Art.Play.Things. In 1996 the book with the same title about the artist's work was published.

Since 1994, Sylvia Wanke has been teaching the subject of visual design in the puppet theater course at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts. In 2005, a guest teaching position for figure design followed at the Burg Giebichenstein Art Academy (Halle). In 2023 she was a lecturer at the 7th UNIMA International Puppet Theater Conference on her main topic “Masks and Art Figures”.

Since 1998, the artist has increasingly turned to the conception and realization of scenography and character designs for the theater stage. Most of the time, cross-disciplinary productions were created for puppet theater, opera, dance theater, plays or musicals. Since 2013 she has been the partner of the cabaret artist Christoph Sonntag for the political-satirical clap-jaw puppet scenes of “Jüngstes Gerücht” on the Radio Station SWR. In addition, she used public spaces for street theater, art parades and city scenarios, installations and flags as well as other elements of public space design.

With the wanke.ensemble she put on stage pieces characterized by her picture theater, such as her own production “Carambolage. An Oscar for gourmets!” and several “scenes for the eyes and ears”.

Most recently, she conceived and staged pieces with her own aesthetic style, which she increasingly realized with the ensembles of permanent playhouses. Most recently, in September 2023, the new director Sabine Schramm, a graduate of the puppet theater course at the HMDK, opened the 2023/24 season of the Magdeburg Puppet Theater with “Nathan's Children” by Ulrich Hub with scenography by Sylvia Wanke.