Water, ice, shadows, and squirrels

For 12 days this month, Chicago will be home to fantastical puppets and artists from Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Norway, Japan, South Africa, Spain, and the United States. The shows in the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival (now in its fifth year) cover a diverse range of topics, from reimagining classic myths and literature, to exploring comedic tempo with squirrels, to delving into the humanity around the geopolitical crisis of refugees. 

In addition to shows at multiple venues around town, the festival is introducing a Pop-Up Puppet Hub in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue with site-specific events throughout the festival. The Puppet Hub will feature a film screening, exhibitions, and a puppet-inspired cafe, as well as performances at the in-house Studebaker Theater. 

Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival1/18-1/29: see chicagopuppetfest.org for complete schedule and ticketing information.

Those not familiar with contemporary puppetry might wonder how the humble puppet has become such an enduring art form (and such a force in Chicago). As droves of puppets descend upon us in midwinter, it is a good time to note that Chicago is well-established as a center of puppet influence in the U.S. With decades of puppet-mongering history behind us, from the grassroots Puppet Guild, to the sadly defunct but hugely influential Redmoon Theater, and onward (the festival’s in-house Puppet Studio, Rootstock Puppet Company, Rough House Theater, and Manual Cinema, to name a few), the city has been fostering puppeteers and puppet designers for years, who have cross-pollinated heavily with the circus and theater communities. 

Puppet festival founder/artistic director Blair Thomas has been an influence for many of the aforementioned companies and a mentor to scores of artists. He shares some insight with me about Chicago’s place in the puppet world. 

“We have a lot of activity in town . . .  We have the most alive and active international puppet theater festival going on in North America. The intensity of programming that happens, you’re not going to find anywhere else in the U.S., but we’re outdone by the funding resources that have existed in other countries for years.” Putting the struggle to find robust funding sources like Europe’s aside, he is happy to discuss Chicago’s impact on the U.S. puppet arts universe, citing the success of Chicago-based Manual Cinema. “They have really skyrocketed into the performing arts world, and they have multiple companies out touring their shows around the country and abroad.” 

Nevertheless, many people still have misconceptions about puppetry. They often assume puppet shows are simply for children, or that the medium will be tiny marionettes, or the stage will be small-scale. They picture street art or improvised Punch & Judy shows. Yet there is a rich arts exchange happening worldwide, from the puppetry of cultural heritages to contemporary and avant-garde approaches that break down Western stereotypes and build on puppetry origins in astounding ways.

This festival is a testament to that, with puppets made of ice, human bodies as stages, the layered universe of shadow puppets, masked humans, full-sized puppets with astounding articulation, and underwater puppets that emit pure poetic motion. Endless methods and genres are being innovated and manipulated in cinematic ways onstage, making it a very exciting art form to witness. 

Thomas describes the festival’s mission to supply the charms of this modern art form, and his theories on why it resonates so well in a town known to be an arts incubator. “I think it is just a matter of exposing them to what is happening in contemporary puppetry. Anyone who has not seen any contemporary puppetry will be shocked by what they see because the work is so visual with such a dynamic quality.” He adds, “You’re used to being oversaturated with visual information in the media. But in the performing arts, puppetry does it in a way that’s astounding and immediate.”

Highlighting the impossibleThomas had 17 examples of how visually impactful puppetry can be to our media-soaked minds (aligning exactly with the amount of shows in the festival this year), but I pressed him to select just one for the article. He chose “a startling piece by Livsmedlet from Finland called Invisible Lands. It uses hardly any spoken word at all, and less-than-inch-tall figurines that represent people who are being forced to migrate out of their country under duress. The two performers use their body as the landscape that depicts this narrative that plays out, and [use] little cameras to magnify what’s happening. It’s a very intimate piece that’s really unlike anything else.” Invisible Lands plays at the Chopin Theater January 19-22.

Invisible Lands, presented by Livsmedlet of Finland Credit Pernilla Lindgren

Further festival highlights include the aforementioned ice puppet in the show Anywhere by Théâtre de L’Entrouvert (also at the Chopin January 19-22). Élise Vigneron, creator of both the theater and the show, describes how Anywhere came to be a collaborative project with two local creators. “As puppeteers, we were motivated by a common question: ‘How can puppet theater contribute? How can two artists who wish to transform practices and rethink how shows tour the world make a collaboration that has as its core cooperation and environmental issues?’ From this was born the idea of transmission of Anywhere to a company of Chicago artists who could tour North America.”She adds, “It is the same show but staged with a new generation of artists. With this transmission we hope for transformation . . . of collaboration, artistic research and discovery shared, artists learning from other artists, and a way for international work to be more readily seen by audiences in North America.”

One of those local collaborators in Anywhere is Ashwaty Chennat, a movement artist and educator whose interdisciplinary and cultural exchange work sows seeds for empathy-building experiences. Chennat describes the experience of working with fellow local artist Mark Blashford. “Teams are everything, especially when everyone is experiencing something new. I am so grateful to have a group of curious, joyful, and playful artists to work with for this process. Seeing Mark at work has helped me understand the presence of dance within puppetry—in many ways puppetry requires more coordination than dance!”

Director/creator Vigneron describes the visceral impact of watching an ice puppet evaporate throughout the 50-minute work, inspired by Henry Bauchau’s novel Oedipus on the Road. “In front of this melting character we physically feel its metamorphosis . . . If there is a message that appeals to me with this show it is that, like matter and nature, our existence is constantly evolving.” She describes the long system of pulleys developed to carry the heavy ice puppet as being reminiscent of her childhood passion for the circus trapeze.

Blashford, who founded Rootstock in Chicago and now lives in Reykjavík, specializes in marionette, rod, and hand puppetry. Blashford says the process of meeting in France to work on Anywhere was a helpful one, because it “afforded us the time and space to develop our onstage chemistry and offstage friendship, a vital component in the process of interpreting and transmitting the work.” He is thrilled to be returning home for the festival to present this work, saying, “As a string puppeteer, I cannot wait to share this innovative performance technique with Chicago and North America. It is a challenge to make a new puppet every night, but the storytelling is exquisite.”

Another show of note in the Festival is Macunaíma Gourmet from Pigmalião Escultura que Mexe, which explores themes from the popular Brazilian novel Macunaíma by Mário de Andrade. Using life-sized puppets and fantastical masked mythological creatures, codirector Eduardo Felix says the work is rooted in political and cultural meanings, something that gives him pride as a Brazilian. “This masterpiece of modern literature in Brazil was the result of a very large and rich collection of habits, folklore, and popular culture that helped build Brazil’s image of itself.”

Felix describes why the puppet is such a powerful tool for artistic and political metaphor. 

“The puppet, because it is a fake being, is free and licensed to talk about certain subjects or perform certain actions that would not look good on human actors.” Speaking of the novel, Felix explains how the complex themes motivated his and other renditions of it in the arts world. “It is a very controversial work, because at the same time that we can recognize ourselves in some way in that antihero, we also feel offended by the harshness of certain stereotypes shown there, and this is what most provoked us and led us in the creation of work.”

Macunaíma Gourmet presented by Pigmalião Escultura que Mexe Credit Yasmini Omari

He adds, “Our show was created in order to provoke in the public the reflection on what it is to be consumed by the market, which uses advertising to make us think that we are special if we inconsequentially consume certain products . . . We are Brazilians and we speak from our own perspective, but I think that these issues are not only ours, they are global, with agents and victims both in Belo Horizonte, as in Chicago, or Paris, or Dubai.”

Growing forward 

The festival has grown at just the right moment, harnessing a pandemic-weary thirst for novelty, the millennial urge for artistic diversity, and a growing appreciation for contemporary art forms, which all contributed to its expansion. According to Thomas, this growth means not just a longer festival with more shows and artists, but also more workshops and opportunities for artists to learn and collaborate, as well as more opportunities for curious audiences from Hyde Park to Wicker Park to explore.

“There has been a very positive response to the festival by the Chicago audiences. I’m really looking for it to be a regular fixture in our landscape culturally each year so that audiences can start to see the breadth of work that’s happening with puppetry.”

More Puppet Festival possibilitiesFor art nerds:Les Anges au Plafond, R.A.G.E., MCA ChicagoFor families:Little Uprisings, My Night in the Planetarium, multiple locations, 1/19-1/22For culture vultures: Basil Twist, Dogugaeshi, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts,1/26-1/29For multimedia art lovers:Manual Cinema, Frankenstein, Studebaker, 1/27-1/29For diehard night owls: Links Hall/Rough House, Nasty, Brutish & Short, Links Hall, 1/20-1/28

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