Don’t Close Your Eyes: A Few Words on Physical Theater Festival Chicago

Nouveau Sud in “La Bestia,” part of Physical Theater Festival Chicago/Photo: Courtesy the artist

Ten years ago, Alice da Cunha and Marc Frost created a small festival for theater artists whose preferred method of storytelling is beyond words. Now, Physical Theater Festival Chicago, running July 8-16 at three venues, works with almost a dozen partners here and abroad to bring companies from around the world with performances that must be seen to be understood. We spoke with Marc and Alice about this year’s lineup and the big tent that is physical theater.
Tell me about the origin of the festival and what gap you saw it filling in Chicago’s performing arts landscape.

Alice: Marc and I met in a Physical Theater school in London. We had been immersed in a city that had so many types of theater and, when we moved to Chicago, we didn’t see a platform for physical theater. Though Chicago has many renowned companies, much of the work was very realistic, fourth-wall theater.

Let me back up and ask, what is physical theater?

Alice: I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I just finished directing another show that is physical theater, “The Dream King” [running through June 18 at Chopin Theatre]. Physical theater can be defined as any type of theater where the primary source of storytelling is the body in the space. It can be anything from Cirque du Soleil to the beginning of “The Lion King”; it can be a mime constructing a wall in front of you. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t have words, but the visual aspect is very important. It’s the type of theater where you can’t close your eyes. I think that’s a good way to explain it to Chicago.

Marc: I think after ten years we still don’t have the elevator-speech answer to it. We talk about three words: visual, physical and contemporary. Alice spoke a little to the first two. When it comes to contemporary: We were particularly inspired by the London International Mime Festival. The old-school vision of a mime of a person in a striped shirt with white makeup—they did a terrific job of exploding that; there were things you could consider puppetry or clowning or movement and dance theater. It was a place to showcase some of the most contemporary work happening. That’s very important to us.

Alice: I’m not sure when kitchen sink became the definition of theater. One of the earliest ideas of theater is the court jester. It’s been here forever.

This encompasses so many forms and it’s an international festival to boot—how do you approach curation?

Marc: The physical theater world is rather small; people know each other by a degree or two. At the school we attended in London, fifteen languages were spoken among fifty students. We were plugged into that network. In Europe and South America there are a lot of festivals. We don’t necessarily have the budget to attend them, but through social networks, Alice has done an incredible job checking out the Santiago a Mil [International Theatre Festival] in Chile and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland and seeing: What are people talking about? What’s exciting? What’s coming out on a scale we could bring to Chicago?

I see there’s a focus on Chicago artists. too. What are you seeing coming out of the local scene? Has it grown over the years?

Marc: It definitely has. Right before the pandemic, we opened an off-season scratch night [works-in-progress showings], the dream being we would do it every three months, but the pandemic had other ideas. I think we could easily fill scratch nights with six-to-eight acts doing ten-to-fifteen minutes of work each. We did one in March and we’ll do one as part of the festival. Broadening what physical theater is and how it’s reflected in so many ways in Chicago is important to us. Back in 2020 we had our first footwork crew [The Era] perform as part of the festival, this year we’ll have a double-dutch team perform and do workshops in our kickoff day in Nichols Park in the Hyde Park neighborhood. That day is not just about having people watch but, if they’re interested and able, getting them to move as well.

Alice: The day at Nichols Park we want to show off Chicago talent. There’s a circus community here we’re proud to show off. Chicago is an amazing city in terms of dance, improv, performance art and theater, and very rarely do these worlds intersect. I strongly feel physical theater can be interesting to anyone in any of these sectors. It’s all theater at the end of the day.

Are there other highlights of the program you’d like to speak to?

Marc: One of the things I think is really exciting—we’ll be bringing a circus company from Charlotte, North Carolina that’s led by a Puerto Rican artist. What’s really cool is that we’ve connected them with the Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center in Humboldt Park and they’re going to do a residency there. That’s been a long-held dream of ours, to not just bring an artist in for three nights but have them stay and more meaningfully connect with our audiences and community. The cultural center has a day camp for students and the circus artist from Nouveau Sud will teach these students for a week.

Alice: This is a dangerous question because we live for this festival. I’m super-excited that we’re having our first companies from Africa and the Middle East, a collaboration between Israel and Spain. A silver lining of the pandemic is that we got in contact with a theater festival in South Africa, the biggest theater festival in Africa. We had thirty submissions and unfortunately could only program one, but we’re very excited to be able to bring them here.

Marc: It’s an award-winning show from the 1980s that had toured the world, including Broadway. The thing that makes it unique this time is that originally the show, set during the apartheid era, was played by five male actors. This production is an all-female production. It brings a whole different perspective on a story that has travelled around the globe.

The Spanish-Israeli show is a story that’s not told very often. It’s set during the Spanish inquisition and tells the story of a Jewish person trying to stay alive, traveling from city to city. It’s all told with just five actors, several pieces of cloth, live instrumentation, and it’s just so crisp, so clear.

Is there anything else either of you would like to mention?

Marc: The other thing I’d like to mention, with it being the tenth year, we really committed ourselves early on with Links Hall—which gave us a grant to do the first one—to make it as open and accessible and amplify as many artists as possible. Having it reach ten years is beyond our imagination. We want to, in some small way, look back and honor the artists we’ve had over the last decade. We’re creating a brochure as a take-home so you’ll have the opportunity to see what kind of shows have come over the years and try to answer that impossible question, “what is physical theater?”

Physical Theater Festival Chicago at Theater Wit, Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center and Nichols Park, July 8  6. More information and tickets at physicalfestival.com.