La Liga Teatro Elastico, “The Beast Dance”/Photo: Pablo Federico

Chicago has become the Western Hemisphere’s destination for puppetry, thanks to The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival and Blair Thomas, the festival’s founder, who curates the biggest gathering of puppet artists on the continent. Thomas and the CIPTF team have made the the Fine Arts Building a hub of activities, with performances, workshops, symposia, and a pop-up café for the ten-day run, but the puppets will be everywhere January 18-28, appearing at more than a dozen venues all across the North, South and West Sides. Thomas spoke about year six of the festival, the poignancy of materials, and how puppets hold up a mirror to our interior world.

It seems like the festival is bigger this year. Is it just me?

It has grown in many ways. We have more large shows at larger houses. Between the Studebaker and the Biograph and the Steppenwolf theaters, we’re planning some large stages for puppet theater.

Are there other new venues?

In the past, the free neighborhood tour was only one weekend and now we have Krystal Puppeteers from Kenya touring “Tears by the River” at different venues all ten days of the festival. 

This is the third year of the festival as an annual event. How has the yearly cadence changed things?

Well, it makes everything go twice as fast; it’s a simple mathematical equation. We’re doing all the nuts and bolts making sure everything we scheduled will be pulled off, and at the same time I have a lineup for the 2025 festival. There’s more action of two festivals in our mind at once.

The biggest trick is to be able to nail down what it will cost to bring that show to that theater for that many days. There are so many dull calculations that aren’t so readily out there. Anyway, it’s not such exciting stuff.

Okay, let’s get poetic. In past interviews you’ve said how the material world has a message for human beings about our relationship with the non-human. That theme seems particularly on the surface in this year’s lineup.

It’s true, there’s a lot of that interest in a lot of puppeteers these days. It’s not only in the theme of the narrative—like in Wakka Wakka or “A Bucket of Beetles”—but it’s also in the material design this year. So much so we’re having all four of our symposium panels to talk about the material design of their performance. Why they’re choosing this material? How does it tell a story in addition to narrative?

One company that’s very interesting is La Liga Teatro Elástico doing “The Beast Dance (or The Secret Spell of the Wild).” This Mexican company is interested in the plight of the wolf in nature. They’ve made these puppets that are evocative and gorgeous and not entirely representational. They’re skeletal in form, but they’re partially made out of animals themselves—bones and antlers and hooves—and found objects like baskets and mechanical pieces. They’re built in a way that makes them move like the animals they represent and have an evocative materiality. People will be able to see them up close at the Fine Arts Building, and they’ll perform with them at the National Museum of Mexican Art in a sort of ritualistic event.

Speaking of materiality, in the press release you say the puppets will “speak to us in their own rare language, beyond mere words or the physical world.” Can you say a little more about how puppets transcend the physical?

In all the thought around our homo sapien-centric world we look at all the issues at hand and ask, “How does this benefit us?” and not how does it affect all the organisms on Earth? When we talk about how the world is being destroyed, we’re talking about our sea coasts and having to move our houses. It’s like someone who is narcissistic, but it’s an entire species. There’s a great book by Melanie Challenger [“How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human”] and the opening line is, “The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal.” It’s such a true statement.

So what this has to do with materiality—the puppet is not an animal either. But I see the puppet as a harbinger coming from a non-human world. It’s like a species that arrives porously through myth and imagination and is like an apparition that becomes present. It speaks and moves, but is like the reflection of a dream, reflecting our experience back to us. The puppet is never feeling anything. But we look at it and see a mirror of our own experience. That’s a template for a lot of artmaking but it’s very pronounced in contemporary puppetry. Yes, there are fabricated things in other art forms and yes, there’s performance in other art forms, but the combination of these two make it wholly unique.

There is a real alchemy to it. Though anyone who saw “Chimpanzee” two years ago would defy your saying that puppet didn’t feel anything. A woman sitting in front of me sat in the theater and just wept and wept after the lights came on. She couldn’t get up. Of course, my beat is dance and there’s a lot of overlap between dance and puppetry. There is one show on the program that stands out with some straight-ahead dance.

Federico Restrepo, the artistic director of Loco7 Dance Puppet Theatre Company, is as much a dancer as a puppeteer. His work has always incorporated dance heavily. [“Lunch With Sonia”] is a unique piece because it has a character narrative, a true experience of having his aunt call her family members together to have a lunch to celebrate her life. She is represented by a puppet. I was moved by this piece when I saw it at La MaMa [Experimental Theatre Club, in New York City] years ago and I’m very excited to have it at the Dance Center of Columbia College.

Figurentheatre Wilde & Vogel in “Krabat”/Photo: Therese Stuber

Any other highlights of the festival you’d like to mention?

Sure. The performance “Krabat” that’s a collaboration between a German company [Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel] and a Polish company. It comes from an Eastern European aesthetic, which is markedly different from Western European work, which dominates so much of our awareness here in the U.S. The former Soviet countries have a different tradition and practice. The company Grupa Coincidentia works rurally. They have a barn in the middle of nowhere in Poland. It’s a different visual language that’s going to come in the festival.

The other thing is “Little Carl.” Michael Montenegro has done a wonderful collaboration with Theatre Y, a company on the West Side that is really embedded in the community. This takes a very pertinent issue—the impact of gun violence on urban youth. Michael comes in with his distinctive aesthetic; it’s always teetering on the brink of falling apart but at the same time it’s achieving this grace and beauty, drawing a delicate line of how fragile existence is. You have this kind of puppetry in this kind of context with this narrative and these young performers who have testimony to the experience. It’s a real blessing.

The Chicago International Puppet Theatre Festival runs January 18 – 28 at over a dozen locations around the city. Info and tickets at chicagopuppetfest.org.