Redmoon Theater’s 2005 production of “The Cabinet.” The set has been rebuilt by Cabinet of Curiosity for the Puppet Festival.
Each January, the (especially cold and) windy city attracts hundreds of the finest puppeteers in the world to perform in what has become the biggest festival of its kind on this continent. Events—over a hundred in twelve days—reliably sell out well in advance and scores of Chicagoans brave the dead of winter to warm themselves with theatrical magic. Any of last year’s ticketholders crammed into the sardine-packed Steppenwolf lobby, jockeying for position in one of the Chopin Theater’s waiting areas, or standing in a line that switchbacked up and down the vestibule of the Biograph might have found rumors of live theater’s death to be greatly exaggerated.
And so, it is with great expectation that the International Puppet Theater Festival returns January 15-26, blanketing our frigid city tip-to-toe and promising once again to be the hottest ticket in the coldest month. Blair Thomas and Sandy Gerding, the respective artistic and executive directors of the festival, have invited artists from eleven countries, including first-time representation from China, Scotland and India. Chicago has a strong showing on the calendar of events, too, thanks in no small part to Thomas’ cultivation of our blossoming local puppetry scene.
Vanessa Valliere, a Chicago performer whose credits include six Tours de Fat and as a nerd cheerleader with Mucca Pazza, will make her festival debut in a small theater on the seventh floor of the Fine Arts Building. In her predominantly one-woman shows, Valliere transforms into awkward, touching, often riotously funny characters who emerge from the weirder corners of the human subconscious. For the festival, she and longtime collaborator Lindsey Nicole Whiting have woven three of her short works into an evening-length show called “Look, Look.” In one segment, a “humanette” (Valliere’s head with a tiny puppet body) named Barbara desperately tries to stay awake during a self-improvement seminar. In another, Valliere’s character is bullied by her best friend, an overbearing doll seated on stage. “She’s so mean to me,” Valliere says, laughing.
Her mix of clowning and puppetry is driven by relationships with the audience and onstage, Valliere says. Regarding clowning, “I’m most comfortable onstage if I can look at the audience and we can be in the room together, as corny as that sounds. I get a lot of information from them, and I enjoy getting that information, even when it’s not great. It’s terrifying but pleasant. When I first started doing puppetry, I wanted to have relationships on stage with puppets and not people. Of course, I love working with people and welcome it. There’s so much more possibility and magical logic with a puppet. It allows for some really wacky storytelling.”
Handspring Puppet Company’s “The Life and Times of Michael K.”/Photo: Fiona MacPherson
“Look, Look” takes place in a small theater in the Fine Arts Building, which also houses the festival headquarters, a pop-up café from The Spoke & Bird, and larger-scale performances in the Studebaker Theater on the first floor. These include an adaptation of “Dracula” from a female perspective by the deliriously brilliant France-and-Norway-based company Plexus Polaire; an adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel “The Life and Times of Michael K” by Handspring Puppet Company from South Africa; and “Iniskim: Return of the Buffalo,” a documentary about a collaboration between puppeteers and Indigenous residents of the Canadian Rockies to honor the reintroduction of bison to Banff National Park. In the film, a crowd sitting on a twilight hillside witnesses life-sized lantern buffalo puppets lope under the stars to Eya-Hey Nakoda drummers and the Iniskim Choir. “I think all theater is political and spiritual,” muses Frank Maugeri. Like Blair Thomas, Maugeri is a godfather of Chicago puppetry, the former artistic director of the legendary, now-defunct Redmoon Theater, which Thomas founded in 1990. Maugeri’s current company, Cabinet of Curiosity, carries on the Redmoon tradition of immersive—and frequently bicycle-powered—public programming, with a mission of creating ritual and celebration. For the festival, Cabinet of Curiosity has rebuilt the 2005 Redmoon production “The Cabinet,” inspired byRobert Wiene’s 1920 German Expressionist silent film “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.” The show had to literally be reconstructed, as Maugeri burned the original set years ago. “I drove to Blair Thomas’ farm to burn it as a ritual of letting go of my past. Through a series of meetings with directors, designers and actors, we had to scratch our heads to remember how it worked.”
The set, teeming with mechanical trickery, has been redesigned for a bigger audience at Biograph Theater. The text by Mickle Maher and music by Mark Messing are unchanged, though Maugeri feels the themes resonate differently twenty years later. “When we first made it, Mickle wrote a story about one man’s possession over another man to lead him to murder. But the more I watched the production, I felt this is a very powerful piece about fascism. Can we protect ourselves from tyrants? That tone of maniac power over the individual is ringing with difficult sounds and I’m curious about how an audience today responds to that tone.”
“Organismo” by Maraña/Photo: Pablo Hassmann
If that sounds like weighty material to prop up with paper and paint, the festival lineup argues that puppets are well suited to take on any subject, from professional wrestling (New York-based Josh Rice Projects’ “Kayfabe”) to a history of imperialism (“Made in Macau 2.0” by Rolling Puppet Alternative Theatre from China) to addiction and its stigmas (Tortoise in a Nutshell’s “Concerned Others” fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival). And of course there’s plenty of whimsy, dream logic, animal-human friendships, and fantastical lands on the schedule. The scale of shows range from tabletop object manipulation, like RoiZIZO théâtre’s “I Killed the Monster,” to “Organismo” from Chilean-German Maraña, in which a massive hand-knit set piece oozes with the limbs and torsos of aerial artists. Admission, too, covers a range of interest and access levels, from ticketed shows at two dozen venues to the free neighborhood tour, making six stops between Grand Crossing and Edgewater.
“The theater of dreams, what puppetry and dance are, has a home and space in our spirit. It’s experiencing a necessary renaissance,” Maugeri says. “I want to applaud Blair and Sandy for creating a festival that is offering people something we need now more than ever. If people are afraid theater is a dying art—especially because of the pandemic—theirs is surviving for a good reason. I think they have their finger on the pulse of what the human spirit requires: wonder, dreams, transformation, images and poetry.”
The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival runs January 15-26 at over twenty venues. Tickets and info at chicagopuppetfest.org.
