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 Indeed, an international puppetry festival in Chicago aims to
redefine the art form and promises theatergoers an experience
that, unlike so many in our digital age, can't be swiped,
streamed, downloaded, or tweeted.
The first annual Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival,
which opens on Wednesday and runs through Jan. 25, is about the
many forms of contemporary puppetry - from marionettes, masking
and shadow puppets to tabletop puppets and larger-than-life
installation characters that tell stories that are both epic and
innately intimate.
Puppet theater is thought to have been around in some form for
more than 3,000 years, with recent award-winning stage shows
like "War Horse" and "The Lion King" taking the art to new,
emotional levels and huge global audiences.
Festival founder Blair Thomas says the low-tech nature of
puppetry is what makes it so enduring, especially when people
are now inundated with technology in their daily lives.
"Live puppet theater is really just this sculptured object being
performed in front of you by someone who has ability to endow it
with life," Thomas said.
"That's in such sharp contrast to our media culture where we are
inundated with how fast things are edited in film. Our cinematic
eye is very sophisticated but also oversaturated. So there's
something very real about being in the presence of an animated
puppet that is a breath of fresh air," he said.
The 12-day festival takes place throughout Chicago, from
storefront theaters to the Museum of Contemporary Art and Field
Museum. It will feature about 50 puppeteers from around the
world including New York, London, Montreal, the Netherlands, and
France.
Chicago is represented by companies like five-year-old Manual
Cinema that incorporates multimedia, soundscapes, and
storytelling focusing on abstract expressionism.
Puppetry has deep roots in Chicago with the term "puppeteer"
credited by etymologists as originating there in 1912 with Ellen
Van Volkenburg, a co-founder of the Chicago Little Theatre that
put on marionette shows on Michigan Avenue.
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Van Volkenburg was later profiled in a 1920 New York Times article
which first used the term "puppeteering" in print.
Thomas says more theater artists are incorporating puppetry today
because they have come to appreciate how it expands their
storytelling potential.
The simplicity of the art form, it seems, taps into something
inherently primitive that cannot be replicated by human actors
reading from conventional scripts.
"Puppet theater is intimately connected to the irrational," he said.
"After several centuries of empirical thinking as the primary way of
looking at the world, there's no way for irrational thought to go.
So watching a puppet that is animated well can tap into that
reptilian brand, which makes it a very powerful experience."
The performances in Chicago (chicagopuppetfest.org) will vary from
traditional shadow puppetry by New York's Chinese Theatre Works, to
the animated drawings of Canadian Daniel Barrow, and what is
described as "a live-action three-dimensional cartoon" performed by
15 puppeteers of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre
of Minneapolis.
Thomas hopes the festival will become a biannual event.
"One of our goals is to redefine what puppetry is in people’s
minds," he says. "It crosses a lot of boundaries and borders and
cultures and languages that otherwise separate us."
(Reporting by Mark Guarino, editing by Jill Serjeant and Gunna
Dickson)
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