Modern Puppetry Takes Center Stage At International Festival In Chicago

January 14, 2015
Chicago

By Mark Guarino
CHICAGO, Jan 14 (Reuters) – Puppets aren’t only about Muppets, kids and circuses.
Indeed, an general puppetry festival in Chicago aims to redefine a art form and promises theatergoers an knowledge that, distinct so many in a digital age, can’t be swiped, streamed, downloaded, or tweeted.
The initial annual Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, that opens on Wednesday and runs by Jan. 25, is about a many forms of contemporary puppetry – from marionettes, masking and shade puppets to tabletop puppets and larger-than-life designation characters that tell stories that are both epic and inherently intimate.
Puppet museum is suspicion to have been around in some form for some-more than 3,000 years, with new award-winning theatre shows like “War Horse” and “The Lion King” holding a art to new, romantic levels and outrageous tellurian audiences.
Festival owner Blair Thomas says a low-tech inlet of puppetry is what creates it so enduring, generally when people are now flooded with record in their daily lives.
“Live puppet museum is unequivocally only this sculptured intent being achieved in front of we by someone who has ability to award it with life,” Thomas said.
“That’s in such pointy contrariety to a media enlightenment where we are flooded with how quick things are edited in film. Our cinematic eye is really worldly though also oversaturated. So there’s something really genuine about being in a participation of an charcterised puppet that is a exhale of uninformed air,” he said.
The 12-day festival takes place via Chicago, from storefront theaters to a Museum of Contemporary Art and Field Museum. It will underline about 50 puppeteers from around a universe including New York, London, Montreal, a Netherlands, and France.
Chicago is represented by companies like five-year-old Manual Cinema that incorporates multimedia, soundscapes, and storytelling focusing on epitome expressionism.
Puppetry has low roots in Chicago with a tenure “puppeteer” credited by etymologists as imagining there in 1912 with Ellen Van Volkenburg, a co-founder of a Chicago Little Theater that put on puppet shows on Michigan Avenue.
Van Volkenburg was after profiled in a 1920 New York Times essay that initial used a tenure “puppeteering” in print.
Thomas says some-more museum artists are incorporating puppetry currently since they have come to conclude how it expands their storytelling potential.
The morality of a art form, it seems, taps into something inherently obsolete that can't be replicated by tellurian actors reading from required scripts.
“Puppet museum is closely connected to a irrational,” he said.
“After several centuries of experimental meditative as a primary approach of looking during a world, there’s no approach for undiscerning suspicion to go. So examination a puppet that is charcterised good can daub into that reptilian brand, that creates it a really absolute experience.”
The performances in Chicago (chicagopuppetfest.org) will change from normal shade puppetry by New York’s Chinese Theater Works, to a charcterised drawings of Canadian Daniel Barrow, and what is described as “a live-action three-dimensional cartoon” achieved by 15 puppeteers of In a Heart of a Beast Puppet and Mask Theater of Minneapolis.
Thomas hopes a festival will turn a biannual event.
“One of a goals is to redefine what puppetry is in people’s minds,” he says. “It crosses a lot of bounds and borders and cultures and languages that differently apart us.” (Reporting by Mark Guarino, modifying by Jill Serjeant and Gunna Dickson)