Theater News: Last Days of Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, thru Jan. 27, 2019

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CHICAGO – They’ve got the world on a string – and other forms of bringing inanimate objects to life – at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, which is currently presenting shows all around the city through January 27th, 2019. For more information and to purchase tickets, click here.

Pup
Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, Through January 27th, 2019
Photo credit: SiskelFilmCenter.org

The 12-day city wide Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival showcases an entertaining and eclectic array of puppet styles from around the world… including marionettes, shadow puppets, Bunraku puppets, tiny toy puppets, and distinctive, innovative styles of contemporary puppetry. Why Chicago? Before 1912, the term “Puppeteer” did not exist in the English language. Ellen van Volkenburg, who was a director with the Chicago Little Theatre at the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, needed a program credit for the actors she had trained to manipulate marionettes while speaking the text of of a Shakespeare play. Chicago is also unique in that has a substantial local theater audience that not only attends performances, but supports innovative and new theater. Puppetry is active in American theater today, frequently employed in musicals and dramas as a sign of the renaissance for the art of puppetry.



Additionally, it gives an opportunity to experience the surreal nature of puppetry, in many forms of narrative and the avant-garde. When I attended “Tedium” and “Other Sensations” at the northside’s famous Neo-Futurists Theatre, the audience was transfixed by a presentation of sound and object fetishism, mesmerizing and indicting at the same time. In this time of year when the atmosphere can be cold and bleak, this festival is the cure for those winter blues.

The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival runs through January 27th, 2019. For specific ticket and schedule information, click here.

HollywoodChicago.com senior staff writer Patrick McDonald

By PATRICK McDONALD
Editor and Film Writer
HollywoodChicago.com
pat@hollywoodchicago.com

© 2019 Patrick McDonald, HollywoodChicago.com

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