FREE Streaming and Cheap In Person Adult Puppet Fun With Nasty, Brutish and Short: A Puppet Cabaret.

ChiIL Live Shows On Our Radar 

Chicago Puppet Fest, Rough House, and Links Hall present:

Nasty, Brutish & Short

January 20-21 & 27-28, 2023 at 10:30pm

Suggested for Ages: 16 and up

 

REVIEW:

By Bonnie Kenaz-Mara

Chicago's being taken over by a puppet invasion for the now annual Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. Don't miss this! We caught Friday night's Nasty, Brutish & Short (named for Thomas Hobbes infamous 1651 quote on life without art and society) and were well entertained by this adult puppet cabaret.

Acts ranged from shadow puppets to life-sized 3D creations, potty mouthed muppet types on MC duty, a giant plush vagina with a chatty clit, a female puppet doctor taking actual medical questions from the audience, and more. Our favorite piece was Mother Water, a gorgeous and moving shadow puppet film. Check out all the nights of on Nasty, Brutish & Short: A Puppet Cabaret on YouTube, now available for free streaming any time HERE.

BRITTANY CLEMONS & MAISIE O'BRIEN: "Mother Water" is a shadow puppetry short film pilot exploring racism, African-American and African folklore and Reconstruction through a supernatural lens.

Puppet cabaret line-up this Friday (Jan 20) at 10:30pm! Links Hall Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival

LINDSEY BALL: This shortened version of "Kopfkino" features a suitcase crankie story of the real history and science of crickets, infusing them with a heroic sweetness and a bit of magic.

(photo by Evan Barr)

MYRA KALAW: "The Soup & the Crumbs" is a shadow puppetry piece about two mismatched creatures caught in an act of communion.

MADIGAN BURKE: Magican is a filmmaker, artist, and engineer whose work aims to explore queerness, encourage curiosity, and spread joy.

Also check out Les Anges, Rocio "Chio" Cabrera, Dana Kogan and more!

If you're short on time and/or money, Chicago’s favorite late-night puppet cabaret, Nasty, Brutish & Short at Links is a great place to start. This special festival edition, featuring the charming and furry host, Jameson, is home to raucous, raunchy, dark, sassy, sad, and mostly hilarious puppet theater, highlighting more experimental work by out of towners as well as local favorites in four different nights of puppet revelry. Every night features a different lineup and all are available live as a ticketed event or streaming free. Catch the live stream show nights at 10:30 on YouTube or watch later at your leisure.

Location: Links Hall, 3111 N. Western Ave.

Cost: $18/$15 students & seniors

Running Time: 85 mins

ADA Accessible

Extend your festival experience by hitting Chicago’s favorite late-night puppet cabaret, Nasty, Brutish & Short. This special festival edition, featuring the charming and furry host, Jameson, is home to raucous, raunchy, dark, sassy, sad and mostly hilarious puppet theater, highlighting more experimental work by out of towners as well as local favorites in four different nights of puppet revelry.

Here at ChiIL Live Shows, we've been catching Nasty, Brutish & Short year round for nearly a decade. Some of the off season shows are uneven, with some brilliant pieces and some that... need work. Still, that's the point. Like everything, puppetry takes practice, and we love that Nasty, Brutish & Short is a place where beginners as well as seasoned professionals come to play together in a safe place to workshop new material or puppet for the first time. During the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival most of the pieces are phenomenal and it's a great place to catch excerpts from multiple International show that are playing around town. Highly recommended.

Bonnie is a Chicago based writer, theatre critic, photographer, videographer, actress, artist and Mama. She owns two websites where she publishes frequently: ChiILLiveShows.com (adult) & ChiILMama.com (family friendly).

Nasty, Brutish & Short

January 20-21 & 27-28, 2023 at 10:30pm

January 20th at 10:30pm

January 21st at 10:30pm

January 27th at 10:30pm

January 28th at 10:30pm

(and streaming any time HERE)

About the Co-Presenters

Rough House connects individuals and communities through art that celebrates the weird things that make us unique, and the weirder things that bring us together. We create puppet art that captures the heart through the eye. Our work use puppetry, music, and human performance to tell stories that are intimate, strange, and sincere. Based in Chicago, Rough House has been presented at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, The National Puppetry Festival, Physical Festival Chicago, and Open Eye Figure Theater’s Toy Theater After Dark. Rough House has toured across the United States, performing in auditoriums, lotion factories, funeral homes, basements, bars, galleries, punk houses and even the woods of Appalachia. Through Collaboration, Education, Art-making, Curating and Performance, Rough House seeks to make a bizarre and loving home for puppet makers and audiences alike. roughhousetheater.com

Links Hall encourages artistic innovation and public engagement by maintaining a facility and providing flexible programming for the research, development and presentation of new work in the performing arts. Through its residency programs, artist-curated festivals, co-presentations with self-producing artists, cabarets, performance series, workshops, and low-cost studio rentals, Links provides a home for artists across all performance disciplines, at all stages of their careers. Founded in 1978 by choreographers Bob Eisen, Carol Bobrow, and Charlie Vernon, Links Hall became a National Performance Network partner in 1998 and received a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions in 2016. In April 2013, Links and musician/presenter Mike Reed created a collaborative arts venue as the shared home of Constellation Arts and Links Hall. See Chicago Dance named Links Hall as the “Fearlessly Inspired” organization of 2020 noting the adaptive spirit and unfailing desire to support artists of all kinds. www.linkshall.org

REVIEW: Compagnie La Pendue’s Tria Fata at The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival

Surprisingly Intimate Puppetry Production 

Darkly Funny and Touching

Review of Compagnie La Pendue’s Tria Fata

Monday Jan 21 at Chopin Theatre

Presented as part of The Festivals Exchange

Guest Review
by d’arcy mies

In Tria Fata, La Pendue’s cast of two puppeteers present a cabaret that serves up life and death. A one-man band (Martin Kaspar Lauchli) fills the space with jaunty Klezmer music and (occasionally manipulates stringed puppets), while the graceful, black clad Estelle Charlier fills various roles, most notably, Death itself. Presented in French with English supertitles projected above the stage, the show is both intimate and expansive, at once personal and universal.



The main character, a red-haired old woman, bargains with Death for a little extra time, so she can once more review the memories of her life. The highlights of her life are presented: an amusing and bizarre childbirth scene, a highly symbolic coming of age vignette, and a heartbreakingly tragic love story. Each part is presented using different techniques: hand puppets and marionettes, shadow-puppetry, mime, and at the end, a touching and mesmerizing kinetic slide show. Tria Fata invites the audience to share in the old woman’s first breath, and her last, an unforgettable tribute to the human experience.

Photo Credit D'Arcy Mies

Photo Credit D'Arcy Mies

D'Arcy Mies is a Montessori teacher, mom, and long time theater lover who lives in Chicago burb, Franklin Park. She drives a "Tardis Blue" car decked out like Dr. Who's time machine and can often be found at pop culture events.



"Tria Fata" by Compagnie La Pendue (France)
Chopin Theatre, 1543 W Division

She is a puppeteer. He is a musician. Life and death are playing in their cabaret. The big imaginary machinery they are activating together strangely looks like the one which presides over our destinies: the Ancients believed this weaving loom belongs to the three Parcae—Tria Fata—where the threads of our lives are weaving, uncoiling, and breaking.

Presented as part of The Festivals Exchange —supported by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation International Connections Fund

About the Festival

The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival was founded in 2014 to establish Chicago as a prominent center for the art of puppetry. This biennial Festival presents the highest quality local, national, and international puppet shows in venues across the city. Invited artists lead workshops, public presentations and talks as an integral part of the Festival offerings. Additionally, the Festival hosts the Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium devoted to the advancement of scholarship and research in the field of puppetry.