Get better feedback on your art

Artist: Mike Oleon Photographer: Joe Mazza

The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival just wrapped, and I was overjoyed to see all the new work from new artists that was presented, particularly at our puppet cabaret, “Nasty, Brutish & Short.”

I love the energy that new work brings, but more than that, I love seeing work that shows curiosity, experimentation and growth. Practically all art benefits from a bit of informed transformation, whether it resonates more deeply with audiences and striking closer whatever measure of success an artist hopes to evoke.

Getting quality feedback plays a crucial role in this journey, providing insights and perspectives that can lead to growth and refinement. But how do you find the right people to offer feedback, especially when experts are not within reach? And once you have it, how do you process and implement it effectively? This post aims to guide puppet artists and creators alike through the emotional and logistical challenges of seeking, receiving, and using feedback.

Finding Feedback Sources:

1. Experts are everywhere: Sometimes you’ll get your work in front of a sage-like wizard with years under their belt, but there’s plenty of secret experts all around us. Everyone is an expert in their own experience! Anyone who engages with your work can offer useful insights. Friends, family, local community members, are all excellent sources of experience. Even so called “expert artists” rely on the feedback of audiences to know how their work is landing.

2. Join Artistic Communities: Participate in the next Puppets in Progress, gather a group of friends to see shows with, and become friends with artists interested in puppetry.

Asking the Right Questions:

1. Be Specific: Generic questions elicit generic responses. A:"What do you think?" B: “It was great!” A:“K, Good talk!” Focus on aspects that you were specifically working on such as the quality of puppet movement, or clarity of storytelling.

2. When in doubt, go for ‘Open-Ended Yet Focused’: Questions like "What part of the performance is working?" “What took you out of it?” “What did you want more of?” can elicit detailed and useful responses.

Receiving Feedback Gracefully:

1. Stay Open and Non-Defensive: Remember, feedback is not a personal attack but an opportunity for growth. Listen actively without jumping to defend your work. This one takes practice, but really pays off.

2. Process Emotionally: It’s natural to feel vulnerable. Feedback can be excruciating! Allow yourself time to process the feedback emotionally before revisiting it analytically.

3. It’s not all gold, but most of it is useful: Not everyone is great at giving feedback, but listen anyway, be present while happening, and you can sort through it later.

Clarifying and Implementing Feedback:

1. Follow-Up Questions: If feedback is vague, don’t hesitate to ask for clarification. For instance, "Could you elaborate on what you meant by 'lacking emotion' in the puppet's performance?"

2. Actionable Steps: Break down the feedback into actionable items. If someone suggests improving the puppet's movements, revisit those items and drill them with a friend.

3. Iterate, Iterate: Good works typically takes longer than our expectations. That’s OK! Implement feedback in stages and reassess. Sometimes, changes might not work as expected, and it’s okay to revert or re-adjust.

To sum it up: Feedback is often skipped, but it’s all around if you’ve got the courage to ask, and it can be really useful if you ask the right questions. As a puppet artist (or any sort of artist), embracing the process of seeking, receiving, and applying feedback not only enhances your skills but also deepens your connection with your audience and the creative community. Keep creating, keep sharing, and most importantly, keep evolving. See you at the puppet utopia.

A completely biased insider's guide to the 2024 Chicago International Puppet Festival

Holy Smokes! we’re less than 2 weeks away from the 2024 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, marking its sixth(!) year. This festival is an art lover’s dream, overflowing with more inspiration than most human hearts can handle. We’re gonna try and make it to everything we possibly can, but here’s our list of can’t-misses:

Wakka Wakka: The Immortal Jellyfish Girl

Kicking off with Wakka Wakka, is without a doubt one of our favorite companies in the US puppetry scene- they’re presenting a new trilogy of work, but the immortal Jellyfish Girl looks right up our haunted scifi alley. Wakka Wakka excels at tackling big big themes, with intimacy and humor that features squishy, dynamic puppets, that somehow steers completely clear of the muppet aesthetic.

Tarish “Jeghetto” Pipkins: The Hip Hopera of 5P1N0K10

Next, we spotlight Tarish “Jehgetto” Pipkins, the hip-hop puppetry virtuoso. Hands down one of our favorite puppet designers of all time. The show looks to be a blend of stunning design, Afro-futurism, hip-hop and is performed an intergenerational family of puppeteers. We can’t wait. Suitable for ages 10 and up, it's a family-friendly show we enthusiastically recommend.

Belova ~ Iacobelli Theatre Company: Chayka

OMG this is a chance to see the work one of our career HEROS. The name “Natacha Belova” has been evoked so many times in so many of our productions and rehearsals. Their work is a fusion of body puppetry and human performance, and their influence on our own work has been profound.

Nasty, Brutish, and Short: A Puppet Cabaret

*Weekend 1 at Links Hall ***Weekend 2 at the Logan Center

Don't miss the 'Nasty, Brutish, and Short' puppet cabaret that we produce, hosted at two different venues on the north and south sides. This event promises a diverse lineup featuring local, international, and emerging puppetry artists. It is hands down the best way to experience the most styles of puppetry in a single hour!

Alex and Olmsted: MAROONED! A Space Comedy

Finally, 'Marooned,' a space comedy by Alex and Olmstead, is an all-ages performance known for its humor, skilled puppet manipulation, and ingenious design. It's definitely not one to miss.

Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium

For those interested in the behind-the-scenes magic of puppetry, the Vulcan Burden Puppetry Symposium is a must-attend. It offers insights into puppetry mechanics, perfect for the curious mind. Don’t mistake it’s free admission price as “free to skip.” This is a chance for some one-on-one time with some seriously beautiful minds.

Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel: Spleen

'Spleen' remains a mystery to us, yet its intriguing visuals alone make it a promising addition to the festival lineup. This is one performance we're eager to explore.

Chicago's Finest Puppet Creations

This is a great chance to catch some of Chicago’s finest, including Manual Cinema's 'Leonardo,' Theater Y, and Michael Montenegro's 'Little Carl,' along with Dan Kerr-Hobert and Matthew Gawryk's adaptation of 'Invisible Cities.' Each a showcase of the brilliant work that’s being produced in this city of ours.

Final Thoughts

Pro-tip: If a show is sold out, try showing up anyway - you might get lucky. People always bail, and most of these venues can squeeze in a few standing audience members, so buy your tickets for the ones you’re sure you want to be comfortable for, and just show up if you waited a little too long to order your seats.

See you at the puppet show!

What’s Next for Rough House?

A couple of Alberts circa 2005. source: intentiondesigns.ca

We have a big year ahead of us. New shows. New opportunities. And look, a new blog! Puppetry is such a multi-faceted art form that it’s often a challenge to show all the elements that go into making it happen. So, we’re starting a blog to help illuminate some of the context surrounding all of the crazy work we do. Here’s what we got:

Invitation to a Beheading

January at the Chicago International Puppet Fest

From left to right: Noah Appelbaum, Michael Brown and Claire Saxe. Photo by Evan Barr

Last year, we were supposed to perform this at the festival, but we had to postpone. Adapted from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, Rough House teams up with our dear collaborator, Michael Brown, to find the delight in existential dread. With more twists and turns than a dungeon stairwell, this stage play is full of puppetry, masks, ridiculous rules for behavior, and characters who don’t definitely have our protagonist’s best interests at heart.

Get tickets

Nasty Brutish & Short: A Puppet Cabaret

Pictured: The Paper Whisperers. Photo Credit Evan Barr.

Four Festival Performances

No matter how many times we put on a cabaret, it remains an infinite source of delight, joy and good vibes. Last year we had performers doing their first puppet show on the same stage and night as a MacArthur genius who came from a multi-generational puppet family. Rough, fresh enthusiasm combined with virtuosity? That’s one of our favorite flavor combos.

The last couple of years of the cabaret have been curated by Myra Su and Caitlin McLeod who have been doing a remarkable job of knitting the cabaret community together and weathering this flipping pandemic. In addition to the FOUR festival editions of the cabaret, we’ll be putting on 2 more seasonal cabarets in Spring and in Fall.

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A Year for Big Experiments

This year, we’ve got presentations of 2 of our Artistic Director’s passion projects. Making a puppet show can take years, and getting those shows on their feet in full-length form is a big feat. Plus, we’ll be taking a deep dive into a project that might make a quantum leap in puppet technology. And even if it doesn’t, we’re gonna learn a lot.

We Missed the Train and Had to Wait

Summer 2023. Created by and featuring Co-Artistic Director Claire Saxe.

We Missed the Train is a loose and playful adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1904 play The Cherry Orchard, rendered in a palette of movement and objects. Drawing from clown, mime, found object puppetry, and texts from a variety of sources, the piece digs into themes of property, commerce, the land we occupy and our relationship to it.

You won’t wanna miss the part where Claire auctions off the entire physical and metaphysical properties of a declining family’s estate.

Claire Saxe at Physical Fest’s Scratch Night. She made that whole set and it fits in that box on the right.

Melodies from the Void: A Puppet Seance

Spring-Fall 2023. Created by and featuring Co-Artistic Director, Mike Oleon

‘Melodies from the Void: A Puppet Seance’ is an evening-length solo-performed collection of short ‘seances’ for spirits to inhabit a collection of fantastical puppets and objects designed, built, and brought to life by Mike Oleon. Blurring the line between performance and ritual, the invisible is made visible as dreams, the dead, and wordless tunes each find a corporeal home, if only for an instant.

This show will be workshopped throughout 2023 in homes around Chicago and the US.

Photo by Evan Barr

Puppet R&D: The Albert Project

left: Albert in 2005 right: elastic degradation from 17 years of tension

Does the future of Puppetry live inside this model? We’re gonna find out! In 2018, Mathematician, Artist and Designer Tom Flemons (intensiondesigns.ca) passed away, leaving behind countless works of “tensegrity” models including the humanoid he named Albert.

As fate would have it, two of the original Alberts have made their way to the Rough House Studio, and we’re gonna build ‘em back stronger than ever. First by reconstructing the original, followed by implementing improvements that Flemons suggested.

Tensegrity is a methodology that allows for highly stable structures (in our case, PUPPETS) to distribute energy or movement across a web of tension. What could this mean for puppetry? Tensegrity could help make puppets with extremely lifelike movements that require fewer hands from puppeteers to come to life. Why, that could be the biggest breakthrough in puppetry since foam rubber!

There is going to be a LOT to learn from this process, and we’ll be documenting in detail what we’re able to uncover this Winter and Spring.

Puppets in Progress

Winter- Fall 2023

We’ll be heatin’ up soup, then firing up the grill and playing with undercooked puppets while chattin’ with people.

PIPs is an informal gathering for testing out new puppet and object-based performances. Bring whatever you’re working on and get encouragement and feedback from other Chicago puppet-folks!

Are you new to puppetry and want a low stakes way to test the waters? Are you an old hand with a new project? Are you a dancer, comics artist, performance poet, teacher, lifeguard, engineer just curious about what puppetry looks like today? Everyone is welcome! Bring a project, no matter how rough, or just come for the conversation.

House of the Exquisite Corpse III

‘Mama’ by Felix Mayes. Puppet by Grace Needlman. Photo by Yvette Dostatni

Fall 2023

It’s happening! If you do something three years in a row… does it become a tradition? We’re still decompressing from the last one, but we’ll have plenty more news later on.