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.
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.
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.