Celebrate Halloween, Rough House style! Spooky cocktails, music, special puppet appearances, and crafty fun, all exclusively inside 2024’s House of the Exquisite Corpse: Superstitions. Support and celebrate puppetry with us! 21+. Costume welcome!

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 puppet-folks!

Nasty, Brutish & Short is a late night cabaret packed with contemporary short-form puppet and object based theater. Providing a low-risk environment for artists to perform new and experimental work, this puppet slam fosters an artistic exchange between puppet artists of different generations and mediums.
This performance is for adult audiences.

Anything can be a puppet! Learn the fundamentals of puppetry and create your very own short performance piece using found objects. This workshop, led by Claire Saxe, will cover the basics of puppet manipulation, and give you the tools to bring to life the extraordinary stories hidden within common objects.

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 puppet-folks!

The Life Uncanny invites you to a real-life confluence of the curious, where the unseen becomes seen, and dreams and stories find a fleeting, tangible home. Join us for a night of wonder, inquiry, and the thrill of the inexplicable.

The Life Uncanny invites you to a real-life confluence of the curious, where the unseen becomes seen, and dreams and stories find a fleeting, tangible home. Join us for a night of wonder, inquiry, and the thrill of the inexplicable.

The Life Uncanny invites you to a real-life confluence of the curious, where the unseen becomes seen, and dreams and stories find a fleeting, tangible home. Join us for a night of wonder, inquiry, and the thrill of the inexplicable.

Crankie is a form of puppet storytelling told through a mechanical box and an illustrated scroll crank, creating an animated picture book! In this workshop, you'll build your very own crankie out of cardboard and make shadow puppets to accompany it. You will also learn pointers on scroll composition and layout to make the most out of the unique storytelling opportunities that the crankie offers.

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 puppet-folks!

Watch artists perform live on stage in-person or virtually. Rough House and Links Hall are pulling out all the stops to create a multi-camera puppet variety show. Combining the polish of network variety show and the rough magic of an experimental cabaret, we welcome you to the new abnormal!

Learn to build giant reed puppets in this hands-on workshop offered live in person in Chicago. All material included with enrollment.

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 puppet-folks!

Join Rough House Co-Artistic Director Mike Oleon to learn how to make a mechanized puppet! We’ll equip you with a prefab kit of puppet parts and teach you the secrets of building a puppet incorporating several basic mechanisms, including moving mouth, head, and limbs.

Nasty, Brutish & Short is a late-night puppet cabaret happening on both Friday and Saturday night (Jan 26 & 27). Join for wild, innovative, and exceptional puppetry from local legends and out-of-town heros.

Nasty, Brutish & Short is a late-night puppet cabaret happening on both Friday and Saturday night (Jan 26 & 27). Join for wild, innovative, and exceptional puppetry from local legends and out-of-town heros.

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

Stay after from 5-9pm for a puppetry exhibit called Potential Energy! Celebrate material and formal invention, trace networks of collaboration, and discover some of the exciting questions and possibilities that are animating puppet art today.

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

Watch artists perform live on stage in-person or virtually. Rough House and Links Hall are pulling out all the stops to create a multi-camera puppet variety show. Combining the polish of network variety show and the rough magic of an experimental cabaret, we welcome you to the new abnormal!

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

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!

Let’s get ready to PUPPPPPPETTTTT. Join us online OR in-person for Nasty, Brutish & Short September. Strap in, hydrate, and brace yourself for one puppety ride.