Make way, ghosts of holiday shows past: it’s a new year for Chicago theater, and as usual, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival is kicking it off with a bang. Now in its seventh iteration, the 2025 festival presents puppet artists and companies from across the U.S. and 13 other countries — including, for the first time, China, India and Scotland — at dozens of local venues starting later this week.
Founded in 2015 by puppeteer and multi-hyphenate artist Blair Thomas, the festival shifted from a biannual to an annual schedule in 2022 and is the largest of its kind in North America. According to Thomas, the annual format has helped with building audiences and attracting the support of individual donors, who contribute the bulk of its funding. In 2024, nearly 20,000 people attended festival events, and two-thirds of the performances were sold out.
For this year’s festival opener in the Fine Arts Building’s Studebaker Theater, Plexus Polaire presents “Dracula: Lucy’s Dream,” a retelling of Bram Stoker’s novel from the perspective of one of the vampire’s victims. Last seen in 2023 with a haunting production of “Moby Dick,” the popular French-Norwegian company returns to the festival for the fourth time.
Tortoise in a Nutshell, a company based in Edinburgh, Scotland, makes its Chicago Puppet Festival debut with “Concerned Others,” a one-man performance based on the lived experiences of Scots affected by substance dependence. Thomas said that fans of Chicago’s Manual Cinema will recognize similar techniques in this production, which uses 32mm figurines, shoe box style installations, turntables, micro-projection and soundscapes to portray a series of short stories.
Crafted from 30-plus hours of firsthand interviews with people in the recovery community, “Concerned Others” aims to break down stigma and bring nuance to a topic that’s often perceived on a surface level, said deviser and performer Alex Bird. With a modest view of what a single piece of theater can accomplish, the artists have worked to connect audience members with support organizations and charities in the UK. “Our function really is to help emphasize the work of experts, because we’re not experts,” said Bird. “The thing that we’re hopefully good at is … creating that shared imaginative bubble that you get in a theater performance.”
Other international productions include “Maati Katha (Earth Stories)” from India’s Tram Arts Trust, which blends real-time sculpting with traditional storytelling to explore the interconnectedness of all living things. Rolling Puppet Alternative Theatre’s “Made in Macau 2.0” tells a personal history of the island city of Macau, a territory of Portugal for four centuries and the last mainland colony returned to China in 1999.
“Life & Times of Michael K,” J.M. Coetzee’s 1983 Booker Prize-winning novel, is adapted for the stage with puppetry by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, designers of the puppets for the play “War Horse” on the West End and Broadway, as well as the internationally touring Little Amal puppet. Artists from Canada, Chile, Germany, Israel, Italy, Puerto Rico and Poland also perform at this year’s festival.
Ty Defoe, a Grammy Award winner and interdisciplinary artist of the Oneida Tribe and Anishinaabe Nation, returns with a family-friendly puppet play, “Skeleton Canoe.” Defoe wrote and co-created the 2019 festival opener, “Ajijaak on Turtle Island,” and workshopped “Skeleton Canoe” at the 2022 festival. The finished version follows Nawbin, an Anishinaabe youth, and Jiimaan, a living canoe, on a journey of self-discovery and cultural awareness.
Written and performed by Defoe, “Skeleton Canoe” is creatively produced by All My Relations Collective, a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary group of artists. The show features English and Ojibwe dialogue, as well as “the language of movement, music, imagery, textures and textiles,” said multimedia designer Katherine Freer. “All of those things are really powerful storytelling tools that can touch and shape hearts and minds and allow folks to see themselves reflected on the stage.”
“It would have been so amazing to see an Indigenous puppet show when I was a kid,” Defoe shared. “I got those stories, of course, orationally in a lodge, but what would that have been to go to our nearby town and to see a puppet show, or to go into a city and see a show that reflects my experience?”
The festival also features local companies such as Cabinet of Curiosity, which reprises “The Cabinet,” inspired by a German Expressionist silent film and formerly the longest running show at the now-defunct Redmoon Theater. Festival favorite Rough House Theatre Company returns with its late-night adult puppet cabaret, “Nasty, Brutish & Short,” and Chicago performer, puppeteer and clown Vanessa Valliere workshops a series of quirky vignettes titled “Look! Look!”
Created by a writing and puppetry team of “Sesame Street” veterans, “Aanika’s Elephants” brings the story of a young Kenyan girl and her animal friend to the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center. Also playing at the DuSable is “The Scarecrow,” a musical by Texan puppeteer Anthony Michael Stokes that draws connections between the mythical land of Oz and the African American experience in the early 20th century. Other U.S.-based productions include “Birdheart,” an intimate tale animated by brown paper and a box of sand, and “Kayfabe,” a mashup of puppetry, pro wrestling and rock show.
The annual free neighborhood tour expands this year to include two different family-friendly shows: “The Amazing Story Machine” by Vermont’s Sandglass Theatre Company and “Hungry Garden” by Puerto Rico’s Poncili Creación. For puppetry fans looking to engage beyond the festival’s performances, the Fine Arts Building will again host a hub with a cafe, shop and exhibits. Panel discussions, artist intensives and professional education workshops are also on offer.
Thomas is understandably proud of the sheer range of artistry represented over the course of 12 days, pointing out that it’s not easy to bring international performers to the U.S. “We have to work really hard to get people in,” he said. “And so, it’s extraordinary. It’s an opportunity for people to be able to travel in their minds and their imagination just by finding one of their local theaters that’s got a presentation of the festival in it.”
Exploring five continents from the comfort of your local theater? Not bad for the middle of a Chicago winter.
The 7th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival runs Jan. 15-26 at various venues across Chicago. Visit ChicagoPuppetFest.org for schedules and tickets.
