WEEK ONE
Friday & Saturday, January 4 & 5, 8pm
Sunday, January 6, 7pm
$12 ($10 students, seniors)

Frank Maugeri
Laika's Coffin: A Suitcase Opera
An epic tale based on the biography of the doomed first animal in space. Three suitcases open to reveal remarkable miniature Soviet-inspired sets while an operatic narrator and three puppeteers animate the melancholy saga. Written by Seth Bockley; additional collaborators: Kevin O’Donnell, Angela Tillges, and Kass Copeland. The mini-tragedy won Best Director and Best Production at its premiere at Collaboraction's Sketchbook in 2006.

Among the best of the eight pieces [in Sketchbook: Program B], the work has hints of Gogol, Brecht and more - Chicago Sun Times

Frank Maugeri (Director) is the Associate Artistic Director of Redmoon Theater where he has served as a director, designer and performer for over ten years. He conceived and directed 2007's Once Upon A Time and the critically acclaimed The Cabinet, and created and co-directed the Jeff-awarded Salao: the worst kind of unlucky. He has been integral to the creation and direction of all of Redmoon’s major spectacles including Twilight Orchard, Loves Me... Loves Me Not, Sink...Sank...Sunk..., Galway's Shadow, all the Annual All Hallows Eve Ritual Celebrations and ten Winter Pageants. His miniature puppet shows won Best Production at Collaboraction’s Sketchbook for three consecutive years.

Seth Bockley (Writer) is a director, writer and performer. He is a recipient of the 2005-07 TCG New Generations Grant, which supported an intensive artistic apprenticeship with Redmoon Theater's artistic directors Jim Lasko and Frank Maugeri in site-specific theater and art direction. He is a member of Walkabout Theater and an associate with Collaboraction. He is currently writing Boneyard Prayers, Redmoon's next mainstage puppet show.

Kevin O'Donnell (Composer) has composed for nearly thirty pieces of theater since 2002, and over forty dance pieces. He has received three Jeff Awards, ten Jeff Nominations and two nominations for Achievement in Dance from the Chicago Music and Dance Alliance. He has worked extensively with The House Theatre of Chicago, The Hypocrites, Redmoon Theater, and the choreographer Molly Shanahan.

Angela Tillges (Art Director) is a designer, director and educator. She is currently the Neighborhood Arts Program Director at Redmoon Theater, where she works to integrate the tools of Spectacle Theater into classroom curriculum. Featured design credits with Redmoon include art direction for Once Upon A Time and installations for Looptopia and From Nothing. She has also worked in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Public Schools, Walkabout Theater, and Collaboraction.

Kass Copeland (Puppet Designer) is a visual artist who recently designed the puppets for Redmoon’s Once Upon A Time. Her work and upcoming exhibition schedule can be viewed at www.kasscopeland.com

Support for Laika's Coffin: A Suitcase Opera was provided by Mauge Design.

Emily Carter
Boy, Girl, and The Modern Baby
This rock musical is a campy sci-fi themed show punctuated by a few non-invasive, forward-focused ad campaigns, leveraging puppetry, ventriloquism, short animated commercials and a persuasive soundscape.

Emily Carter is a Chicago-based variable-media artist. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and enjoyed a short residency at the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, MA. Currently, she is working on a collaboration with her sister in Texas involving re-enactments of the re-enactments of their familial stories and events.

Roth Mobot
Circuit Bending Music
Roth Mobot is Tommy Stephenson and Patrick McCarthy, improvising music on Circuit Bent Devices. Circuit Bending is the creative rewiring, or "hacking" of common consumer electronics into unique musical and video instruments. Using the poignant and often humorous language of toys and common discarded electronic devices, dark ambient drones and languid melodies are punctuated by randomly generated rhythms. www.rothmobot.com

Tommy Stephenson has been at the center of the Circuit Bending movement for over a decade. Along with frequent custom commissions, he has designed and created devices for members of noted musical groups as the Animal Collective, Umphrey's McGee, the Benevento Russo Duo, and Phish.

Patrick McCarthy has been conducting Circuit Bending workshops in various Galleries, Schools, and Corporate Seminars since the year 1999. Patrick has conducted his workshops and lectures at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul University, The University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Columbia College, The Association for Computing Machinery, and Accenture Technologies. He was recently invited to conduct a seven week course in the subject at the Oak Park Arts League, in Oak Park. Patrick directs The Rubber Monkey Puppet Company, curates the Midwest's "Deus Ex Machina" Contraptionism festivals, and teaches Circuit Bending workshops at the Old Town School of folk Music in Chicago.

Roth Mobot were featured at TimeOut Chicago Magazine's Inaugural Ball at Union Station, the PACedge Festival at the Athenaeum Theatre, Sketchbook 7 at the Steppenwolf Garage Theatre, and have performed at the Chicago Dramatists, and participated in Chicago's Looptopia festival. Tommy and Patrick were the founders of the The Guild Of Acquired Technology (aka The G.O.A.T.) in Chicago, and were responsible for booking Guild lectures, demonstrations, and performances that stress the recycling of discarded electronics and e-waste ecological responsibility. Roth Mobot, was hired as "Circuit Bending" consultants for Collaboraction's The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow in Chicago, and occasionally performed as the show's opening act on Saturday nights.

If you do it: musical genius, or at least your old toys get new life
- Michael Roach,The Chicago Tribune

Jessica Hudson
Attempts at Flight
Attempts at Flight uses the life story of Alberto Santos-Dumont, a French-Brazilian aeronaut who took turn-of-the-century Paris by storm with his fashion sense, his dirigibles and his first public flight in a heavier-than-air flying machine called the 14-Bis, as a frame to explore concepts of invention, suspension and hope and mechanics. Excerpted as part of a larger work in progress, this piece bridges the vocabularies of dance and spectacle theatre, navigating the audience into a story through image and text.

Why Flight? The invention of flight may be the only invention in history so deeply rooted in culture and myth, as well as technology and engineering. Even after the successful invention of flight, this cultural and mythological curiosity still thrives. Invention itself is surely the cross-roads of crack-pot hope and methodical research. It would seem that art-making must live at that intersection as well.

Jessica Hudson is an independent performer in Chicago. Her work bridges vocabularies of dance, theatre and the spectacle arts. She was an active member of the Chicago Kings for five years. Recently she has performed with Walkabout Theatre, the Neofuturists, Peter Carpenter at the Dance Center of Columbia College and in Kate Sheehy’s attic as part of the Random House Epic Show. Jessica works as a teaching artist, integrating performance and classroom curriculum in the Chicago Public Schools, with CAPE (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education), Redmoon Theatre and Hubbard Street Dance Center.

Matt Marsden
Boxcartoon
A collaboration between the filmmaker and three animators, this short video was conceived of as an “exquisite corpse” experiment – a work in which each segment is created without knowledge of the content of the other segments. All contributors were selected on the basis of a general aesthetic similarity in personal work as well as an abiding interest in the fantastic or grotesque.

The result is a series of train cars, each revealing fantastic, grotesque and unearthly visions.

Matt Marsden is a Chicago based freelance animator, puppet maker, part time faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and DePaul University as well as an independent animator/filmmaker whose previous short works include 4 Films for Hypnotic Suggestion (2004), Stalactite (2004), Small Green Scratches (2001), 12 Months in 4 Films (1999), and Boxcartoon (2006).

Neil Bhaerman & Michael Maraden
Puppets
Puppets is a documentary short that examines what draws an object-based artist to a certain form. With Pittsburgh's Black Sheep Puppet Festival as a backdrop, puppeteers explain what draws them to express themselves through mangled pieces of cardboard, paper mache and other common objects. Maraden, a filmmaker, and Bhaerman, a writer and political organizer, have collaborated on a several short documentaries available online at www.current.tv/community/people/NeilDB