WEEK FOUR
Friday & Saturday, January 25 & 26, 8pm
Sunday, January 27, 7pm
$12 ($10 students, seniors)

Nance Klehm - Twinkle
Rebecca Tennison &
Aviva Steigmeyer - Spell Launcher & Love Has Brought Me To Despair
Emily Carter - Boy, Girl, and The Modern Baby
Jessica Hudson - Attempts at Flight
Matt Marsden - Boxcartoon
Blair Thomas/Fast Fish Puppet Theatre - The Selfish Giant

Nance Klehm is pro-biotic, a radical ecologist, urban forager, mad scientist of the living, and knower of the inner resources.

Rebecca Tennison & Aviva Steigmeyer
Two pieces: Spell Launcher & Love Has Brought Me To Despair
Spell Launcher is a kind of psychological spin off on a Punch and Judy hand puppet show. The play stars a witch and a devil who are eternally bound to one another through spells and their sheer desire to destroy one another. With psychotropic substances they crash into each others dreams, and ruminate on the age-old problems of love, hatred, obsession, and mermaids.
Love Has Brought Me To Despair is Steigmeyer’s old time love ballad hand stitched into a crankie show—sad love songs as the fabric scrolls along.

Rebecca Tennison has been performing and creating original theater and puppet shows for over twelve years. Her collaborative projects and solo work have been seen in Toronto's Cooking Fire Theater Festival, The Black Sheep Puppet Festival in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia's The Puppet Uprising, and the RadiCackaLacky Puppetry Convergence in North Carolina. She most recently toured the Pacific Northwest with her hand puppet show Spell Launcher. Originally from Chicago, Rebecca fled to the west five years ago and currently lives down the hill from the woods in Bellingham,Wa.

Aviva Steigmeyer is an old time musician and artist living in Bellingham,WA. She spends most of her time practicing non-technological ways of living and is a pro at canning and slingshot making. This is her first puppet show.

A world away from theatrical glitz and technical hoopla…the humblest of handmade puppets and props…- Byron Woods, indyweek.com

Clearly one of the most haunting works of the year, though it used little more than recycled cardboard and fabric, string, a few words from William Faulkner—and a deep belief in their audience's ability to hear a very simple truth, spoken quietly. - Byron Woods, indyweek.com

Emily Carter
Boy, Girl, and The Modern Baby
For description, see week one.

Jessica Hudson
Attempts at Flight
For description, see week one.

Matt Marsden
Boxcartoon
For description, see week one.

SPECIAL MATINEE
Chicago Children's Theatre’s The Selfish Giant
Adapted and created by Blair Thomas/Fast Fish Puppet Theatre
Sunday, January 27, 4pm
$10
Original puppets and music tell the story of a grumpy old giant who forbids the children in his village from playing in his beautiful garden. After the children are locked out, the garden plunges into an eternal winter, until the children sneak back into the garden, bringing with them the joyous rebirth of spring. Puppet Design: Jesse Mooney-Bullock; Costumes: Meredith Miller. www.chicagochildrenstheatre.org; www.blairthomas.org

Blair Thomas is the founder and artistic director of Blair Thomas & Company, which creates Chamber Puppet Theater for adults, and for children under the name Fast Fish Puppet Theater. As co-founder of Redmoon Theater in 1989, Blair Thomas spent a decade leading a vision to create large-scale spectacle theater. Blair has served as curator for Chicago's International Puppet Festival, as an Associate Adjunct Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was the first recipient of the Jim Henson Fellowship at the University of Maryland. Along with composer Michael Smith, he created The Snow Queen, recently performed for the second year at Victory Gardens.

...the technique and commitment on display is nothing short of staggering - Chicago Tribune