By Valerie Jean Johnson

“In the puppet theater, the text is important, but not as important as the performance itself,” says Blair Thomas, founder and artistic director of the eponymous Blair Thomas & Company, the puppet theater he established in 2002. For six years, the Chicago-based company has focused primarily on touring shows, traveling the globe with their highly unique, multi-dimensional productions. 2008, however, marks the year that Thomas and company have decided to establish new roots in Chicago, launching their premiere season in the city. Following their inaugural show at DCA Theatre this fall, “Cabaret of Desire,” a comedic look at poet Frederico Garcia Lorca (directed by Hypocrites’ Sean Graney), Thomas moves his crew to the Museum of Contemporary Art this week with the Zen Buddhist parable, “The Ox-Herder’s Tale.”

The decision to initiate a home-city season, Thomas explains, “is to establish a regular presence in the city, and to participate in the dialogue that exists in the creation of new work in Chicago.” Founder of the lauded Chicago spectacle theater, Redmoon, Thomas left the company in 1998 to follow other artistic pursuits, including teaching at the School of the Art Institute and co-curating the Chicago International Puppet Festival. Interested in puppet theater from a young age, Thomas is a self-taught puppeteer and puppet maker, combining his background in the traditional actors’ theater with his interest in visual art and performance to explore the unique possibilities of a staged world where puppets are hardly pawns, they are the stars of the show.

“[Most important] is what is said by the presence of the puppets onstage, what gets said by the other visual elements that are incorporated. So the language that is being used in the puppet theater is innately more collaborative because its got the elements of actors’ theater—dramaturgy, story—that are going on, but you also have the physical properties of the kind of puppet you’re working with and the fabricated environment that its functioning under. And then I choose to incorporate music as a primary component as well. I want to find text that allows these other forms to come to fruition.”

And so Thomas was drawn to the story of “The Ox-Herder,” a fable told through a series of ten paintings, each accompanied by a short verse that, while not well-known in the general Western culture, has inspired various interpretations and distinctive depictions from a slew of visual artists throughout its history. While the texts that correspond to the images, which are not attributed to a single author, certainly play their part in Thomas’ world of “The Ox-Herder’s Tale,” the story is primarily based in the visual images. “The script for ‘The Ox-Herder’s Tale’ is only about fifteen pages long, so it’s a very short  piece of text—though that’s actually a lot of text for the puppet theater. It’s a lot to contend with. For me the source of the primary material for creating work has ranged from musical compositions to poems to, in this case, a collection of paintings. I’m also interested in things that have some sort of resonance in our culture,” says Thomas.

In “The Ox-Herder’s Tale,” music is unquestionably a central element, driven by a continuous live percussion score performed by renowned musicians Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake. But it is, of course, the puppets who take center stage. Utilizing the traditional Japanese puppet style bunraku, which uses life-sized human-doll puppets manipulated by performers masked all in black, as well as a a towering bull, guided by a stilt-walking performer, Thomas’ elaborate creations require the skills and commitment of extremely well-rounded artists to bring them to life. “I look for performers who can deliver lines like an actor, but can also think conceptually like a director in the process as well as have physical skills like a dancer, in some cases be a musician as well,” he explains. “The nexus point of interest in the contemporary puppetry movement is the relationship between the puppeteer and the puppet—it’s a defining characteristic of what’s going on today. The reality is that you can kind of conceive some ideas, but you’ve got to get the puppet in the room, and you’ve got to get the actors in the room, and then the text if there’s text and the music, and you’ve got to find out what kind of convention is going to be believable. It’s a process of discovery.  The puppets are easily cast, then we have to find out who are we in relation to them, rather than who are they in relation to us.”

At Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660, Through November 30.

By Sharon Hoyer

Born in Algiers to a French mother and Algerian father, now living in Toulouse and creating tribal-infused contemporary choreography for dancers from Francophone African countries, Heddy Maalem is something of a post-colonialist scholar’s wet dream. Critical theorists should be braining each other with their dissertations at the chance to deconstruct Maalem’s stark investigations of race and identity. In 2000, Maalem presented “Black Spring,” the first evening-length piece in a trilogy about the brutality of war and Western perspectives of African bodies. The series culminates with a new interpretation of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” or “The Rite of Spring,” showing this weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Maalem cast fourteen dancers from Mali, Benin, Nigeria, Togo, Mozambique, Senegal and Martinique—all trained in contemporary dance as well as the traditional dances of their home countries. Maalem himself was a boxer and martial artist before discovering dance in his late twenties. The truculent movements of his scantily, if vibrantly clad cast presents a tangle of complications—often uncomfortable ones—which Maalem has no interest in unraveling.

“I think that in the relationships we have with others it is important to be able to distinguish what disturbs our vision rather than trying to shed light on absolutely everything,” Maalem said in an interview at the premiere of “Le Sacre du Printemps” in 2005. “I find that extremely dangerous.”

For better or worse, Maalem fearlessly treads into ambiguous, disturbing realms. “Le Sacre du Printemps” is set in Lagos, Nigeria, a megalopolis where Maalem became aware of “something extremely vital” in death—“a brilliance [that] overwhelms us with despair.” Beauty and horror meet in the choreography; Maalem compares a gesture by dancer Nathalie Rinaldi to both the exhaustion experienced by endurance athletes—“le petit moment du faiblesse”—and the movements of Rwandans fatigued by the repetitive task of slaughtering their fellow countrymen with machetes.

These images of violence in Africa spring from the imagination of a white French-Algerian and are embodied by scantily clad African dancers. Maalem states that the piece is not “a question about a black body but a human one,” yet there’s a lot of squirm-inducing, decadent-Orient-in-the-refined-Occident-gaze material here, particularly when placed in a relatively highbrow venue like the MCA. It’s only appropriate that Maalem should further complicate matters by choosing the classical European score about pagan ritual so innovative and controversial it incited at riot at its 1913 premiere.

While Maalem’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” may not have prompted any chair throwing as of yet, it has been met with a fair share of critical ambivalence. In Dance Magazine, Eva Yaa Asantewaa rhetorically ponders the artist’s intent: “To inflame? To defuse? To subvert?” The most accurate response this query would probably be “all three”; Maalem is clearly not interested in drawing any tidy conclusions about race and colonialism. Despair, loss, brutality, mob mentality and sexual violence hang heavy over the stomping, writhing, thunderous choreography, broken by moments of tenderness, but finally resulting in human sacrifice.

When talking about his position as a white choreographer working with a black cast, Maalem quotes the poet Francois Villon: “’in my country, naked as a worm, but costumed as a president, nothing is sure but uncertainty, I seem to win everything, but lose all.’

“Maybe these pieces, ‘Black Spring’ and ‘The Rite of Spring’ are on that wavelength,” Maalem continues. “They have the same irreconcilability so I apply myself knowing perhaps it is a battle I have already lost attempting to connect something which was not disconnected, but demolished with an axe.”

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)397-4010. October 17 & 18 at 7:30pm and October 19 at 3pm. $20-$25.

“If you consider yourself a serious writer in town you have read Algren,” says director John Musial about the subject of Lookingglass Theatre’s “Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day.” “His voice is really distinctive and it is Chicago.” 

Born in Detroit in 1909, Nelson Algren moved to Chicago’s South Side at the age of 3. As a writer he hit his stride in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Often controversial, Algren’s poetry and prose flirted with social realism—he was a writer who spent his life chronicling what it was to live in the lower classes.

 “He moved into the neighborhood of Wicker Park, which was a big Polish neighborhood at the time,” Musial tells. “He was interested in walking around and talking to people.” His insight and talent made him the recipient of the first National Book Award for fiction in 1950 for “The Man With the Golden Arm.” Algren is today memorialized through the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for short fiction.

Musial has lived with the words of this Chicago literary icon since the inception of the show, before it premiered at Lookingglass in 2001. Between then and now he has shepherded the project from performances on the rooftop of his South Side apartment to Lookingglass’ main stage to a television production on WTTW. Now, after a seven-year hiatus, Chicago gets another opportunity to know this writer as the theater company revives the work on the stage of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

“Coming down to work on the show again, I hoped it was as good as I remembered it,” Musial recalls. The director has been pleasantly surprised. The play is structured with one man, Lookingglass Ensemble Member Thomas J. Cox, playing Algren through readings of the author’s texts. He is assisted by two live jazz musicians and film also shot by Musial.

Although on paper the show has not changed much, the years that have passed have deepened the work on stage. “The older we get the denser the piece becomes,” Musial insists. “Its not a matter of lets put this up and crank it out. It is a piece that continues to develop.”

Chicago has changed since 2001, and certainly since Algren’s writings were published. But like many great works, the passing of years can deepen the words on the page and in performance. “I’m excited to see it in ten years when there is a real separation between old and young,” Musial says, referring to footage of Cox in the film portions of the show. Like the work of its namesake, “Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day” will continue on and continue to grow over time. (William Scott)

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660. This production is now closed. 

RECOMMENDED

Astonishing, necessary theater. Heather Raffo’s one-woman show paints a moving portrait of the lives of nine different Iraqi women, bringing each character to life intensely and vividly under the intelligent direction of Joanna Settle. The writing is smart, lyrical and satisfying; Raffo’s characters are created from interviews and thoughtful research, and there are simply no moments that ring false. That the women’s stories Raffo has found are rare and significant is the beginning of why this show matters so much; the genre is in large part investigative journalism, but it transcends the subject matter and marks an upper limit of what creative nonfiction can accomplish. The intelligence and aesthetic of the play carries through to art direction, with a dazzling, dynamic set that becomes another silent female character. One of the most nuanced and interesting women in the show, based on a real Iraqi painter under the early nineties Saddam regime, describes her self-portraits as a way to express the experiences of other women: “my body her body.” This is precisely what Raffo has done in her piece. (Monica Westin) 

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, (312)280-2660. This production is now closed.

By Monica Westin

Afrika Bambaataa recently declared “How you act, walk, look and talk is all part of hip-hop culture. And the music is colorless. Hip-hop music is made from black, brown, yellow, red and white.” With hip-hop culture classes on college syllabi and the music’s rapid proliferation and endless re-interpretations and subgenres throughout the world, hip-hop is no longer a subculture but a permanent fixture and source of culture itself. MCA Performances, always cutting-edge and smart, talk back to its diverse elements and evolutions through this weekend’s “Hip Hop Live + Reel” series. The series will showcase an inspired and thoughtful collection of hip-hop film screenings and live performances, with nods to where hip-hop has come from and all the possibilities for its future.

“Hip Hop Live + Reel” will concentrate on four main elements of hip-hop: the music, both MCing and DJing, street art and beat-boxing. The film lineup might be the most exciting, with five seminal films focusing on these elements. On Thursday, Henry Chalfant, a photographer and videographer famous for his documentaries on urban culture will present his 1983 “Style Wars” and 2006 “From Mambo to Hip-Hop: A South Bronx Tale,” which go up at 7pm and 8:30pm respectively, with an appearance from Chalfant himself in between to discuss his work. “Style Wars” focuses on graffiti but provides a shockingly prescient study of break-dancing and MCing before the two blew up. “From Mambo to Hip-Hop” tracks musical rebellion in the South Bronx, studying the parallel developments of 1940s Mambo to the beginning of hip-hop in the 1970s. 

A variety of films documenting individual figures in hip-hop will be screened on Sunday: 2004’s “Rock Fresh,” Danny Lee’s stylish study of five renowned street artists trying to make a living without giving into the temptation of the mainstream; “Breath Control: The History of the Human Beat Box,” from award-winning Chicago director Joey Garfield; and “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party,” which features performances from everyone from Dead Prez to Cody ChesnuTT. 

Friday night brings renaissance man Reggie Watts, who gives testament to the range of what can fit under the heading of hip-hop: Watts beatboxes and freestyles in between deliveries of deadpan comedy, absurdist improv and sometimes-incoherent but massively entertaining forays into foreign-language accents. Combining stream-of-consciousness with satire, Watts could in many ways stand in for hip-hop’s multi-disciplinarity and reach. Joining Watts will be poet Deja Taylor and Teatro Luna, an all-Latina theater company who will put on their gender-bending “MACHOS,” an interview-based play about masculinity performed in drag. 

The depiction of gender and power could have been a fascinating trope for “Hip Hop Live + Reel,” and for an art museum, the MCA could have considered a stronger focus on masculinity and hip-hop, especially their complex and sometimes anatagonist relationship to the media. Beat-boxing, rather, seems to be a running theme of the series, which seems to be a bit of an odd choice at first, given its declining weight in hip-hop today; in addition to Watts, acclaimed beat-boxer Yuri Lane will appear both on Sunday between films to answer questions (possibly about the place of his genre in hip-hop today) and on Saturday with the Suicide Kings, a spoken-word group that combines verse with a capella, vaudeville and even punk theater in “In Spite of Everything,” a performance piece about gang violence and school shootings. Also performing on Saturday are the winners of the 2008 “Louder than a Bomb” slam, a local Chicago teen poetry festival.

 The MCA’s goal for “Hip Hop Live + Reel” is to present the rise and proliferation of hip-hop, and their lineup shows exactly how pervasive hip-hop culture is now by tracing the evolution of its quintessential elements. More than anything else, the ambition of the series should be commended, especially the focus on elements of hip-hop culture other than commercial rap music, as Danny Hoch has rightly complained about: “[The focus on rap] is proof that even the discussion around hip-hop as art as culture has been poisoned by this one-dimensional view of it as music. That’s why I’ve been on this mantra of ‘Hip-hop is not just rap.’” The MCA offers a smart alternative and counterpoint; as Surinder Martignetti, performance programs coordinator, points out, these diverse artists “show that hip-hop is more than dance and music; it is poetry, movement, theater and film, too.”

“Hip Hop Live + Reel” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

As one of Australia’s great storytellers, famed photographer and performance artist William Yang shares an intimate perspective on two communities with histories of life on the margins—Australian Aborigines and migrant Germans in South Australia. With arresting imagery and a wry sense of humor, “Shadows” is a moving story about the lives of “outsiders” told through the eyes of a gay Chinese Australian. As a compassionate witness, Yang employs a sensitive and voyeuristic approach in this work about two seemingly separate groups of people who share tragic histories of gross mistreatment in which they were interned, banished and demonized. Part social documentary and part personal observation, “Shadows” features Yang’s powerful photographs as he shares his personal stories of the ignored and dispossessed of Australia. Accompanied by Colin Offord’s haunting and lyrical music performed live. Recently voted one of the twenty-five most influential gay and lesbian Australians, Yang is well known for documenting the HIV epidemic and the rise of Australia’s gay community over the past three decades through his art and performances. (William Scott)

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, (312)280-2660. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Sex is on the menu this weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Curious Theatre Branch remounts its “Round and Round: asexfarcetragedy,” this time with more elaborate sets and six more years of living to inform the piece. The bedroom farce revolves around one woman and her relationship with three different men as they plot against one another for power. Jenny Magnus, co-founder of Curious, serves as writer and co-director. She also plays the central femme fatale, this time with a more maternal touch. “As you age, the sexual ethics of your youth become rotten. But now, I’m more sympathetic to her…I see more shades of gray.” The experience does not stop when the lights go down on this show. Join Magnus (February 9, 2pm-4pm) for a discussion on the unique contributions of women in Chicago theater. The panel, also representing Steppenwolf, Teatro Vista, Congo Square and others, will speak to the challenges as well as advantages existent in the field today. (William Scott)

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660. This production is now closed.

By Valerie Jean Johnson

From an oozing liquid cocoon atop a long slab reminiscent of an examination table, a naked woman emerges and takes her place onstage, born anew. So begins renowned Italian imagist theater company Societas Rafaello Sanzio’s “Hey Girl!,” described as “an intense symbolic work that follows a girl’s evolution from birth through the brutality of adolescence to the sexual independence and power of womanhood.” Sanzio makes a stop in Chicago this weekend, taking up residency at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art for two performances only. A fiercely original company that’s been garnering praise from audiences and stirring up political controversies throughout Europe since its inception in 1981 with director Romeo Castellucci at the helm, Sanzio first made its mark on the Windy City in 2002 with “Giulio Cesare” (Julius Caesar), at a time when the company was virtually unknown stateside. This time around, Sanzio is in high demand, making appearances in five major cities on the U.S. leg of its current tour, which includes stops in Minneapolis and Seattle, creating a resounding buzz throughout the art and theater communities worldwide.

Director of MCA Performance Programs Peter Taub, who was turned on to the company by an Italian colleague several years ago and subsequently brought their work to the museum, praises Sanzio’s “commitment to being radical” while at the same time keeping strong roots in traditional forms. “They are an exciting company that creates work that is difficult to describe and has this unpredictable electricity to it,” Taub says. “Hey Girl!,” which is staged as a series of visual tableaux, combines “a ferocious technical intensity” with “a very vulnerable human dimension” in its exploration of a woman’s fight for freedom and self-discovery in a world dictated by often rigid constraints and unattainable ideals of the traditional female role.

Deeply rooted in the visual and sound arts, the company, founded by Castellucci, his wife Chiara Guidi and his sister Claudia Castellucci, has developed a reputation as one of the foremost innovators of experimental theater. With educational backgrounds in art history, scenography and painting, Castellucci and company create provocative multimedia stage events that draw influence from a myriad of disciplines, marrying technological experimentation with historical themes and forms. Citing Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” as a strong influence, Castellucci has been both revered and reviled for his stark examinations of the human form, choosing to feature physically “deformed” performers in many of the company’s pieces. By confronting audiences with the rail-thin form of an anorexic, or the bare chest of a woman scarred by mastectomy, Sanzio pushes the boundaries of societal iconography of the body as art.

Taub will engage in a post-show discussion with Romeo Castellucci and members of his company following Friday’s performance, and Castellucci himself will lead a discussion on his work after Saturday’s show. In conjunction with the performances of “Hey Girl!,” the Instituto Italiano Cultura will feature an exhibition of photos by Luca del Piá of Sanzio productions from 1996 to 1999. The exhibition, which opens January 15 and runs through March 11, will include a sound installation by Chiara Guidi and Chicago-based composer and frequent Sanzio collaborator Scott Gibbons, who also created “Hey Girl!”’s electro-acoustic score. It will also be screening a film documentation of five episodes of Sanzio’s acclaimed production “Tragedia Endogonidia” (Endogonida Tragedy) on February 5 at 6pm.

This convergence in Chicago of “all things Sanzio” is reflective of the company’s ever-expanding ubiquity on the global arts scene. A YouTube search of “Sanzio” or “Castellucci” will turn up a rather impressive handful of video clips from several of the company’s productions. (In one scene from “Tragedia Endogonidia,” two full-sized cars drop from the flies, crashing to the stage below, seemingly unbeknownst to the gangly, underwear-clad man who is standing front and center, staring out into the audience. He doesn’t flinch in the slightest at this surprisingly—though the commotion does set the tail of what appears to be a real horse, stationed stage left, to swinging.) Shocking and surprising at every turn, Sanzio’s highly politicized work has been sparking debate beyond the four walls of any performance space or art gallery for over two decades, incurring efforts to ban their work by the Italian Ministry of Art and Culture in 1994. The company fought back on an epic scale, founding an International Convention of Theatre Censorship in Italy and winning the support of their community, and worldwide recognition, including a 1996 Ubu prize for resistance.

Societas Rafaello Sanzio’s “Hey Girl!” at the MCA Stage, 220 East Chicago, (312)397-4010. This production is now closed.

In a culture where technology moves forward at lightning speed and nearly everyone gets their fair, democratic chance at fifteen minutes in the limelight, a fragmentary residue of broken-up narratives often gets left behind.

“Cinderbox 18,” the latest work from Lucky Plush Productions, explores the state of a society obsessed with the purported realness of reality TV and the false intimacy of Web 2.0 creations like MySpace. Julia Rhoads, artistic director of Lucky Plush, says, “Loosely, the entire show was originally a response to the reality programming that is so prevalent.”

As the work evolved, however, Rhoads says it took on a wider scope. “We started looking at that weird disconnect of people trying to make connections and failing to make connections. In our hyper-networked culture we are becoming disconnected from real interaction. It’s this interesting duality to me, and that’s what we’re exploring in this work.”

Duality is present in all aspects of the production, from the costumes that Rhoads says are “a blend between what a dancer/performer would wear to rehearsals and what they would wear on the street,” to the intermixing of dance with theater.

“I’ve always been curious about the tension between theater and dance,” Rhoads says. “Dancers are told how to respond; in theater you are responding in the moment, having a very personal and honest response. I feel like this is the first work where I’ve been able to do a deeper investigation into that idea”

One way Rhoads gives dancers a chance to respond in the moment is by creating a structure within which they can improvise words and movement. There is also a level of self-awareness as dancers talk on stage, questioning what they are doing and voicing thoughts like: “This doesn’t make any sense.”

These human moments provide relief to an audience that might be worried about drawing the correct artistic interpretation. The wall between performer and audience becomes transparent and Rhoads says that interpretations are dependent on the experience of each individual viewer. “You’re not just going to sit back and be entertained. You’re going to meet the work with your own ideas and that’s what’s entertaining.” Tamara Matthews) 

“Cinderbox 18” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

How appropriate that conceptual artist Diamanda Galas is making a rare visit to the area Halloween week, given that her use of double meanings, metaphor and satire in her work have led many to dub her as the “diabolical diva.” Galas’ 1981 debut album, “The Litanies of Satan” (Mute), became an underground cult classic among heavy-metal fans who interpreted her spine-chilling use of solo voice, tape and electronics to re-create “the emeraldine perversity of the live struggle in Hell” as a literal exercise, when in actuality the work was a setting of the poem of the same name by nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire. An established pianist and operatically trained bel canto singer with an extraordinary four-octave range that extends from contralto to coloratura, sometimes in a single bound, Galas is a true original with a voice that can express an infinite variety of vocal textures and timbres that can have a chilling effect on listeners and which has been used to great effect across a wide variety of horror film soundtracks and even the climax of Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.” None of us who witnessed it will ever forget her 1991 “Plague Mass” for victims of AIDS here in which the climax had her literally shrieking in terror as she washed her naked top half in blood. One of my colleagues actually ran from the venue in cold fear, saying that, “I don’t know what that woman is doing up there, but I don’t want any part of it.” Galas’ last appearance here in 1994 had her singing a cabaret act as only she could with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, and this current two-night appearance of two separate programs has her performing her highly theatrical “Guilty, Guilty, Guilty,” a program of “tragic and homicidal love songs conjuring shattered love, blinding obsession and howling melancholy” on Thursday night and her “Songs of Exile” on Saturday, featuring Greek Rembetika songs, the virtuosic vocal tradition of the Amanedhes, improvised lamentations from Asia Minor and the Middle East, as well as Galas’ own songs set to the words of exiled poets from around the world. (Dennis Polkow)

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, (312)397-4010. This production is now closed.