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.

RECOMMENDED

One of the most exciting things about being relatively new to Chicago is the shear numbers and diversity of theater companies out there to discover. Redmoon Theater has been on my list for some time. Finally with “Dr. Egg and the Man with No Ear,” their current project with Australian artist Jessica Wilson, Redmoon’s commitment to “engineering wonder” makes sense. They make magic right before eyes. This fantastical moral exploration of new developments in biotechnology and genetics is sweetened, but made no less potent, with beautifully sparse animation, precisely exaggerated gesture, and delicate puppetry that is hilarious and heartbreaking. This production will enthrall both children and adults. In fact, one of the best parts of my experience was seeing the way a 4-year-old boy took it in, and then observing the 60-year-old woman right beside him. Both were riveted. With spectacle, craftsmanship, and heart, Redmoon Theater makes it hard to blink. (William Scott)

At Redmoon Theater, 1463 W. Hubbard, (312)850-8440, through October 19.

“There’s such a mystery about who we are and why we’re here.” Jan Bartoszek is not talking about epistemology, but ancestry. Bartoszek is deeply interested in how identity is shaped by history—both personal and collective—and, in the case of many Americans, its absence. For the past twenty-four years she has probed the subject by way of her acclaimed company, Hedwig Dances, now in its sixteenth year of residency at the Chicago Cultural Center. The investigation continues this week at the Ruth Page Center with “Earthly Tongues,” Bartoszek’s latest abstract, yet highly theatrical creation.

 “‘Earthly Tongues’ is about mystery,” Bartoszek says. “It digs into the past and projects into the future.” The piece is roughly chronological, starting in a distant, mystical past. Elaborate headpieces, by costume designer and Redmoon collaborator Tatjana Radisic, obscure the dancers’ faces, suggesting a forgotten past that must be pieced together and reinvented. “A later sequence is a sort of deconstructed folk dance that we’re trying to learn, or find,” Bartoszek says. “Folk dances contain stories, images of everyday life: planting, harvesting. There’s humor in it, too.” As the dancers move into the present, their faces are revealed and voices heard. They discuss what they know of their individual origins. At one point, a dancer pipes in with “I don’t know and I don’t want to know.”

  “Like many children of immigrants, I don’t know my family before my grandparents. There’s lost memory beyond that generation. Sometimes you look in albums or hear stories that may resonate with following generations, but there’s a mystery of continuity—the genome that connects us with the past and is alive in the present.” “Earthly Tongues” is part of a larger series on memory and history. The next piece, “Dance of Forgotten Steps,” is a personal exploration of Bartoszek’s own family.

 Bartoszek believes dance is a singularly effective tool for exploring the obscurities of identity and memory, by virtue of its abstraction. “Dance is to theater as poetry is to prose,” she says. “The audience can bring their own experience because it works within metaphor much in the same way poetry does.”

 This isn’t to say Bartoszek eschews the power of narrative and theatrical elements. Video projections by Petra Poul Bachmaier of luftwerk create direct images of aging generations on the dancers bodies. The layered, imaginative costumes by Radisic evoke fantastical periods past and an evolution to the present. The music, by Stone (Winston Damen) captures, as Bartoszek says, “a human dimension of traveling in time—without being too specific. I try to find collaborators who can join in with ideas and brainstorm with me. I’m blessed with people who are engaged with the same ideas.”

 It seems Jan Bartoszek is surrounded by like minds, as Hedwig Dances enters its sixteenth year as Company in Residence at the Chicago Cultural Center. “It’s wonderful to have a home, especially one as beautiful as the Cultural Center,” she says. Hedwig Dances offers a series of professional development workshops each year in the Cultural Center space, and shares it with DanceBridge, a program offering emerging choreographers and companies free rehearsal space and performance opportunities.

 In addition to organizing and mentoring with DanceBridge, Bartoszek, along with Sarah Best, curated last year’s Dance for the Camera event, a new annual program hosted by Hedwig Dances in partnership with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. “It’s become a whole new genre of dance,” she says. “We have an upcoming film for this year as well.”

 Next year is the quarter-century mark for Hedwig Dances and the company hopes to find a venue in New York to celebrate the anniversary. Guest artists and teachers will be invited to collaborate with the company. “I’ve become more focused on collaboration over the years,” Bartoszek says, when I ask about what she has learned from her years with Hedwig. “I’m trying to get away from formality and find the essence of the idea. To get at the content of the work and let that drive creation of the movement.” Ultimately, collaboration fuels the work. “I’ve got such a wonderful group of performers. I think ‘Earthly Tongues’ will resonate with audiences. It will be in a language people will understand. Even though it isn’t spoken.” (Sharon Hoyer)

At the Ruth Page Theater 1016 North Dearborn, (773)871-0872. This production is now closed. 

A folk opera about the Depression, advertising its influences as T.S. Eliot, Dante, Santos, William Kennedy and songs from the time period, “Boneyard Prayer” feels more like a Nick Cave ballad: beautiful, but sometimes a bit bogged down in its own weight. The Redmoon production is extremely stylized, with excellent use of multimedia, puppets and silent film tropes. Actors are engaging and do their best to channel the genre and time. “Boneyard Prayer” feels heavily influenced by early Chaplin movies as well, with hoboes that are reminiscent of his tramp character, providing moments of comic relief from mild physical humor. The story of redemption is universal, the visual images of the production are striking and songs are occasionally very moving. However, the play sometimes doesn’t stray far enough from cliché, from its song lyrics to the constant presence of whiskey bottles, and for a play produced at a time when America is facing a recession, it doesn’t seem relevant to present concerns and anxieties in a way that could have made it far more engaging. (Monica Westin)

At Redmoon Central, 1463 W. Hubbard, (312)850-8440 ex. 111. This production is now closed.

Redmoon first staged this show at the Steppenwolf back in 2000, and it is distinctive from many of the company’s more recent efforts which (for me, anyway) fail to convey a clear and compelling story. That’s not the case here. A solid retelling of Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” has been transformed and transmuted into something contraption-y and physical. Leslie Buxbaum Danzig directs, and you can see the same schoolyard aesthetics found in her “500 Clown” shows, a kind of rompy-stompy enthusiasm coupled with real theatrical ingenuity. There are some issues with the piece that hold it back—namely its stop-start rhythm, which feels like directorial uncertainty—but it has a strange, cumulative power. An addled version of Victor Hugo (Jeremy Sher) tumbles out of a shipping crate, and he is a meddlesome fussbudget who provides the show with its only spoken text (courtesy of Mickle Maher), describing Paris, year 1482, as a place of “epic foulness” and a “city of shit.” Love that. Forget that the original story is such a downer—Danzig finds a nice balance between the tragic and the comic, including a very funny pre-coital negotiation between the gypsy Esmeralda (Katie Rose McLaughlin) and her soon-to-be-lover, Phoebus (Matt Hawkins in full horn-dog mode). The bell tower is approximated with a kind of ladder scaffolding, which sometimes seems more complicated than necessary. Prowling the cathedral is Quasimodo, played by Jay Torrence, who conveys a gamut of emotions under that mask. (Something about it, designed by Shoshanna Utchenik, brings to mind the chubby-cheeked version worn in the film “Brazil.”) I’m not always won over by mask work, but here it creates the idea of illustrations come to life—which is just the kind of stylized permutation Redmoon does best. (Nina Metz)

At Redmoon Central, 1463 W. Hubbard, (312)850-8440 ex. 111. This production is now closed.

Redmoon’s current show begs the question: Is there such a thing as too much spectacle? What ever happened to quiet shows like “Salao—the worst kind of unlucky,” in which the company’s creative efforts felt not only unusual, but truly meaningful? In any case, “The Princess Club,” created and co-directed by Jim Lasko with cast member Vanessa Stalling, is an all-theme affair. Too often it verges on the boring. A riff on princess obsessions—from the Barbie-Cinderella fixation to the trashy modern-day Britney/Lindsay sexpot princess—the show plays out almost entirely without words. A quintet of princess wannabes, dressed in bedraggled lingerie, reenact fairytales. In between, they engage in nightclub shenanigans—drinking, smoking, drugging, falling all over the place in a stupor. These scenes have no context or point. “Oh my God, you guys,” is one of the few intelligible phrases uttered, along with “Seriously!” which becomes “Sarah-ously.” Funny. But empty. Wandering through the basement of an old puppet theater, these living dolls look like Brooke Shields in “Pretty Baby”—whore-girls with curls and ruffles. (The design is impeccable, as always.) Eventually their make-believe hijinks become weirdly scatological—to point out, I suppose, that princesses poop just like everyone else. Other than that, I’m not sure what this show is saying, exactly. The princess complex is very real, but its influence on female identity is not examined so much as represented. Let’s face it: Perez Hilton, Chelsea Handler and “The Hills” girls probe deeper on this subject—and prove to be far more entertaining. (Nina Metz)

At Redmoon Central, 1463 W. Hubbard, (312)850-8440 ex. 111. This production is now closed.