Manual Cinema's LIVE Tele-FUN-draiser World Premiere Special, Saturday, August 22 at 8 p.m. CST, is a one-night-only, 10th Anniversary variety show capped by the live debut of a new short work from the acclaimed Chicago-based live performance, design studio, and film/video production collective.
Fans, friends, and Manual Cinema’s artists will reunite online for a virtual celebration featuring live music, cameos by past Manual Cinema characters, and special guest performances by puppeteer Myra Su and singer/songwriter/visual artist Maren Celest.
Headlining Manual Cinema's LIVE Tele-FUN-draiser is the world premiere of the company’s newest work, Quarantine Dream, Manual Cinema’s first socially distanced performance made exclusively for live streaming.
In Quarantine Dream, a woman forced to work from home is driven out of her mind by self-isolation; that is, until she receives a letter from the Dream Delivery Service. The letter takes her on a journey of her own subconscious, culminating in a rendezvous with a mysterious stranger on a bicycle.
Told with overhead projectors, crankies, miniatures, live music and sound design, Quarantine Dream is a 15-minute new work created and performed live by the company’s five co-artistic directors: Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller and Kyle Vegter.
Donations will be encouraged during the event to compensate for lost touring income due to Covid-19. Ten percent of proceeds will go to the actors and artists featured in the four shows that are now being revived online as part of Manual Cinema’s 10th Anniversary Retrospectacular!, along with the artists who would have been hired this month to perform the shows live at Chopin Theater as originally planned.
Right now, it’s week two of Manual Cinema’s month-long virtual birthday party, which is reviving four of the company’s most seminal shows, one per week, for virtual audiences on multi-camera, high-definition video and in their entirety.
Go to manualcinema.com/watch to enjoy free, on-demand, 24/7 streams of The End of TV, playing now through Monday, August 10 at Noon, followed by No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, August 10-17, and Frankenstein, August 17-23.
(Lula del Ray, the show that got it all started for Manual Cinema a decade ago, was the Retrospectacular! kick off production.)
In addition, live, online, virtual talkbacks reuniting each production’s creators, collaborators and fans are Saturday, August 8 for The End of TV, Saturday, August 15 for No Blue Memories (featuring playwrights Eve Ewing and Nate Marshall, moderated by Ydalmi Noriega of the Poetry Foundation) and Friday, August 21 for Frankenstein. Talkbacks start at 8 p.m. CST.
Visit manualcinema.com for more information about Manual Cinema’s 10th Anniversary Retrospectacular! and Manual Cinema's LIVE Tele-FUN-draiser World Premiere Special.
For the very latest updates, follow Manual Cinema on Facebook at facebook.com/manualcinema, on Instagram at instagram.com/manual_cinema and on Twitter at @ManualCinema.
More about the three remaining shows in Retrospectacular!
The End of TV
August 3-10
The End of TV explores the quest to find meaning amongst the increasingly constant barrage of commercial images and advertising white noise. Set in a post-industrial Rust Belt city in the 1990s, this production is staged in cinematic shadow puppetry and lo-fi live video feeds with flat paper renderings of commercial products, and driven by a 70’s inspired R&B-inspired art pop song cycle performed by a five-piece band. “With puppets, projections and a Rust Belt story, Manual Cinema works magic.” – Chicago Tribune
Manual Cinema received creation and touring grant support for The End of TV from the National Theater Project, a program administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts. It premiered in 2017 at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven, CT. It was filmed at Chicago’s Chopin Theatre the following year.
No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks
August 10-17
No Blue Memories: The Story of Gwendolyn Brooks tells the true story of the first lady of Chicago poetry by combining intricate paper puppetry, live actors working in shadow, and an original score for an unforgettable multi-media experience. This 2017 Manual Cinema premiere was commissioned by the Poetry Foundation, written by Crescendo Literary (Eve L. Ewing and Nate Marshall), and features music composed by Jamila Woods and Ayanna Woods. “You’ve Never Seen Gwendolyn Brooks Like This Before” - Chicago Magazine
Frankenstein
August 17-23
Love, loss, and discovery merge in unexpected ways when Manual Cinema stitches together the classic story of Frankenstein with Mary Shelley’s own biography. This 2018 Court Theatre world premiere is a thrilling classic gothic tale about the horrors of creation, weaving together the stories of Mary Shelley, Victor Frankenstein, and his Monster using shadow puppetry, a 3D creature puppet, live actors in camera, live music, and percussive robots. “Full of boundless imagination, ingenious technique and beautiful storytelling that packs an emotional punch…simply outstanding.” - Fringe Review UK
A recipient of the 2018 Jim Henson Workshop Grant, Frankenstein was originally developed with The Public Theatre’s Devised Theater Initiative in a research residency partnership with the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. The filmed version for the retrospective was shot in 2019 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.
Note: See the companion backgrounder for more details about each production.
Manual Cinema’s four-show, “best of” Retropectacular! line-up (top, from left): Lula Del Ray (July 27-August 3), The End of TV (August 3-10), (bottom, from left) No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (August 10-17) and Frankenstein (August 17-23).
More about Manual Cinema
The five founders and co-artistic directors of Manual Cinema are (standing, from left) Kyle Vegter, Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, (front, from left) Julia Miller and Ben Kauffman.
For 10 years now, Manual Cinema has been turning heads in Chicago and around the globe, combining handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music to create immersive visual stories for stage and screen.
The Emmy Award winning performance collective, design studio, and film/video production company was founded in Chicago in 2010 by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller, and Kyle Vegter. Using vintage overhead projectors, multiple screens, puppets, actors, live feed cameras, multi-channel sound design, and a live music ensemble, Manual Cinema transforms the experience of attending the cinema and imbues it with liveness, ingenuity, and theatricality.
To date Manual Cinema has created nine feature length live multimedia theater shows (Lula del Ray, ADA/ AVA, Fjords, Mementos Mori, My Soul’s Shadow, The Magic City, The End of TV, No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, and Frankenstein); a live cinematic contemporary dance show created for family audiences in collaboration with Hubbard Street Dance and the choreographer Robyn Mineko Williams (Mariko’s Magical Mix: A Dance Adventure); an original site-specific installation for the MET Museum (La Celestina); an original adaptation of Hansel & Gretel created for the Belgian Royal Opera; music videos for Sony Masterworks, Gabriel Kahane, three time GRAMMY Award-winning eighth blackbird, NYTimes Best Selling author Reif Larson and Grammy Award winning Esperanza Spalding; a live non-fiction piece for Pop-Up Magazine; a self-produced short film (Chicagoland); a museum exhibit created in collaboration with the Chicago History Museum (The Secret Lives of Objects) a collection of cinematic shorts in collaboration with poet Zachary Schomburg and string quartet Chicago Q Ensemble (Fjords); live cinematic puppet adaptations of StoryCorps stories (Show & Tell) and NPR’s Invisibilia and four animated videos for the Poetry Foundation (We Real Cool, Poem, Three WWI Poems and Multitudes). Manual Cinema’s Emmy Award-winning collaboration with The New York Times (The Forger), was nominated for a documentary short Peabody Award and won 2nd prize in the World Press Photo 2017 Digital Storytelling Contest, Long Form.
Manual Cinema has been presented by, worked in collaboration with, or brought its work to: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), The Tehran International Puppet Festival (Iran), La Monnaie-De Munt (Brussels), Brooklyn Academy of Music (NYC), Underbelly (UK), Adelaide Festival (AU), The Avignon Off Festival (France), The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Saudi Arabia), Theatre World Festival Brno (Czechia), A Tarumba – Teatro de Marionetas (Portugal), The Chan Center for the Performing Arts (Bristish Columbia), The Kennedy Center (DC), The Kimmel Center (Philadelphia), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Noorderzon Festival (Netherlands), The O, Miami Poetry Festival, Handmade Worlds Puppet Festival (Minneapolis), The Screenwriters’ Colony in Nantucket, The Detroit Institute of Art, The Future of Storytelling Conference (NYC), the NYC Fringe Festival, Arts Emerson (Boston), Yale Repertory Theatre, The Poetry Foundation (Chicago), The Chicago International Puppet Theatre Festival, Pop-Up Magazine, The Chicago International Music and Movies Festival, The Puppeteers of America: Puppet Festival (R)evolution, The Public Theatre’s Under the Radar Festival (NYC), and elsewhere around the world.
Manual Cinema was ensemble-in-residence at the University of Chicago in the Theater and Performance Studies program in the fall of 2012, where they taught as adjunct faculty. They were an ensemble in residence at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in partnership with the Public Theatre in winter 2019. They lead the Catapult: Professional Training Workshop with the Chicago International Puppet Theatre Festival and the Poetry Foundation during spring 2018. Manual Cinema has taught workshops at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, The Future of Storytelling Conference (NYC), Stanford University, Yale University, Puppeteers of America: Puppet Festival (R)evolution, the Chicago Parks District, and many other theaters and universities around the country. The company offers extensive workshops and education opportunities as part of its touring engagements.
In Fall 2016, Manual Cinema contributed visuals, music, and sound design for an immersive adaptation of Peter Pan with producer Randy Weiner (Sleep No More, The Donkey Show, Queen of the Night) which premiered in Beijing in December 2016. The company was awarded an Emmy Award in 2017 for “The Forger,” a video created for The New York Times. In summer 2018 Manual Cinema premiered and self-produced a sold-out run of The End of TV at Chopin Theatre, which was quickly followed by its world premiere adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at Chicago’s Court Theatre. By year’s end, the Chicago Tribune named Manual Cinema Chicago Artists of the Year in 2018. Frankenstein subsequently had its New York City premiere in January, 2019 at The Public Theatre’s Under the Radar Festival.
Current and upcoming projects include creating shadow animations for the film remake of Candyman debuting October 16, 2020, a new adaptation of The Christmas Carol, and a world premiere adaptation of two Mo Willems' children’s books, Leonardo, the Terrible Monster and Sam, the Most Scaredy-cat Kid in the Whole World, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. followed by a Chicago premiere with Chicago Children’s Theatre.
For more information, visit manualcinema.com, follow the company on Facebook at facebook.com/manualcinema, on Instagram at instagram.com/manual_cinema and on Twitter @ManualCinema.
