Manual Cinema, the Chicago-based performance collective, design studio, and film/video production company founded by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller, and Kyle Vegter, will celebrate the company’s 10th Anniversary with a four-week virtual celebration launching Monday, July 27 at Noon CST, culminating in a live, retro, remote view variety show and Covid-relief fundraiser streaming live on Saturday, August 22 at 8 p.m.
Titled Manual Cinema’s 10th Anniversary Retrospectacular!, this month-long virtual birthday party will bring back four of the company’s most seminal shows from the past 10 years, on multi-camera, high-definition video and in their entirety, starting Monday, July 27.
Each week’s video will open with a personal introduction from one of the company’s five co-artistic directors, who will briefly introduce the show and its place in Manual Cinema’s history. Each production will be available for on-demand viewing 24/7 on manualcinema.com/watch until the following Monday at noon when it will be replaced with the next week’s show. A live talkback reuniting the creators and collaborators for each production is planned every Saturday night.
All four videos are free to enjoy via Manual Cinema’s home page with a suggested donation to the company to compensate for lost touring income due to Covid-19.
Sample images from Manual Cinema's No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks
Sample images from Manual Cinema's The End of TV.
But wait! That’s not all!
Manual Cinema’s 10th Anniversary Retrospectacular! will culminate with a live stream event, Manual Cinema's LIVE Tele-FUN-draiser World Premiere Special, on Saturday, August 22 at 8 p.m.
Manual Cinema’s fans, friends, funders and artists will gather online for a really cool, retro variety show including a host, a house band and special guest artists. Manual Cinema will introduce folks to their work, touch on the company’s inception and 10-year history, highlight accomplishments of note over the last decade, and ask for support through donations. The live stream will culminate in the world premiere of a 15-minute new short work created and performed live by the five co-artistic directors.
In the coming weeks the company will reveal the four “greatest hits” to be revived online for Manual Cinema’s 10th Anniversary Retrospectacular!, plus more details Manual Cinema's LIVE Tele-FUN-draiser World Premiere Special live stream event on August 22.
Until then, for the latest updates visit manualcinema.com, follow the company on Facebook at facebook.com/manualcinema, on Instagram at instagram.com/manual_cinema and on Twitter at @ManualCinema.
A sample still photo of Manual Cinema's shadow animations for the new film Candyman, set for release in September 2020.
"Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyma..."
Soon after, in September 2020, comes another big moment in company history: the national release of the major motion picture remake of Candyman.
Manual Cinema created shadow animations featured in the Chicago-set horror film reboot, directed by Nia DaCosta and produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions.
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.
More about Manual Cinema
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 September 2020, 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.