‘The body in the space is the primary source of storytelling’
In some ways, it might be a bit odd to describe something as “physical theater.” Doesn’t all theater involve some degree of physicality? As Marc Frost and Alice da Cunha, the married cofounders of Physical Theater Festival Chicago, note during our Zoom interview, the narrowing of the definition of theater is a relatively newer phenomenon. “The beginnings of theater are the court jester and commedia dell’arte,” says da Cunha. “When did it become just a table and two chairs and a family arguing?” She adds, “We define it as a theater that has a strong visual language, and that the body in the space is the primary source of storytelling. Another way to say it is that if you close your eyes, you will miss at least 50 percent of the story.”
Founded in spring of 2013, the Physical Theater Festival celebrates its 12th edition June 2-8 at Theater Wit with seven shows featuring both local and international artists, along with professional workshops at Theater Wit and Columbia College Chicago.
Physical Theater Festival Chicago
6/2-6/8: Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, see physicalfestival.com for complete schedule.
Frost says, “We’ve been trying to hone the definition down specifically to I guess our version of physical theater, which is very much rooted in a question around what is possible in theater, especially when it cuts across languages, cultures, genres. What can theater be and do in community building?”
In practical terms, the Physical Theater Festival often incorporates multidisciplinary work, including puppetry, movement, music, storytelling, circus arts, projections, poetry, and more.
A big part of the community building for the Physical Theater Festival is Scratch Night, which allows local artists to present work in progress. Curated by Scott Ray Merchant, it kicks off this year’s festival on Monday. In recent years, Scratch Night has also been a part of the Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, with a Latine lineup. One of the shows from an earlier Destinos Scratch Night, Jean Carlos Claudioʼs solo piece Memorabilia, has gone on to further developmental productions and is now in a full run (5/30-6/29) with Teatro Vista.
This year’s Scratch Night participants include DaughterBoy Collective (a duo featuring Felipe Carrasco and Camilla Frontain, with movement direction by Chih-Jou Cheng) and Theatre Nobody, featuring Kevin Michael Wesson, Leah Lara, Sam Lewis, Lindsey Ball, and Mak Scheel.
DaughterBoy made their debut in the 2023 Scratch Night. This year, they’re presenting Regina, a piece that stretches back to the couple’s 2019 grad school experiences. The Taiwanese-born Cheng, who works in puppetry and movement in Chicago (and also appeared with Teatro Vista in their acclaimed 2023 production The Dream King), performed with Scratch Night in winter 2022. Frontain says, “She’s a movement master. She really speaks through movement and has a deep relationship with embodied emotion, and is helping us to bring that very needed layer and element to our piece.”
Wesson is a puppeteer and devised theater artist who, in addition to working with their own company, Theatre Nobody, has also worked extensively with Rough House Theater and Theater Unspeakable, and was a Co-Mission artist in residence with Links Hall this past year. For Scratch Night, Wesson is “making a live ska music video in one shot. We’ll be using a karaoke machine with a really long cord, and we’ll be doing a bunch of highly choreographed stuff. We’ll just play a song, and then we will be projected—you will just see a music video of it. As we speak over Zoom, Wesson cuts out a cardboard trumpet that will appear in the piece. “It’s technically puppetry, but there is no animism in it,” they explain. “But yeah, it’ll be just like a highly choreographed fun piece.”
What comes after Scratch Night? For Britt Anderson and Richie Schiraldi, who create together as Whisper Theatre, it’s Being Made in Chicago. This new addition to the festival (June 3) provides a link between the shorter in-progress work of Scratch Night and fully developed pieces. Anderson and Schiraldi’s piece, Well-Balanced Dads, uses “partner acrobatics, audience interaction, and a lot of cringey dad-isms” to tell the story of two dads dealing with empty-nest syndrome. The two have performed in Scratch Night before, and this particular piece also grew out of the cabaret showcase Broken Planet Show.
Anderson says, “I think the thing that is exciting about building this piece and about physical theater pieces is that they are pieces of theater that you have to put in front of an audience for each stage of development in order to know if it’s working. It just doesn’t work if you’re sitting down alone in a room, right? Pen to paper. So we’re really lucky in that we built the show in increments, almost kind of like a sketch show, even though we knew that there was a throughline. This opportunity is for us to see if all of these sketches that work really well on their own fit together well with an audience.”
“The show also has a lot of audience interaction. We play these two dads that are clowns, basically. They are very goofy. They’re the same status. They are both idiots, they have a lot of heart, and they interact with the audience constantly. So we’re always playing games with the audience, always playing games with each other. And if you weren’t able to watch the thing in person, that we’re doing, just the script would make no sense.”
Frost says, “We have a two-pronged mission basically as an organization. We are sort of like an incubator and a presenter in a sense. So the incubator side is where we focus on local artists who we are trying to provide scaffolding opportunities to build their pieces, to build their new ideas one step at a time.” Being Made in Chicago extends that incubation process. In addition to Well-Balanced Dads, the evening includes a solo, Sensation(s), by Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist Amanda Raquel Martinez, in which “a depressed woman beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown seeks answers in her sadness and her senses, questioning the world around her in search of relief and through other, more colorful, worlds that she can escape to and find solace in.”
Credit: Tristram Kenton
The national and international lineup is just as varied in themes and performance styles as Scratch Night and Being Made in Chicago. Un Poyo Rojo from Argentina is a “cross between dance, sports and sexuality,” in which two men (and a live radio) in a dressing room fight and seduce each other. Rewind from Ephemeral Ensemble (whose members include artists from Iceland, Brazil, Colombia, and the UK) draws on actual testimonies of Latin American migrants and refugees across generations to tell the story in reverse of Alicia, “a young woman who dares to resist.” U.S.-raised clown Madeleine Rowe brings their solo Knight, Knight, which tackles “courage, determination, brotherhood, grief, and most of all, horses.” Apphia Campbell of the U.S. and Scotland performs Black Is the Color of My Voice, inspired by the music and life of Nina Simone. Finally, locals Lily Emerson and Charlie Malavé (the latter’s piece, A Suite of Dreams, is also part of this year’s Chicago Puppet Lab Showcase) present the family-friendly Adventure Sandwich: A Sandwich Adventure!, in which Lily and Hoagie face a sea of foes and challenges.
Both Frost and da Cunha point to the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival as a model for where they’d like to see Physical Theater Festival Chicago grow. And like Blair Thomas, the founder of the Puppet Theater Festival, the Physical Theater Festival founders note the influence of the long-gone but deeply vital International Theatre Festival of Chicago, which, beginning in 1986, brought a breathtaking array of artists from around the globe to local stages. (I saw my first authentic commedia show through the festival in its first year.)
But Frost also points out, “I’m from Chicago. We love the Chicago theater scene. We love the storefront aesthetic that you can be right there, and you’re with the actors, and it feels more real than a movie in some ways. We were gifted the opportunity to live and study in London. [Frost and da Cunha met at the London International School of Performing Arts, which is now arthaus.berlin.] The breadth of types and forms of work that we experienced there, we just wanted to bring some of that to Chicago.”
And as da Cunha emphasizes, even though the festival went virtual during the pandemic shutdown, it really takes audiences in the space to complete the physicality of the experience. “There’s something of the immediacy of the creators being onstage telling the story that they created for the past years. And they’ve toured, they carried it, it’s really what they wanna say. They’ve curated the best experience to tell that story.”
Chicago Dance Month kicks off
For many dance lovers, summer starts when the citywide annual celebration known as Chicago Dance Month kicks off at Navy Pier. That happens this Saturday at 3 PM, featuring Ayodele Drum and Dance, Chicago Dance Crash, Mexican Folkloric Dance Company of Chicago, Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater, Hiplet NEXT (a company within Hiplet Ballerinas), MOMENTA Dance Company, Natya Dance Theatre, and Praize Productions, Inc.
Chicago Dance Month
5/31-6/28: Kickoff celebration Sat 5/31 3 PM at Navy Pier; complete lineup at seechicagodance.com
Presented by See Chicago Dance, all the events under the Chicago Dance Month umbrella are free and family-friendly. You can download the brochure and schedule here to follow all the events happening inside and outside throughout the city, including the return of Wave Wall Moves at Navy Pier every Saturday at 4 PM, which might actually give you a reason to go there—or at least give out-of-town visitors a free taste of Chicago’s rich dance scene.
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2025-05-29 15:49:29
