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Cabinet of Wonder is a collaboration with internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter and activist Natalie Merchant, in partnership with Chicago Children’s Theatre and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The
16-part music video series is available for free viewing online! The videos feature Merchant playing a dual role: a modern-day librarian figure named Miss Natalie with a passion for nursery rhymes, and an 18th-century fashioned Mother Goose who introduces the children, through song and dance, to the characters in her rhymes. more info
A dedicated team of workers in white-collar shirts and ties assemble each night for a serious purpose: to create and deliver dreams to an unseen Dreamer. Using old-school overhead projectors, fax machines, Xerox copies, and other analog technologies, they create handmade visions that beguile, enchant, frighten, and captivate. But as the night goes on, the Dreamer begins to lose their ability to dream, and the dream-workers find themselves threatened by a powerful new technology. Combining puppetry, projection, physical theater, clowning, and spectacle, Dream Delivery Service is a live cinematic experience about the power of the human connection amidst the distractions and entrapments of the digital era. more info
Manual Cinema’s The 4th Witch is a fantastic new tale, inspired by elements of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which a girl escapes war and flees into a dark forest. Told through shadow puppetry, actors in silhouette and live music (without dialogue or narration), The 4th Witch begins on the eve of an invasion of a small town by the local warlord, Macbeth. The girl flees the invading army and escapes into the nearby forest. Orphaned and exiled, she is rescued by a witch, who adopts her as an apprentice. As she becomes more skilled in witchcraft, her grief and rage draw her into a nightmarish quest for vengeance against the warlord who killed her parents: Macbeth.
The 4th Witch, an inversion of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, explores themes of grief, war, generational conflict, and cycles of violence through the collateral damage left behind on the battleground. more info