2024 Festival Archive: Nasty, Brutish & Short
Nasty, Brutish & Short
January 19-20 and 26-27, 2024
Links Hall (Weekend 1)
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Performance Penthouse (Weekend 2)
Presented by Rough House Theatre Co., Links Hall, UChicago, and Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival
Scholarship and Resources
The Pleasures of Puppetry:
Technical Prowess and Puppet “Life” at Nasty, Brutish & Short, A Puppet Cabaret (January 19, 2024)
An Essay by Skye Strauss
An abbreviated version of this review was published in Puppetry Journal, under section editor Jamie Donmoyer, with the permission of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival.
The stage at Links Hall was bathed in low-wattage red light as a voice whispered “nasty” over a thumping beat, soon brightened by a jazzy saxophone. You might suspect that you had wandered into a very different kind of show if the audience wasn’t laughing. Soon, the stage was occupied by something not so much house, or even Hobbes, as Henson. Curators Caitlyn McLeod and Myra Su opened by crediting Rough House Theater Co., Links Hall, and the Puppet Slam Network. Then, the evening’s hosts––the so-called “furry morons” of Noah Ginex Puppet Company––took the stage. Jameson Jarvis Ralphonzo, a furry orange monster with short horns and a dapper purple suit (Noah Ginex), was joined by a Manitoban moose named Toronto (Sam Locke).
TORONTO: “Look who’s starting out with the audience’s sympathy.”
JAMESON (snippy): “Your other bit got cut.”
TORONTO (undeterred): “Even more sympathy. I don’t need the applause; I just need the awws.”
The joke, about two kinds of audience reactions, got me thinking about the twin pleasures of watching a puppet performance. Over the course of the evening, I found myself alternating between enjoying the technical prowess of the puppeteer(s) that fostered my investment in the life of the puppet and considering what causes that “spark” of puppet life to appear.
Some pieces made no clear claim to “puppet life” in the present. Instead, an artful presentation invited audience members to consider past events. Alexandra Sulack’s small, jewel-box stage presented a lushly illustrated feminist history of beer––beginning with mythological Viking lore and the goddesses from Finland, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Jumps forward in time unfolded a new perspective on her magical box. Doors with still illustrations opened to reveal crankies scrolling through a story about English ale wives turned into “witches” by jealous Puritans. Images of cauldrons, cats, brooms, and pointy hats that had logical explanations at first glance turned sinister with the toggling of an unseen switch that bathed the little box in a flickering light like flame. If applause can successfully sanction an alternative history, this one may have attained a few new followers in the audience.
Emily Schubert’s shadow puppetry piece made the unknown known, with the story of Patricia McGowen––her Aunt Pat––who helped collect narratives about UFO sightings. The performance included the kind of X Files stories you would expect, with an electric-green field creeping in to represent alien sights and sounds. It encroached on an otherwise black-and-white world that combined mid–twentieth-century photos with shadow-puppet silhouettes. The performance artfully incorporated more real documents to make Pat’s life feel present in this tribute, including her carefully collected news clippings, recordings of her voice, and family photos. Pat’s formative influence on Schubert––-encouraging her niece to question received narratives and pursue her creativity––became more interesting than the aliens. By the time a three-dimensional UFO entered the stage to give Aunt Pat a long overdue audience of fellow witnesses to the same sighting, the “real” ship felt strangely anticlimactic. It was seeing the documentation lovingly sifted through in the process of making the performance that really drove home the importance of, to quote the show, “feel[ing] someone believe,” not in aliens, but “in you.”
Chris Fair’s Laser Comedy Show became an unexpected reminder of how little it takes to get an audience invested in a character. The laser technology of the title showed us the bright, Etch A Sketch afterimage of the artist’s “pen” on an otherwise dark screen. The skill lay in gesture drawing—deciding how to introduce a character or capture movement in just a few well-chosen strokes. Fair began with a standard improv opening, asking the audience for a prompt: “Walrus!” “Lights!” “Avocado!” Soon, we were privy to furious preparations for a “One Walrus Show.” The toothy showman gave us an impressive finale––with eyes rolling, feet tapping, and flares flying––but the “applause” paled in comparison to the “awws” from the audience when the penguin and the seal, who tried to join him and interrupt the one-man-show schtick, were both rejected and cleverly illustrated waddling away upstage and turning back to gaze sadly over their shoulders at the walrus (and, by extension, at us). The seal got the best exit––an illustrated “splash” as it dove back under the imaginary ice.
In an object performance, the puppeteer has to work a little harder to convince us that they are not the one pulling the strings. When Claire Saxe first entered with a white fabric–covered box, she pantomimed struggling under its weight. The piece became puppetry rather than clowning when the same box became a being. As Saxe tried to exit, it hopped after her, only to be coaxed back into place. The box scanned the crowd, shaking as if suddenly seized by stage fright, which earned it a few “awws.” After her third exit attempt, Saxe found herself swamped with affection as the box jumped onto her––wiggling like an excited golden retriever––shoved her around the stage, and finally, swallowed her whole. The piece ended with the box striding confidently downstage, on what were Saxe’s legs, to face the audience head on for a round of applause.
La Liga-Teatro Elástico’s piece, Metamorphosis of Love, proved that it takes little more than a compelling head to sustain suspension of disbelief. Company members improvised a puppet: a scarf for a neck, a poncho for a body, lengths of green bamboo for legs, and a bundle of straw as a tail. The donkey’s head was quite the work of art—composed out of bent bamboo, it was as much negative as positive space—but its floppy ears and soulful eyes rendered it expressive. Just watching it chase after an apple was riveting. They then placed the same head on the body of a woman from the company, who ate the apple before launching into a reversed Midsummer Night’s Dream scenario. She reeled in a young male volunteer out of the front row for a kiss and concluded with some flamenco footwork.
An endearing puppet likely has the power of facial expressions on its side, and anthropomorphism is a natural part of puppetry. Madigan Burke introduced us to Harvey, a puppet who is “writing a play about top surgery.” Harvey looks like the sort of hand-and-rod puppet you would expect to see in a kindergarten classroom, framing the piece as “elementary education” for an adult audience in the spirit of Avenue Q. The piece takes clever advantage of the ability to stage nudity and consider physical trauma from a safe distance using puppetry––a distancing effect compounded by the fact that Harvey steps into character as the play’s lead named Max. Max starts his story by proudly showing us his post-surgical chest––with its shunts, drains, and blood bags––while singing a song about keeping his “arms down” and his “spirits up” during recovery. When the tape is ripped off, a downstage curtain drops to reveal a close-up of the scar on Max’s chest. Endearing though Harvey is as Max, once this “close-up” is introduced, a measure of the audience’s sympathy is transferred to two characters who might remain barely visible at ordinary human scale: Max’s anthropomorphized nipples, aptly named Lefty and Nips. While Nips regained sensation shortly after surgery, Lefty is initially trapped in unmoving limbo. The biggest moment of celebration comes when Max tells a story about taking a very cold cannonball dive at the gay beach and surfacing to the sudden realization that “both nipples [can] cut glass”––complete with Lefty’s face, still visible, shifting from sleepy blankness to sudden shock-and-awe. This puppet show did an excellent job of inviting the audience to sympathize with even the smallest of characters.
Becoming invested in the life of a puppet––whether it foregrounds or obscures the puppeteer’s prowess––invites the audience closer to a given performance. The rapt attention they give to the puppet in the moment arguably also draws them toward the deeper meaning of each piece. Even this cabaret’s short offerings might leave you with a new perspective on outsider history; encourage you to spare a thought for an object, animal, or body part after a dose of well-played anthropomorphism; or cultivate a newfound understanding of what it takes, physically and mentally, to surgically transition. In a well-played performance, puppet life becomes a source of empathy as well as entertainment.
Beyond the Living Body:
Nasty, Brutish & Short, A Puppet Cabaret (January 20, 2024)
An Essay by Skye Strauss
An abbreviated version of this review was published in Puppetry Journal, under section editor Jamie Donmoyer, with the permission of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival.
The Puppet Cabaret Nasty, Brutish & Short is part of a broader storefront theater scene in the city of Chicago––connecting it informally to a web of other performance styles and genres with their own devoted fan bases. On the evening of January 20, a member of the Neo–Futurists––a company based in the Andersonville neighborhood whose work focuses on short-form performance art about members’ everyday lives––crossed over into the temporarily “puppet-centric” space of Links Hall on the edge of Roscoe Village.
Kevin Michael Wesson performed “Elements of Style” with found objects, using an overhead projector to show snippets of text and various images. Wesson began by recruiting a volunteer from the audience, who was instructed to write down six adjectives and complete a fill-in-the-blank prompt over the course of the performance. In between prompts, Wesson showed a series of images––including a puppy on an unmade bed, a cat, and a man who seemed thoroughly disinterested in the camera’s gaze––before disclosing that the negatives were found near Wesson’s dumpster. There was no knowing how the volunteer’s handwritten captions would resonate until words were paired with images. The crux of the performance lay in Wesson’s textual narration, which delivered its philosophy on art: Its highest purpose is “bestowing beauty” on the everyday “from thin air,” crediting the status of the artwork to its “frame” rather than its inherent aesthetic value. Even though Wesson was abundantly present in the piece––using childhood photos paired with the second set of adjectives––the randomness of the whole created a hedge against narcissism. The same philosophy, delivered in a monologue instead of an interactive performance, might well fall flat. From serious to frivolous, working at the intersection of theater, performance art, and visual art empowers puppetry to stage stories and engage with genres that can prove problematic with “real” bodies.
This was apparent in Emilie Helene Wingate and Rachel Hartmann’s piece, in which a large bear encounters a white wolf (a masked human) and a whippet-thin blue dog (operated by a team of two puppeteers). The poor bear ends the piece chained to a pole––captured for an old-fashioned bear baiting before a cheering crowd. What would be intolerable to watch with a living animal becomes a vaguely sad curiosity when the animal involved is bright pink (though I applaud the puppeteer’s skill in using its expressive face to endow it with breath and intention as it lumbered about the stage).
“The Clockettes,” by Steven Widerman, Mark Blashford, and Dave Herzog used puppets to solve the maladies of chorus girls––why search for dancers with a specific height and build, who might well step out of line, when you could craft an identical team of twelve marionettes? Right down to the long lashes on their blinking eyes, these cartoonish clocks automatically made a perfect set, and watching the puppeteers grapevine around the stage, to give each chorus a jaunty sway, was a very pleasurable way to end the evening.
Rabbit Foot Puppetry’s “Watchfly,” presented by Abby Palen and Rachel Hartmann, used shadow puppetry to stage bizarre events fit for urban legend. They introduced the audience to a disquieting parasite that’s both a “real” bug––capable of being squashed onscreen––and an embodiment of disquieting fears about being stalked and surveilled; boxes popped up when their camera’s facial recognition deemed a shadow or drawing sufficiently “human.” Some shadows did the impossible––showing a variety of icky “microscopic” bugs and worms, forcing the passage of time, and orchestrating changes in scale. The bug and its human victim switch places––with people growing so small that they go missing (an ominous twist). The same story performed with live actors could never navigate the vertiginous shifts the story required.
Krystal Puppeteers provided a more lighthearted vignette––two monkey puppets playing the dating game. The woman starts onstage alone, and (in accord with the classic comic trope) her suitor in a leopard skin loincloth brings three gifts. The first small present is quickly rejected. The next, a banana that is delightfully both food and phallus, is also rebuffed. Finally, a wad of cash gets him pulled into a dancing embrace. The story’s simplicity combined with hand-hewn puppetry gave us full permission to laugh.
The evening’s most gripping performance used painterly images to deliver statistics about Palestine and Gaza, fixing facts in the audience’s minds without engaging with the real, personal suffering depicted in wartime photography. Four puppeteers (lead by Sayeda Misa Sourour and Abby Palen) carried in a large bundle of fabric, like a body in a shroud, that they unfolded to reveal a scroll of paintings. Facts and figures accompanied each image. A map of Palestine with an account of the 1948 creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” ironically juxtaposed against “750,000 displaced” Palestinians. A tree split in two––one side blooming and the other being blown apart––as they spoke of the 250 people who die daily in the current conflict, adding that Gaza has been declared “uninhabitable.” A tangle of dollar signs and war machines depicted in stark, angular black-and-white, as they reference the “US/Israel War Machine” and asked accusingly: “Who is the terrorist?” A hand holding a microphone and a host of eyes in a sea of deep purple, around an island of white badges and press passes, that memorialized “116 martyred journalists.” Finally, they unwound a long white strip of fabric out and over the audience, repeatedly asking: “How many more?” until the blackout. After applause, at least two audience members were bold enough to speak, saying “Free the hostages” and “Ceasefire now” surrounded by a room full of “others” who were too stunned, too aware of the complexity, or too concerned about “ruining the evening” to interject. The evening’s performances continued, but the images lingered.
Fabrications That Make Sense:
January 26 at Nasty, Brutish & Short
An Essay by Alec Abramson
Though the performances at Nasty, Brutish & Short on January 26 were an eclectic bunch, what bound them together was an interrogation into verisimilitude itself: What, in other words, is “truth” onstage? And how can puppets tell it?
Up, Down, and Journeys in Between
When the eponymous “Man in the Forest,” performed by Justin D’Acci and Nadia Henderson, died at the end of the episode, the narrator puppet died with him—until, we gather, both are “born again.” The narrator puppet, who at the outset laboriously wobbled to the stage under a flashlight’s piercing gaze, had but one purpose: to tell the Man’s story, with both a raspy voice and a feeble hand. And as he told that tale—boy gets taken up by the trees and lives among them as he becomes a man before falling gently to the ground in his final moments—I started to wonder whether the narrator puppet was, in some sense, a god. Beyond merely telling the story, the puppet was making it. But those brief moments of seeming transcendence—the narrator-puppet was in some sense “up there” in the sky as much as the boy was “up there” in the trees—came gently, though irrevocably, crashing down. The narrator, too, was brought back to earth: His job was complete, but maybe that was enough.
Whereas “Man in the Forest” opined on foreboding truths of life and death, “Just Do It” harnessed the puppet’s very artificialities to create (true) joy. Sharon Udoh was on piano, but she was only part of the band: Sam Lewis and his marionette Hambone were the rest. Udoh and Lewis took the simple lyric and sometimes adage, “Just do your thing on the drum,” and opened up its possibilities before our very eyes. What if “on” the drum meant literally “on” the drum? Hambone began by percussing with his hand on a small drum just in front of him, but as the song began to crescendo, he started to use his feet to beat the bigger drum he was standing on. Does a “drum” just have to be, well, a drum? Hambone turned next to a tambourine, percussing it with his feet as the bells rang (Lewis had bells on his own legs, too, only adding to the cacophony). And finally, Lewis and Udoh asked what “things” can you really “do” on the drum. Hambone took to the air, making gravity-defying jumps, which caused me—and most others in the audience—grin ear to ear. Indeed, “Just Do It” was a gleeful celebration of what puppets, maybe uniquely, can.
Sucked into (Non)Sense
Karly Gesine Bergmann took up joy as well, beginning her performance with a simple truth. “We cannot postpone joy until after the work is done.” Her joyful project, however, was not in search of smiles but rather of laughs: Bergmann’s nugget of truth introduced the Ancient Goddess and Little Pussy Clown, Bbo—that is, a face-vagina puppet strapped around her waist, which we in the audience had the pleasure of summoning (and then grappling with) together. After I stopped cackling, I started thinking: What made this so very funny? As I see it, Bergmann brought into (humorous) relief the problem of metaphor itself: the (erotic) discomfort of something at once being and not being. It was a vagina. It was not a vagina, but a face. It was neither a face nor a vagina, but a plush puppet. A face-vagina was dancing—but also not. A face-vagina was drinking liquid and then splashing it on the audience—but also not. In other words, she used a puppet to get at the very problem of language and communicability itself. Perhaps that’s why the adage with which she ended the performance rang ever true: “Silliness is sacred.”
The premise of “Trash Sisyphus” was simple: Someone was trying to take out the trash. Or rather, put a trash bag inside a trash can. The trash bag resisted, and things devolved from there. What began as the puppet luring the trash bag towards the can ended with the puppet itself being consumed by the bag—and, ultimately, the trash bag consuming the trash can. Who, we were asked just before the performance begins, is taking out whom? We can certainly tie this back to the mythological Sisyphus (a king eternally condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to fall back down again), but I can’t help but think of “Trash Sisyphus” as an allegory for our global warming–ridden future. It was telling a hard truth. So far, we’ve been able to keep the trash bags in the bin. We’ve been able to utilize institutions—trash collection, landfills—to keep things in check, or at least out of view, and ostensibly taken care of. But at some point, the trash itself will reign supreme, and we’ll just all be sucked inside. There was a moment’s pause right after the show ended, with both Jacklynn Kelsey and August Boyne obscured behind the black cloth–covered table before ambivalently putting their hands up with a knowing smile. To me, this said it all: What are we going to—and what will we—do?
I hadn’t seen Part 1 of Marianna Gallegos, Steffen Diem Garcia, Lilith Towers, and Daniela Kreidler’s “ZaHaHa,” so I was probably missing out on some key aspects of the plot. But, in their world of pizza, chefs, puppets, and drag, maybe plot wasn’t the point. It was vibes‒wacky and burlesque as they may be. The oddities and idiosyncrasies of the world they built were for me most poignant (and funny!) with two simple gestures. First, the chef puppet hitting its puppeteer, accosting her for thinking she was ready to take over the pizza shop. Second, the chef puppet haphazardly tossing a coin on the ground—for good luck, of course. Both required some degree of my suspension of disbelief: that the chef puppet had some kind of agency over the puppeteer and that there was a koi pond sitting just below the stage. But “ZaHaHa” wasn’t asking me to suspend my disbelief. Instead, their show was a matter of enjoying (and laughing at!) how unbelievable everything was. And yet, it didn’t have to be true for it to—and this goes for all the performances that night—make sense.
Discovering Selves and Sins:
January 27 at Nasty, Brutish & Short
An Essay by Alec Abramson
On January 27, the puppet-committed and the puppet-curious gathered after dark in Logan Art Center’s penthouse playhouse for a most memorable evening of performance. Though the evening’s pieces tackled an impressively wide range of themes, all were invested in making their mechanisms—shadow and puppet—abundantly clear. In other words, the pieces signified not despite their apparent artificialities but rather because of and through them.
Consumption in/of the Shadow
“Living Rock” centered on the life and times of Laurence Sickman, an American art historian and anthropologist who “acquired knowledge by acquiring things”—which is to say, ancient Chinese artifacts. The storytellers, Paper Whisperers, used shadow puppetry and projected animation to recount the story of an artifact that Sickman got perhaps too close to: a cave painting with which he was enamored. He first encountered it at its original site and then later as cutup fragments at a marketplace. Looking at the pieces of rock, the performance’s narrator remarked, “It is as if he sees the surface of his own face.” But for the Paper Whisperers, surfaces are what matter. “Living Rock,” told in only two dimensions, posits the superficiality of the antiquities marketplace itself through rotating and multiplied images of artifacts accompanied by an upbeat drum. It’s as though these precious, culturally significant items were instead mass-reproducible commodities, designed only to be bought and sold. To Sickman, perhaps they were. And so, when he put down the fragment at the end of “Living Rock,” I was left hoping that Sickman did see his own face … in more ways than one.
Set to Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand,” The Bunny Royale’s performance knew it was close to midnight: This was a tale of indulgence, desire, vice, and passion. Jennifer Friedrich walked slowly down the aisle towards the stage, brandishing a lantern. Removing a layer of her dress with a stoic but ever-knowing look on her face, she used it to create the screen for a shadow tale of love, goodbyes, nautical adventures, letter-writing, infidelity, despair, and—perhaps inevitably—death. Friedrich told the story through a series of distilled images and signs (“a ship,” “a woman writing a letter”), giving us enough information to follow the narrative but still leaving plenty of room for our imaginations. Then, an ocean-turquoise scarf, ever so sensually removed from a bag, became the waves upon which the ship that sat atop Friedrich’s head at the beginning of the piece began to sail (even if the green lights now emanating from her body may have momentarily averted our gaze). It was fitting then that the scene ended with Friedrich taking an object from the boat and eating it. What was Friedrich offering us—be it through the story, the costumes, the gestures, or the music—if not consumption itself?
Puppet as Guide—to the World, to Ourselves, to Our Shadows
As I see it, “I’ve Been Better” by Vanessa Valliere was about falling in love with the version of yourself that you want to be. It’s thanks to the puppet as a medium itself that Valliere was able to convey the joys of confidence and self-acceptance so beautifully. After resignedly snuggling on a beanbag to watch television—unable to pick a channel, perhaps because of how ludicrous they all seemed to be—Valliere emerged from beneath her blanket behind a puppet version of herself. On the television an ad for a fragrance by Gloria Vanderbilt played: “Break free and feel. Feel how splendid you are.” Valliere (the puppet) stood up, took a turn around the space, untied her hair, and settled back in, now entertained by what was on the television. Valliere (the human woman) accepted the takeover but soon resisted. Then, a détente: Valliere (the puppet) untied her alter ego’s hair, they settled in side-by-side, and enjoyed wholeheartedly what they were watching together. The way forward, suggests Valliere and Valliere-the-puppet, isn’t becoming fully your aspirational self. Instead, it’s finding the space between it and the person you already are.
And who is the person we already are? With “Show for Me,” Nate Puppets answered: We are beautifully multifaceted. With Peter Gabriel’s rock song “Sledgehammer” as his guide, Nate Puppets joyously unraveled his magnificent puppets-within-a-puppet creation. To me, one of the song’s lyrics best summed up the virtues of the piece itself: “All you do is call me, / I’ll be anything you need.” Here, “anything” (literally) meant the various parts already within us—our complex, eclectic, beings—ready to reveal themselves at any moment and even do a little dance. Maybe the most exciting part was when the puppet split fully into two, revealing once more that what we thought of as a “whole” is actually made of distinct, idiosyncratic parts.
One of my favorite books is Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (2020). The plot—if you can call it that—is less a sequence of events and more the eponymous character discovering alongside the reader the true nature of her (very peculiar) world: a house of infinitely regressing rooms and hallways. Jabberwocky Marionette’s performance seemed like a similar endeavor. While it centered around a simple, timeless question—“What’s inside the box?”—the performance’s joys arose from our opportunity to inhabit the world the team had created. Considering that the titular puppet had brightly shining lights for both eyes and mouth—which looked and gaped, giving it a “human” resemblance—discovery seemed to be the operative gesture. When the puppet finally opened the box, a creature emerged that, by all physical estimations, was quite foreboding and vaguely Voldemort-esque. Yet I wasn’t scared. Nor was I scared for the fate of our protagonist. That’s because Jabberwocky’s world wasn’t about fear. Faced with the odd, the unnatural, and the extraordinary, they invited us to revel in our curiosity. We let them be our guides.
Festival Performances
About the Performance
January 19-20, 2024
Links Hall
3111 N. Western Ave.
January 26-27, 2024
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Performance Penthouse
The University of Chicago, 915 E. 60th St.
Hit the fan-favorite late show to take your puppetry experience from the highest heights to the best kind of lows. Enjoy Chicago’s long-standing puppet cabaret with your host Jameson and somewhat furry friends for a naughty night of raucous, raunchy, dark, sassy, sad and mostly hilarious puppet theater. The best part? Fancy out-of-towner puppeteers are invited to join local legends in a bawdy night of revelry followed by friendly unwinding.
Reviews + Interviews
January 19, 2024 at Links Hall
Live Stream
Performers:
- Emily Schubert with Ian Mansfield
- Madigan Burke
Dead Reckoning, Laura Marsh/Alexandra Sulack - Rough House’s Claire Saxe
- Chris Fair
January 20, 2024 at Links Hall
Live Stream
Performers:
- The Puppet Company: Steven Widerman with Mark Blashford and David C. Herzog
- Emilie Helene Wingate with Rachel Hartmann
- Kevin Michael Wesson
- Sayeda Misa Sourour with Abby Palen
- Rabbit Foot Puppetry: Abby Palen and Rachel Hartmann
Jan 26, 2024 at Logan Center
Live Stream
Performers:
- Karly Gesine Bergmann
- Fidget Theatre: Jacklynn Kelsey and August Boyne
- Justin D’Acci with Nadia Henderson
- Sam Lewis and Sharon Udoh
- Marianna Gallegos with Steffen Garcia
Jan 27, 2024 at Logan Center
Live Stream
Performers:
- The Bunny Royale: Jennifer friedrich
- Vanessa Valliere
- Manual Cinema
- Jabberwocky Marionettes: Lolly Extract and Amber Marsh
- Yiwen Wu with Sherry Wang, Rudradutt Renade, and Emair Zhu