Nasty, Brutish & Short

The Performing Body: A Night of Puppet Experiments

An Essay by Yiwen Wu

At the first Nasty, Brutish, and Short: A Puppet Cabaret during the 2025 festival, seven groups of puppeteers embarked on a series of exciting puppet experiments. Curiously, the shows that were featured in this cabaret demonstrated a collective commitment to play with the performer’s bodily presence on the stage, calling our attention to the sometimes ignored and overlooked puppeteer in new ways. 

First up, Felicia Cooper’s “It Has Its Ups and Downs” is a fast comedy that captures the overwhelming excitement of training to become an elevator operator. The only performer onstage, Cooper displays physical virtuosity by juggling between half a dozen rod puppets and animating the characters by quickly transitioning among different voices. Using her arms and even legs to run the show, Cooper performs with a lively energy. The major spectacle of the show is surely the “operation” of the elevator rides: A bright red pulley system moves up and down a cardboard elevator room that is itself a toy theater box! The elevator is cleverly adorned with two paper pull tabs acting as the sliding doors––or even as the curtain of a stage—behind which puppet characters pop in and out. 

Leah Lara’s “Fish Sermon II” wows the audience members with its first entrance: A giant glittery fish, in the form of a larger-than-life backpack puppet, dances onto the stage, flapping two bright green veil fans as its fins. The fish then unexpectedly turns out to also double as the musician of the performance, with the puppeteer tap dancing to create a tempo throughout the performance. Two additional puppeteers simultaneously operate an overhead projector, demonstrating the act of baiting, hooking, and catching fish. The onstage presence of the fish puppet, then, becomes a loud call that amplifies the perspective of the animals, alongside that of the humans.

Lindsey Ball’s “New, but Familiar” is a poetic statement about queer resistance and persistence. With only one performer, the piece swiftly transitions between toy theater, rod puppets, and shadow play––all accompanied by Ball’s intimate first-person narration. At the center of the stage is a tunnel-shaped toy theater box, installed with layers of images. Ball reveals the images one after another, until the final layer is disclosed to be a crankie machine, where the turning of the spool slowly unrolls a long, illustrated scroll. The finely delineated images on the scroll further provide a delicate visual accompaniment to the poetry that is being performed. In the end, at the line “My heart is like a too tightly wound clock,” Ball suddenly takes their hands off the machine and leaves the scroll in suspended tension, just like a tightly wound clock. Then, with their fists clenched, Ball stands firmly on the stage. They slowly turn their head around to look at all the audience members in the house, demanding us to fully acknowledge their presence and clearly hear the last words of the poetry: “I will stay as long as I’m granted, for them, for the privilege to continue to be an aging queer, for the opportunity to continue fighting to make things better for you, for me, for us.” 

While Ball’s performance explores the affective power of the puppeteer’s body coming into the spotlight on center stage, other performances that night experiment with how the puppeteer’s presence can contribute to storytelling, even in a mediated form. Justin D’Acci’s “Old Man Walking,” a story about slaughter and revenge, for example, produces a unique spine-chilling effect by embracing rather than shying away from the shaking hands of the puppeteers. On a mostly dark stage, the performer uses one hand to operate the puppets and another to cast light and their shadows onto a back screen. Like a cinematic handheld shot, the flashlight’s beam follows the action of the puppet closely; however, it also captures and enlarges every movement of the puppeteer’s body. This uneven effect is especially fitting for the horror of this thriller short, throwing the audience into the unsettling storyworld with an added sense of immediacy and urgency.

To the repetitive beats of percussive musical shakers, “Inked” begins with the puppeteer’s grand entrance, all the way from the corner of the house to the stage––charged with great excitement. As Myra Su walks onto the stage, the proud performer infuses the stage setting with a heightened sense of wonder. On the stage is a simple crankie machine, but its roll of paper plays a dual role (pun intended): It is a canvas upon which brush and ink can paint directly, but it’s also a projection screen that displays pre-recorded videos. Interestingly, what’s projected onto the paper is a mini-sized image of Su, who appears to be responding to the painting’s creation by the brush: When a door is drawn, she opens it; when the ink spills, she tries to escape away from the fast travelling paint brush on the quickly rolling paper. The magic of the performance, then, is made possible by the perfect synchronization between the live performance and the video recording, creating an illusion of live interaction across mediums. The playful performance ends with a satisfying twist, where the “crankie” Myra, cranky with how much control the real Myra has with a paint brush in her hands, manages to break the formal confinement, take over the brush, and make her own world. Seen in this light, Su’s “Inked” is a witty meta-performance that demonstrates the creative power of the artist by making, quite literally, the creative power of art-making the central theme of the play. 

Lastly, Jackie Berland’s “Dig Deep and Cut Me Open” is a grotesque but surprisingly heartwarming interactive piece, where the performer invites one of the audience members to perform a surgery on their “body.” After the surgical gown is lifted and a layer of paper-made skin is torn open, a grotesque view of the body organs is nakedly displayed in front of us. Following the performer’s guidance, the audience member onstage is invited to pull out the intestines that are made of elastic chords, remove the little plastic duckies from some mysteriously unknown vessels, and tear open a squirting organ that is constructed from metal with their bare hands. This absurd performance, in the end, closes with a tender moment of caregiving, where the performer and the audience member collectively embrace the wounded body with gentleness and love. Once again, the performance, like the rest of shorts, calls our attention to the very presence of the performing “bodies,” both those of the puppets and the puppeteers.

Changing Viewpoints with the Puppets of Nasty, Brutish & Short

An Essay by Skye Strauss

At Nasty, Brutish & Short, puppeteers are either testing new ideas or picking up a second performance opportunity during the festival. In a short-form cabaret piece, the physical puppet––what kind of material it is made of and what mechanisms it uses––determines what actions it is predisposed to and, therefore, what kind of stories it can tell, especially in a short space of time. Once audiences are drawn into the “world” of that puppet, things can shift in surprising ways. On the evening of January 18, 2025, supported by the Puppet Slam Network and hosted by Noah Ginex Puppetry Company, the puppet performances of Nasty, Brutish & Short seemed to be asking me to change my perspective––on both who or what these puppets were and who or what they remade me into as an audience member.

I do not normally give much thought to what I am made of, but the Bramble Family Band got me thinking. At first, their strange creatures appeared in shadow—reaching long necks and tentacled arms toward one another. Then the screen changed to a command: “Prepare to Consume Your Translation Packet.” We watched the puppeteers, our human proxies, emerge from behind the screen and swallow individually packaged Swedish Fish. The alien creatures who floated out from behind the screen next were made from a hodgepodge of craft supplies––multicolored fur, springy tubes, and fairy lights—that grabbed our attention, making the black-clad puppeteers (behind the shadow screen and visible onstage) seem less substantial by comparison. Thankfully, courtesy of the translation packets, we got to understand the aliens’ every word. They were fascinated to discover that humans are “meat,” a conversation uncomfortably illustrated in shadow by hams, steaks, bacon, and eggs. They were shocked that the meat “was sentient” and had been trying to get in touch with them (or perhaps it?). They decided to “erase the records and forget the whole thing,” leaving humans feeling “all alone” in the universe. Before the lights went out, I watched a tiny paper spaceship fly around a globe in a multicolored swirl of stars. A marvel of human achievement was rendered both wondrous and finite. I ended the piece feeling a little small and wondering: If I’m just “meat,” should I become a vegetarian?

Other puppet pieces seemed less bent on changing my mind than expanding it by helping me see things anew. Mike Oleon’s offering introduced the audience to a chubby baby, armed with a silly soundtrack and a staff worthy of Prospero, who was––oddly––missing his head. Understandably, the unfolding dramaturgy of the story was about finding one. A straw purse produced possibilities accompanied by comic commentary. First, a skull with a gravelly voice for the “babymancer” (flung offstage) and then a creepy vintage baby doll head that tried to hawk bitcoin (before disappearing into the puppeteer’s pocket). The bag itself was eventually tried on as a potential head, giving me a new way to look at a humble handbag as part of a strange “bag baby” assemblage. It was Oleon’s head, as a humanette, that concluded the number. It felt fitting, since the source of the audience’s laughter was often an awareness of his presence when a prop wouldn’t fit into a pocket or the wrong puppet’s mouth moved when the other one was speaking or spoken lines needed to cover for inevitable fumbles with two full hands.

Rubicon Studios’s meditative piece “Unrecognizeable World” followed a little girl through a dreamscape populated with faux flowers, bees, and butterflies composed of an array of repurposed objects in a friendly rainbow of colors. As a marionette with classic balletic grace, even the way she fell was adorable. Lulled by the piece’s melodic music and gentle pace, I was not expecting the lovely twist at the end. An older voice entered the soundtrack, singing the same rhyming refrain that accompanied the girl skipping rope. The brick wall of the set turned to reveal an old woman sleeping beneath a stained glass window adorned with flowers. The final moments reframed what I had already seen. I was not watching a child play; I was watching an old woman dream.

The evening’s other three offerings put me in very different roles as an audience member. Anthony Michael Stokes presented “The Awakening,” excerpted from his full-length festival production The Scarecrow. Like Wicked and The Woodsman, it is another spin-off from Oz, recasting the Scarecrow as an “anti-lynching crusader” who awakens flooded with memories of his death. The puppet’s mobile mouth was key to carrying the song. Its straw-trimmed body magnified its movements, as it danced across the stage under the power of Stokes’s voice. He spun the familiar phrase “no place like home” into something new, dark, and dramatic, but the one lyric that really stuck with me came after: “So many Black lives lost, how can you condone?” This time, we were the witnesses, charged with holding his question.

Children’s puppets, introduced as Chango Snake Dog and Friends, a “puppet rock band,” transformed all of us at the start of their performance by looking straight out into the audience and declaring: “So many CHILDREN.” They proceeded to lead the “children” in sing-along songs helping us practice our numbers and days of the week in Spanish. The spotted leopard, blue dog, and green frog were worthy of their live guitar accompaniment––their fabric bodies made their head-bobbing, body-bouncing, tail-spinning joy both possible and infectious. I have no doubt that they had their daytime crowd of real kids up on their feet in no time.

Lest anyone mistake the cabaret for a children’s show, the evening’s final offering was there to settle the score. Monica Lark puppeteered a model of a human hand for her burlesque number “Hands on You.” Its relationship to her body cast it as an unseen lover who progressed from awkwardly holding hands to caressing her breasts, sliding down her shoulders to rest on her hips, and eventually helping her remove her top and unzip her mini skirt. Somewhere in the middle, as she was sucking on the fingers, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I’d been recast again––this time, as a voyeur. By the end, she had buried the “spare” hand (no longer the center of the audience’s attention) between her legs and out of sight to take her final round of applause bathed in red light.

Throughout an evening of radically different performances, each new puppet (or set of puppets) brought new perspectives, in part by being made of such radically different things. If live actor performance relies on our reaction to those like ourselves, perhaps puppetry develops a new capacity to relate to those unlike ourselves, to practice “reading” new faces and forms as we rethink our position in relation to the rest of the world.

The Many Lives of Puppetry at the Nasty, Brutish & Short Cabaret

An Essay by Will Bixby

Entering its fifteenth year, the Nasty, Brutish, and Short (NBS) puppet cabaret has become the premier vehicle for short-form, experimental puppetry in Chicago. As the name implies, the cabaret performances cater to adult audiences as they regularly wade into the obscene, grotesque, and flat-out bizarre. As a cabaret, a typical NBS show covers a diverse sampling of puppetry styles and subjects ranging from frenetic entertainment and bawdy comedy to poetic reflection and political commentary. The performance on January 23, 2025, was no exception, with seven pieces curated by Myra Su and Caitlin McLeod covering a range of themes and puppetry forms. While this ping-ponging across forms might seem like a disorienting disjunction, variety is NBS’s greatest strength. The juxtaposition of varied styles forces us as spectators to read these performances alongside one another, allowing a glimpse into the multifaceted ways in which puppets make meaning. 

The opening piece perfectly captures how puppets and humans work in relation with one another in performance, as Tom Lee demonstrates a ceremonial Sanbasō, a dance typically performed in the Japanese traditions of Kabuki and Bunraku. Unlike the more well-known Bunraku puppet tradition that uses three puppeteers to animate one puppet, Lee reconfigures the dance for the kuruma ningyō style that utilizes only one performer. Sitting atop a small, wheeled box, Lee is connected to his puppet foot-to-foot, controls the puppet’s head and left arm with his left arm, and uses the fingers of his right hand for the puppet’s right hand. It is an intricate interweaving of human and object, and it is often difficult to discern where Lee’s body ends and the puppet’s body begins. The dance itself is composed of a series of dynamic movements—the puppet shakes and twirls his sleeves and stomps on the ground—but the true marvel is watching the connection between Lee and his puppet. Lee is always within our view, yet he never seems to impose any control over the puppet. Instead, the two work in tandem with one another: When Lee steps, the puppet steps; when the puppet flexes his hand, Lee flexes his. This intimate synthesis serves as a powerful example of the co-presence between human and puppet, how they work with and through one another to create the image of life onstage. 

The kuruma ningyō form makes a reappearance in a snippet from Josh Rice’s Kayfabe (a performance that ran as part of the 2025 festival lineup). This sequence modernizes the traditional form to enact the entrance routine of a flamboyant 1980s wrestler. Rice and his puppet—dressed in a pink robe with long, feathered sleeves—glide and stamp across the stage to the accompanying up-tempo rock music. Rice’s piece exemplifies not just the presence between puppet and puppeteer but the intense connection to the spectators that the puppet can facilitate. Early in the piece, the puppet raises his hands above his head and begins to clap in time with the music, signifying to the audience to clap along. Soon after, Rice and his puppet are dancing center stage to the sound of the entire performance hall clapping in unison. It is an act of pure spectacle, one that unites puppet, performer, and audience to bring the puppet to life. 

The physical fusion of puppet and puppeteer continues in Daniela N.’s “Kenneth – A Burlesque.” Kenneth—a stuffed flannel shirt attached to Daniela’s torso—is a human-puppet hybrid. Daniela and Kenneth share the same pair of legs. Daniela’s left arm is tucked into the flannel shirt to act as Kenneth’s arm, while her right arm is hidden from view to control Kenneth’s papier-mâché head. Whereas in Lee’s performance the boundary between human and puppet is blurred, in Kenneth’s burlesque the boundary is amplified. Set to Gillian Hills’s “Zou Bisou Bisou,” Kenneth dances on a metal folding chair as Daniela’s gracefully expressive legs and arms are humorously juxtaposed against Kenneth’s awkwardly stiff materiality. The dance culminates in Kenneth’s striptease, but as he unbuttons his flannel shirt and slips his hand inside, he does not reveal bare skin but instead handfuls of stuffing followed by a long, plushy intestine that he twirls around his body to the climax of the song. The pairing of human body and puppet fluff is a delightful piece of pure bawdy entertainment.

Rabbit Foot’s “No Strings Attached” leans fully into the spectacular potential of the puppet and leads us into an otherworldly dreamscape where life-sized, anthropomorphic mice take over a puppeteer’s workshop during a night of revelry. Rabbit Foot employs a variety of puppet types: large, two-dimensional cardboard figures; marionettes; glove puppets; and two papier-mâché mice heads—one worn directly as a mask by a puppeteer and the other extended into the air by a series of dowel rods attached to a performer’s body. While varied in type, they each embody a sense of handmade-ness, where their materiality and artificiality take center stage. There is no attempt at verisimilitude; we are intended to view these puppets as puppets. The effect is a sense of estrangement, a transportation into a surreal storybook world where plot and character give way to spectacle and a sense of childish whimsy. 

However, not every piece features the physical entwining of puppet and human performer. In Amy Davis’s “Miraculous Vision of a Midwestern Apocalypse: A Dress-Up Fashion Game,” the puppet is a two-dimensional drawing that remains immobile throughout the piece. Using an overhead projector, Davis places a series of articles of clothing (hand-drawn on transparent overlays) atop their character “Six String.” The scenario is framed like a character build session for a tabletop role-playing game, such as Dungeons and Dragons, where the essence of Six String is distilled into a list of character traits and attributes. Part paper doll, part shadow play, the result is a delightfully tongue-in-cheek performance where we watch Davis physically construct the puppet into existence. 

While Davis’s piece illustrates the age-old adage of less is more, the performance by the collective Poncili Creacion charges full steam in the opposite direction. In a ten-minute segment, two puppeteers engage in an intensely frenetic, grotesque, and uproarious sampling of puppet chaos, animating several felt hand puppets modeled to look like abstract, anthropomorphic monster-animal hybrids in a series of short, absurd vignettes. A plush yellow creature attached to a back massager spins independently on the stage while a puppeteer violently pummels the ground; a green monster head is flip-flopped and folded in on itself, transforming into a massive mouth that attempts to eat the puppeteer; the head of a puppet is extracted from the posterior of one puppeteer while its body springs out from the mouth of the other. The surprising transformation and destruction of the brightly colored puppets occur alongside the carnal screaming and grunting of the performers. It is an absolute assault on the senses, a total eradication of any semblance of logic or understanding, and it is immensely satisfying and hilarious. 

The highlight of Poncili Creacion’s piece is a delightful fusion of crafted puppets, found objects, and audience interaction. Two purple monster feet (made from carved felt attached to a performer’s shoes) are turned upside down and transformed into two independent mini-monsters. The foot-hole of the shoe now serves as the monster’s mouth, the tongue of the shoe the monster’s tongue. After a brief fight with one another, the monsters turn to the audience, slowly crawl towards them, and steal the spectators’ shoes. The shoe-monsters then begin to engage in simulated sex acts with the spectators’ shoes. As the puppeteers moan and groan, the audience showers the stage with more shoes, flinging them from all sides as the monster-puppets move from shoe to shoe in a massive shoe-on-monster orgy and easily the truest embodiment of “nasty” and “brutish” of the entire night. What was so spectacular is that there was seemingly no prompt for the audience to begin to toss their shoes into the scene; it was simply the natural response and a perfect encapsulation of the puppet’s ability to channel the energies and imaginations of performers and spectators alike. 

While most of the performances are lighthearted entertainment, Tanima’s piece, “Shake Off,” serves as a powerful reminder of the puppet’s potential for political agitation. Tanima, wearing a trench coat and a wide-brimmed hat, hides their head from the audience, replacing it instead with an inflated balloon painted to look like a giant, unblinking eye. We watch Tanima traipse around the stage while audio from Mischa Hiller’s 2011 novel Shake Off plays overhead. Hiller’s novel follows a former operative of the Palestine Liberation Organization as he is pursued through the streets of Europe by various counterinsurgent groups. Hiller transposes the fear and anxieties that accompany a life of constant surveillance into the genre of a spy thriller, as the protagonist attempts to avoid the pursuits of multiple assailants and his own internalized policing born from a lifetime of living under occupation. Tanima humorously repackages the concept of surveillance and capture into the figure of the balloon, drawing our attention to the inherent instability and fragility of authoritarian control. In the final sequence, Tanima peels a Jaffa orange—itself a symbol of Palestine—and, with a slice of the fruit, bursts the balloon as the following text appears on the projection screen at the back of the stage: 

“intifada” 

[ORIGIN: Arabic, a shaking off]

An uprising by Palestinians to protest against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 

Tanima’s piece profoundly illustrates the puppet’s ability to allegorize issues of social and political injustice: how the material world of objects can help make legible the lives of the dispossessed and potentially even inspire spectators to take further action once the performance ends. The Nasty, Brutish, and Short cabarets truly embody the endless vitality of puppets. While you never quite know just what you’ll see at one of these performances, you’re guaranteed to experience some of the most innovative, creative, and outlandish works of puppetry on offer.

Singing Across the Divide with NBS

An Essay by Dawn Tracey Brandes

The final Nasty, Brutish and Short cabaret of the Chicago International Puppet Festival took place in front of an enthusiastic crowd on Saturday, January 25, 2025, at Links Hall. Hosts Myra Su and Madigan Burke began the night by listing three central qualities of the puppet slam: The pieces are short; they are often new works that have never been performed before; and they can be works-in-progress that will eventually grow into full-scale shows. NBS is an “adult-oriented” puppet slam, but while the selection of works in this evening’s offering contained some glimmers of the “raunchiness” that Su playfully warned us about at the outset, what actually linked this assortment of pieces together was the many ways they tackled the difficulties of communicating what lies beneath the surface.

After a brief interlude by our Muppet-style co-hosts (courtesy of the Noah Ginex Puppet Company), the show opened with Chelsea Warren’s “She Took to the Sea.” This piece told two intertwining stories: on one hand, the story of an ocean explorer named Harriett’s deep-sea expedition; on the other, a broader history of the world’s whale population. Warren’s piece was remarkable for its array of interwoven visual techniques, including a marionette (Harriett), stop-motion video, and shadow puppetry performed behind and in front of the projection screen. But it was a sound that formed the core of the story—specifically, whale song. As narrator, Warren told us first about a recording of whale songs released by Capitol Records while the gracefully curved body of a humpback whale rotated inside a circle of light on the screen like a record on a turntable. “We just needed to hear the whales sing,” Warren told us, explaining how that record led to legislation and a ban on whaling. Later, when Harriett’s DIY steampunk seacraft broke apart and she was left adrift under water, the whale song provided the soundtrack as Harriett’s small silhouette drifted alongside giant whale fins. Although Harriett’s expedition was not entirely successful, the piece ended hopefully: with Harriett literally back to her drawing board and the whale silhouettes singing to each other across the murky deep. 

While “She Took to the Sea” explored the difficulties of communicating across the vastness of the ocean, UnterWasser’s “Nonso and Nunsa” tackled the sometimes equally difficult-to-bridge gap between two people falling in love. Nonso and Nunsa were white-faced, slightly cartoonish tabletop puppets, each manipulated by one puppeteer, and their story began with a significant miscommunication: Just as they were entering the early throes of love, Nonsa grabbed Nunsa’s breast and earned himself a robust slap to the face. But the two persevered, making themselves understood to each other and to us through large gestures and lingering looks (as well as some incensed gibberish on Nunsa’s part). Nonsa managed to woo her with gifts, dancing, and finally, a marriage proposal. Their “I do” remained unspoken, but when they pointed enthusiastically to themselves, then to each other, and then nodded excitedly at us, their intention was crystal clear.

The next short piece was also wordless but full of meaning. In Kat Pleviak’s “Last Call,” a female burlesque performer undressed for the evening. The show was performed using overhead projectors and followed the dramaturgy of a traditional striptease, with layers of costume (here created by layers of illustrated transparencies) being slowly removed. But this was a more intimate, private spectacle—while the puppet’s purple corset was removed to reveal her naked body beneath, so too was her makeup. We were witnessing not a performance for our titillation but the shedding of performative layers and a revelation of the person underneath.

Gretchen Hasse’s “The Knee Play” was also interested in the secrets communicated by the body. Alone onstage in a long black dress, Hasse told us about an autoimmune disease she has battled since she was 15 years old and the resulting knee replacement surgery it required. She also told us about a man from her past, and as she did so, her knees became puppet representations of her former self and her lover. Hasse accomplished this by giving each of her knees a face: Elastic garters held long-lashed blue eyes and bright red lips to one knee and smaller eyes and a black moustache to the other. The man loved her for her brokenness, and once surgery alleviated her pain, he told her, “You’ve lost the one thing that made you interesting.” The puppetry of Hasse’s piece was funny and creative but also charged. By reducing this man to a character played by one of her (now repaired) knees, Hasse managed to simultaneously perform his smallness and also acknowledge that his words (and her own feelings about them) remained a part of her.

The last show of the evening was PDF’s “The Wiggle Room,” a kind of hand-puppet cabaret performance within the larger NBS cabaret format. The frame story of the piece involved a job interview: The proprietor of a series of failed restaurant ventures was now opening a coffee shop called The Wiggle Room and was looking for an employee. The proprietor, a (literal) pig, interviewed a woman who turned out to be part of a singing duo along with her cat. Soon she and the cat were crooning for the proprietor’s and our enjoyment. Later, when the proprietor referred to his past failed ventures, we entered a dream sequence and another musical number. If the other shows were interested in what lies unspoken beneath the surface, this one reveled in surfaces, using what storyline it had to knit together fun musical interludes. This is not a criticism: The piece’s knowing tone was part of its charm. 

As Madigan Burke noted at the beginning of the show, part of the joy of NBS is the magic of seeing new pieces make their first entry into the world. The other delight was the audience, whose support for new, innovative works-in-progress was boisterous and infectious. While the shows sometimes reflected on things unsaid, the audience was not shy in expressing its well-deserved appreciation.