LINEUP JUST ANNOUNCED!
The 8th Chicago Puppet Fest Returns: January 21-February 1, 2026
The 2026 festival will span 12 days and dozens of Chicago venues, presenting an international pageant of puppet artists sharing more than 100 puppetry activities. Tickets go on sale Wednesday, November 12 for all-ages spectacle shows in landmark theaters, intimate works on smaller stages, and the always popular, adults-only, late night puppet cabarets. And mark your calendar with a long list of free puppet events and shows happening all over the city throughout the festival. Scroll down for lineup!
Puppetry from Around the World!
Warm up to a wildly diverse range of classic and contemporary puppetry styles from around the world, created by puppet artists from England, France, Norway, Denmark, India, South Korea and Spain, plus the U.S. and Chicago. These stories and more await fans of the 8th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, all told by puppet artists from around the world, showcasing different forms of traditional and contemporary puppetry, from bunraku-style to shadow puppetry, marionettes to object-based works.
Tickets on Sale Wednesday, November 12: 8am
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Show Highlights Include:
Wakka Wakka
Norway / New York — Opening Night!
Wakka Wakka opens this year’s festival with Dead as a Dodo, a mesmerizing musical odyssey about survival, transformation, and the power of true friendship. Infused with puppetry, humor, and stunningly innovative visual effects, Wakka Wakka takes audiences deep into the underworld, where two skeleton friends, a Dodo and a boy, may be shattering the established order of the dead.
Plexus Polaire
France / Norway
Festival favorite Plexus Polaire returns with A Doll’s House, a work that brings together puppets, actors, music and video projections for an eerie retelling of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play, created by and starring artistic director Yngvild Aspeli.
Blind Summit
England
Blind SumMiT, break-out stars of the inaugural Chicago Puppet Festival with The Table, returns with The Sex Lives of Puppets, in which their beautiful puppets talk dirty to present a bawdy snapshot of puppet sex in modern-day Britain.
Roald Dahl Story Company
England
Family audiences will love Roald Dahl’s The Enormous Crocodile – The Musical. In this mischievous musical, based on Dahl’s snappy book with toe-tapping tunes, the titular star weaves through the jungle with his tummy rumbling, while other jungle creatures foil his secret plans to stop this greedy brute.
Sofie Krog Theatre
Denmark
The House, a puppet comedy thriller from Denmark’s Sofie Krog Theatre, is set in a family-owned funeral home, where hilarious horror, twists and turns and jumping souls haunt a revolving set featuring intricate lighting, strange contraptions and scary sound effects.
Manual Cinema
Chicago
Chicago’s own shadow puppet masters, Manual Cinema, is back with The 4th Witch, a new and fantastic tale about a girl’s nightmarish quest for vengeance inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
KT Shivak
Chicago
Also from Chicago comes Rhynoceron by local puppeteer KT Shivak, featuring a life-size, life-like rhino puppet that transforms in front of our eyes from a natural inspiring wonder to a hunted object of human greed.
Théâtre de la Massue
France
Théâtre de la Massue presents two shows by artistic director Ézéquiel Garcia-Romeu: The Little Theater at the End of the World, Opus II, a genre-busting work that reveals an extraordinary world of the infinitesimal, and La Méridienne, a unique blend of a high-end dinner and a show for just one spectator starring a microscopic puppet.
Alva Puppet Theatre
New York
Alva Puppet Theatre presents The Harlem Doll Palace, based on the true story of Lenon Holder Hoyt, better known as Aunt Len, a beloved public school art teacher for 40 years who created a doll museum in her Harlem brownstone. Join the dolls from Aunt Len’s “dollection” as they recreate their journeys to their museum.
Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust
India
Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust makes their Chicago debut with About Ram, an experimental theatrical piece using excerpts from the Bhavbhuti’s “Ramayana,” an epic tale and guide for Hindu principles like dharma, told through animation, digitally projected dance, masks and puppets.
Laura Heit
Portland
Playing the part of miniature raconteur and sequined performer, Laura Heit performs teeny tiny puppet shows inside matchboxes for The Matchbox Shows. The miniature stages come to life with crankies, fire, and pop-up paper engineering. The puppet shows are simultaneously projected on a screen behind the table making the little tiny details of this portable variety show larger than life.
Geumhyung Jeong
South Korea
Oil Pressure Vibrator is created by and featuring Geumhyung Jeong, an artist who’s interested in the human body, the objects that surround it, with a particularly strange fascination with the excavator. Witness as Jeong plunges a big bucket into preconceptions about sexuality, technology and the body. Adults only.
Untitled Theater Co. No. 61 and Yara Arts Group
New York / Chicago
The Left Hand of Darkness is based on the 1969 novel by famed sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin. Puppetry and co-direction are by Tom Lee, Co-Director of the Chicago Puppet Studio and Chicago Puppet Lab, in a show featuring a deep bench of Chicago puppet artists and actors.
More Festival Events:
Nasty, Brutish & Short + Free Neighborhood Tour
2026 also marks the return of the always popular late-night puppet cabarets, Nasty, Brutish & Short, and the Free Neighborhood Tour, presenting two free, family-friendly puppet shows from Spain and the U.S. at venues and community spaces all over the city throughout the festival.
Ellen Van Volkenburg Symposium + Catapult
Puppetry enthusiasts are also welcome to check out the free Ellen Van Volkenburg Symposium, the Catapult Artist Intensive, professional education workshops with visiting puppet artists, and more.
The Puppet Hub
In addition to the incredible pageant of international and U.S. puppetry artists, The Puppet Hub is back and open throughout the festival on the 4th floor of the Fine Arts Building. It’s the perfect place to relax between shows, get a bite to eat, meet up with friends, make new ones, and learn more about contemporary puppetry. Attractions include The Spoke & Bird Pop-Up Cafe, serving coffee, tea, winter soups and baked treats, the Pop-Up Puppet Shop, and the free exhibit Two Ways Down, featuring festival artist Laura Heit’s exquisite hand-drawn animation and film inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Heavenly Delights.”