Nasty, Brutish & Short

The “Real Cost” of Art and the Artist’s Dilemma at Nasty, Brutish & Short

An Essay by Skye Strauss

Regular festival goers already know the setup: Nasty, Brutish & Short is a late-night cabaret-style performance curated by Caitlin McLeod and Myra Su and funded by the Puppet Slam Network. The short-form format invites a variety of puppetry onto the same stage in rapid succession. The evenings of January 23 and 24 of the 2026 festival featured Muppet-style hand-and-rod puppets, marionettes, hand puppets, shadow puppets, body puppets worn like costumes, and the hands-on manipulation techniques of Bunraku alongside an impressive array of performing objects. There was even one performance art piece by Felix that (by the performer’s own admission, as part of their practice of “radical honesty”) might be disappointing for the audience because it did not feature any physical puppets at all––instead, the audience puppeteered the performer, trying (and failing) to chaotically shout them through the process of making and eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The puppeteers participating in a slam end up showcasing a range of ways to express ideas, suiting form to function, product to circumstance.

Some pieces are a bit “nasty” in more than one way. The first piece on January 24, set in a charming cardboard forest, showed the audience a game of hide-and-seek between an old woman tending to her garden and a thieving, farting moose who was stealing her plants. Both marionettes by Maïté Agopian were so cute that the audience let out an audible “Aww” when they made friends in the end. If you reach for an alternative meaning and swap “sexy” for “nasty,” different performances come to mind. That alternative meaning is clearly something the crowd recognizes, since the hosts asked everyone to point out the “puppet slam virgins,” as if       we were watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show. On the 24th, two performances played into that expectation. Deviant Cabaret’s fan-dancing marionette presented graceful leg work while wearing an elaborate costume and plastic mask that blurred the line between person and puppet. Heidi Tungseth’s aptly named short “Hellooo, Susan!” also invoked the vocabulary of striptease with a flower suggestively pulling off their petals one by one, making a bee intent on pollination and a simple squirt of water strangely, hilariously obscene. Part of the fun of the festival, especially in the late-night slot, is seeing “adult” puppetry.

Other performances were certainly “brutish.” Zlata Godunova used the puppets and performing objects hidden in her pastel princess minidress to tell us the story of the ruthless queen Olga of Kyiv as she taxed the people into submission, buried and boiled her suitors, and even rained down burning pigeons on her foes. The connection to Ukraine’s continued resistance against Russia was unstated yet clear, as the lady foiled her every enemy. Later the same evening, Rubicon Studios indulged in more puppet violence worthy of the historical Grand Guignol. They introduced us to an elderly couple, Marv and Kathleen (the title of the piece), whose secret to prize-winning tomatoes turns out to be the blood of random strangers. The elderly puppet couple did an impressive job of butchering a hapless UPS delivery person in front of the audience, complete with jagged broken bones, stretched flesh, arterial spray, and a blender full of gore. Apparently, winning requires cruelty as well as cunning.

Technically, all the performances were “short” when it came to time. On the first night, “The Morning Commute” boiled down heroine Plucky Rosenthal’s train journey to Grandma’s house into a few minutes’ time. The whole performance took place within a toy-theater proscenium shaped like a vintage television, augmented by a 1960s soundtrack. Each fellow passenger was delightfully voice-acted until a train crash (gasp!) brought the story to a sudden end. Tian Gombau dealt with the time limit by excerpting part of his longer piece, Stone by Stone, for the crowd—a teaser about building a house and a new friend using his collection of stones that hopefully brought more audience members to The Free Neighborhood Tour, where Gombau performed his full piece in different communal, nontheatrical spaces spread throughout the city of Chicago. This penchant for “short” performers extended into a piece by Karen Hoyer, titled “Kloc and the Ballerina,” where a classical clown, Hoyer in a blousy black dress with a round red nose, received a package covered in stamps and wrapped in twine. It opened to reveal a pint-sized ballerina in sparkling white. Twisting her rods, with all the deft skill of a lacemaker, the puppeteer led her through a series of graceful moves and great leaps––dancing her out onto the shoulders and upturned palms of delighted audience members before she returned to the stage for her bow. There is a lot of joy to be found in little things.

Looking back over this array of performances in different mediums, it is worth noting how a finished performance hints at the time invested in it. Many of the performances described above (to create a record of the sheer variety of creative work on display at this year’s festival) use humble materials like cardboard, paper, and fabric and rely on meticulous craftsmanship to enliven the everyday. All benefit from extensive planning and rehearsal, built on that performer’s combined training and previous experience. Su and McLeod use their grant from the Puppet Slam Network to allow proceeds to go straight to the artists by covering specific venue fees and other producing expenses. Yet what we pay as a crowd, broken down across the participants, still undoubtedly fails to convert into any reasonable rate-per-hour for the artist’s labor in creating each show. Writing about Jim Henson’s choice to eventually license his Sesame Street characters, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens points out that an original work of art is difficult to monetize because it takes so long to create, “making it, in a sense, a gift,” (2013: 24), and these Nasty, Brutish & Short performances are certainly not as cute and cuddly as Henson’s more marketable characters. Licensing helped Henson escape the pressure of his early commercial work and leave a financial legacy substantial enough for his daughter Heather Henson to fund future artistic endeavors, including puppet slams like Nasty, Brutish & Short (starting in 2005 alongside Green Feather Foundation, formerly known as IBEX Puppetry, according to The Puppet Slam Network home page). While some puppeteers, like Henson, manage to find a following sizable enough to allow financially successful work to fund later fringe projects, festival puppeteers participating in the slam are likely still dealing with the classic artist’s dilemma: How do you have both the time and money to make art? Why labor over what you cannot monetize?

The first piece on January 23 by Oahn Vu, entitled “Time Flies,” was very literal about the trade-offs of being an artist. In one sense, the title seemed to refer to the chickens we saw onstage. One was a realistic-looking, bunraku-style puppet, built roughly to scale, whose expressive neck and flapping wings gave it life. Another was a tiny rod puppet. The third manifestation of “time flying” came onstage with a hand puppet, whose scenes were interspersed with the chicken check-ins. While life on the imaginary farm seemed pastoral, reinforced by a symphonic soundtrack, the urban artist we visited was clearly living a hectic life. Plagued by pop-up notifications (that we saw as a hovering swarm of symbols on rods), they were torn between making it to a protest, attending their dad’s birthday dinner, going to rehearsal, and submitting a grant report. In their harried state, a moment of distraction––watching a leaf floating on the wind––seemed to prove fatal when a car crashed into them (and, to add insult to injury, backed up and ran them over a second time). As only a puppet can, they got back on their feet to bow, but the philosophical sting stayed. Can art be political enough? Or do we also need time to protest? Do you honor the day job, especially one that might be artistic in its own right, or give time to developing your own work? Where does family fit in? As the scenes toggled back and forth, the puppeteer kept up a steady vocal patter of “tick-tock, tick-tock” sounds––reminding us that the clock was always running, no matter which path our hand-puppet proxy chose. It seems frustrating, but truthful, that the piece asked questions but did not give answers. I’m sure it took a lot of time to make those chickens.

On January 24, Penny Benson confronted the audience with another familiar dilemma––the wastefulness of the artistic process. At the beginning of the piece, the puppeteer unwrapped a diaphanous white puppet tied with a red ribbon from within a length of black cloth. The promising puppet promptly fell to pieces. Its butcher-paper sibling, plain but serviceable, appeared on the scene with a demand: “Put me in, Coach.” There was an echo of Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero in the setup––a testing of who had the power here and whether they had a right to it. Showing off for the crowd, the prototype puppet demonstrated that it was flexible, strong, and capable, unlike its airy sibling who had proven to be, in its words, “all shine and no spine.” As the puppeteer tried to resume the scheduled program, their puppet creation became more and more confrontational: Why should I, the puppet, as a “work in progress,” a part of the necessary “chaos of creation,” bow out quietly? The debate devolved into a well-staged fight between the puppeteer and the puppet, who was willing to go as far as choking its creator to avoid being boxed up again. (Though one wonders, of course, what would happen if it went too far—surely they would both go down for the count?) As artists try and try again, they inevitably create waste. They are losing resources, time, and emotional energy on work that remains unfinished, that never goes on display. There is either the literal, physical waste to contend with or, as some of the dialogue suggested, the need to labor intensively—“upcycle” materials—to avoid the guilt of throwing things away. Either way, the imagined price of the eventual finished product rises yet again.

Labor is a commodity that is paradoxically limited and limitless for artists. In his writing, Lewis Hyde productively distinguishes self-motivated labor––that situationally ebbs and flows––from strictly clocked work hours. As “Time Flies” reminded us, our time is finite and, for most of us, work takes its share. Yet, in Hyde’s terms, the artist can put all the labor they want into their art without paying anyone (including themselves) a working wage for their time. What makes art worth investing in, given its poor rate of return? “The Artist” by Maisie O’Brien, presented on Friday evening, offered one answer––art, made in memoriam, hedges against loss. The shadow-making puppeteer in their parable says, to their world of beloved trees and animals, “I love you, and this is how I will keep you safe.” By cutting them out of paper, the artist doubles (or even triples, given the mirror nature of many of their lacy shadows) what they love. However, in their fairy tale, preservation proves to be a tricky business. The puppeteer, who is the artist, awakes one day to find the shadows gone, with not even their own reflection looking back at them from the mirror. To recover their world, they must make sacrifices––re-creating a version of their first puppet, a tree of life, using their body and breath to set it in motion and jump-start creation again. The flashing scissors of the artist in the shadow show suggested the process that presumably lay behind the piece––cutting out the delicate images and carefully adhering each one to the translucent scroll used to present them in performance so they flowed smoothly from still to still as tree branches twisted into roots and animals scurried under foot. The artist’s meticulous labor was clearly on display––a labor of love, a gift of time made concrete, and well worth more than the ticket price.

Works Cited

Hyde, Lewis. “The Labor of Gratitude,” in The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World. New York: Vintage [e-book edition], 2019, 51-71. 

Hyde Stevens, Elizabeth. Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career. Seattle: Lake Union Publishing, 2013.

Nasty, Brutish & Short: Coming Together in Community to Create Good Chaos

An Essay by Tim Cusack

¹ Fiscal sponsorship is a fairly common model in the nonprofit arts sector. Established organizations that have completed the expensive and time-consuming process of securing an official 501(c)(3) tax-exempt determination from the Internal Revenue Service will often partner with newer organizations or individual artists to accept donations from private individuals and/or grants from both government agencies and NGOs on their behalf. Only donations to an official 501(c)(3) organization are tax-deductible, so this is a way for artists unaffiliated with a not-for-profit corporation to garner support. In exchange, the larger, more well-established organization will often retain a certain agreed-upon percentage of the funds to underwrite administrative costs.