Language, music, and soundscapes are especially important elements in numerous works of puppetry this festival. Artists will discuss how the sounds that arise from manipulation of material, the dialogue, the soundscape, and musical accompaniment complement the puppet as a visual object. In this panel Craig Leo (Life and Times of Michael K), Yael Rasooly (The House by the Lake, Edith and Me), Paula Riquelme (Organismo), and Anthony Michael Stokes (The Scarecrow), respond to the question: What do sounds and words contribute to the emotional journey of each story? Moderated by Dr. Paulette Richards.

About the Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium

The Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium brings together practicing Festival artists with scholars to consider the intersection of puppetry with other disciplines and ideas. Before 1912, the year the Little Theater of Chicago was founded in the historic Fine Arts Building, the term “puppeteer” did not even exist. Little Theater director Ellen Van Volkenburg needed a program credit for the actors she had trained to manipulate marionettes while speaking the text of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and she coined the word “puppeteer.” That marked the dawn of the movement that has brought us to the rich art form now practiced around the world.

This year’s theme is: Puppets Doing and Being. In her 2024 book, Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects, Claudia Orenstein notes that puppets enact being alive by doing rather than through written dialogue. The 2025 Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium series explores the dramaturgical elements that distinguish puppet theater and actively engage audiences in endowing material with life.