Join us for a contemporary puppet adventure as six puppet artists gather under one roof to share their visions in fresh, new work. Get ready to expand your concept of puppetry through a variety of styles, stories, and mediums. This showcase is the culmination of Rough House Puppet Arts Expansion Artist Residency — celebrating bold experimentation, distinct voices, and the wonderfully weird world of puppetry.

Runs: Thursday, June 18th – Sunday, June 21st

Tanima, with their medium-length work: Fireflies’ Dream

Casey Doe, with their medium-length work: Open Season

Steven Widerman, with his medium-length work: Merkaba’s Progeny

Plus, short-form works-in-progress from:

T.Jordan Christmas, Felix Mayes, and Sion Silva

Expansion Residency Director: Sam Lewis

Executive Artistic Director: Claire Saxe

Managing Director: Marcey Abramovitz

Marketing Director: Kimzyn Campbell

David Carlson, Efrén Cruz Cortés, Antonio Luna, Maureen Mizwicki, Julie Moller, Eva Silverman, and Aisha Naseem (our Expansion Residency Audience Cohort) & The Saints Volunteers for the Performing Arts

Rough House is on a mission to build connection through puppetry, celebrating the weird things that make us unique and the weirder things that bring us together. Our work collides contemporary puppetry with physical theater, music, visual arts, and an insatiable taste for experimentation.

For more than a decade, we’ve worked toward a vision of Chicago as a national hub for contemporary puppet theater through a combination of public workshops, artist incubation, and a range of performance programs. Our signature productions include the long-running puppet slam, Nasty, Brutish & Short: A Puppet Cabaret, and our acclaimed puppet horror anthology, House of the Exquisite Corpse, presented each October (“Exquisite storytelling.” – Chicago Sun-Times).

Rough House is committed to making the arts accessible to both artists AND audiences. Here is a suggested guide for selecting your ticket tier, based on annual income:

Patron Ticket — $65k+/year