The Chicago-based performance collective and production company Manual Cinema amplifies the theatricality of attending the cinema by creating “live films” onstage with use of overhead projectors, live-feed videos, hand-cut puppets, silhouetted actors, and original live musical scores. While the audience watches Manual Cinema’ s puppeteers, actors, and musicians create the various layers of their piece, the resulting images of their carefully choreographed shadow puppetry are displayed on multiple screens above them. The puppet company typically tells stories without spoken dialogue, where narrative context either appears in written form on screen or in accompanying lyrics. The novelty of their innovative theater is thus met by nostalgia for older media, such as the familiar classroom standby, the overhead projector, or the classic aesthetics of silent film. In showing both the process of manually creating their “cinema” and their polished multimedia scenes, Manual Cinema replicates a paradox of our contemporary media world. They deliver the seamlessness of popular cinema and TV, where the coherent, pixilated aesthetic of the screen is expected to present polished and palatable narratives, while also ripping open those seams, an aesthetic practice long familiar to the avant-garde. The audiences of Manual Cinema can delight in a tightly crafted narrative without the expectation of being fully absorbed by its fiction.
The techniques long associated with method acting in both theater and film—in other words, the eruption of organic and spontaneous feeling that paradoxically comes from years of training and craft—is no longer located in the body of the actors, but in a series of magically coordinated technical elements: music, silhouettes, light, transparencies, and spoken, sung, and recorded text. The serendipity produced by seeing these elements conspire together is, like traditional approaches to acting, a product of masterful technique: the diligent timing and dexterity of the puppeteers, their well-crafted puppets, and the ingenuity of the musicians. Yet, by locating the illusion of theatrical invention outside the athleticism of the actors’ emotional recall and mimetic skill, Manual Cinema instead allows its audience to enjoy the pleasure of narrative while displacing the secret magic of their theater to the process of creating the world where that narrative lives as opposed to the believability of its players. Manual Cinema neither sanctimoniously preserves the aura of authenticity or “liveness” traditionally attributed to the theater nor do they replicate the seductive veneer of the screen. Instead they offer their paper-cutout puppets and live-action silhouettes as a shadow medium that intercedes between the two: that which gives us both the pleasures of the crafted and the organic without placing these categories in false opposition. Manual Cinema’ s use of the incredibly malleable medium of shadow puppetry demonstrates how the use of an eclectic and diverse media landscape need not impede a practice of straightforward storytelling.
Manual Cinema’ s recent production No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks draws heavily on untheatrical material. The piece was commissioned by the Poetry Foundation for the Brooks Centenary and written by Crescendo Literary, a collaborative partnership between poets and educators Eve L. Ewing and Nate Marshall.† In fact, the name Crescendo comes directly from a Brooks poem, and their mission, “to create opportunities for artists to think meaningfully about what it is to be in community,” is inspired by her legacy. No Blue Memories not only turns Brooks’ s poetic language into visual, scored tableaus; it reconstructs the story of her life from archival material housed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In many ways, this is a product of Ewing and Marshall’ s training; while intimately familiar with poetry, and Brooks’ s poetry especially, Ewing in particular also has a background in social science work and archival research. In fact, this show draws not only from the archives at UIUC, but Ewing’ s undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, where further materials on Brooks are held. Yet, the passive act of letter writing, the reserved quietness of Brooks’ s personality, and the abstract quality of poetic language are difficult to translate into theatrical action.
While No Blue Memories marks Ewing and Marshall’ s playwriting debut, through their collaboration with Manual Cinema they turned a scholarly endeavor into a dynamic and animated production that takes on characteristics of a live concert or music video—mediums far afield from what one expects of the pedagogical and readerly exercise undertaken in this piece. While Ewing and Marshall’ s work is largely text-based, Manual Cinema rarely uses text in their pieces, but rather uses almost exclusively visuals and sound to tell a story. And yet, Manual Cinema’ s visual and sonic medium has the unique ability to tap into formal features of pop culture that contain surprising opportunities for the poetic and pedagogical project of Ewing and Marshall’ s script. Their pieces not only deploy visual representations of rhythmic forms reminiscent of music videos, but in disclosing the makings of each performance, their techniques are also resonant with those of reality TV—a form that capitalizes on public exposure and scandal, moments where audiences are able to glimpse what goes on “behind the scenes” of celebrity performances. No Blue Memories also used a sonic landscape to capture the different eras of Brooks’ s life. For example, the play takes its title from a 1948 Ella Fitzgerald song, “My Happiness,” and Jamila and Ayanna Woods, who composed the show’ s score, deployed a wide variety of musical styles to mark the ways in which music differently shaped Brooks as a poet, educator, and Black woman.
No Blue Memories gives us intimate glimpses into the making of Gwendolyn Brooks—as poet and persona—but also the making of Gwendolyn Brooks the shadow puppet character—as a performative and academic reconstruction. In one scene we see a silhouette of Brooks talking into a phone against the backdrop of her book-lined living room. This scene alternates with a silhouette of her daughter, similarly situated against a projected backdrop of her own room, talking on the other line. Brooks asks her daughter to read back a letter Brooks has just dictated to her. (The letter is one of the documents uncovered by Ewing and Marshall in the archives.) Brooks has written to the publishers anthologizing her poems insisting that they include a broader spectrum of her work. As her daughter reads the letter back to her, Brooks insists that the words appear in their proper format. Her daughter begrudgingly confirms that she has, indeed, typed them out correctly; she narrates the various emphases and stylistic flourishes of Brooks’s s pen, from underlining to repetition to capitalization. In this way, one can see the archival process behind the development of the show: Brooks’s letters, speeches, and poems appear within the narrative as textual artifacts. In fact, Ewing and Marshall were interested not just in individual letters but the way that letters as a form could represent different aspects of Brooks’s teaching, craft, and legacy. They turn these static historical documents into dynamic theatrical events without erasing the evidence of the academic project behind their resuscitation.
Brooks was a poet writing out of two competing literary traditions: modernism and the Black Arts Movement, the former known for its formal experimentation and the latter marked by free verse and social critique. Much like Brooks’s own divided poetic lineage, Manual Cinema’s “live films” dance between a similar split in aesthetic tradition. In No Blue Memories, Manual Cinema stays close to a biographical and socially inflected portrait of Brooks. They present her poems predominantly as artifacts that contain social observations of Chicago’ s South Side and Brooks as an ethnographer of her environment. When reciting “We Real Cool,” Manual Cinema represents the seven pool players at the Golden Shovel described in the poem. On one slide, Brooks is shown hesitantly peeking into the bar as another projector opens on close-ups of the pool players’ faces, their pool cues, and a bird’s-eye view of the pool table as the balls break. We are looking at the poem’ s content through the eyes of Brooks as an observer. However, once soul singer Jamila Woods comes center stage beneath the screen and sings an R&B rendition of Brooks’ s poem, we see a puppet Brooks dancing in the Golden Shovel beside the pool players. The music shifts the poem’s function from documentary form to an account of Brooks’s own interior experience. Woods becomes the voice of the poem, adopting the position of outside observer, while Brooks becomes the poem’s subject. Manual Cinema powerfully deploys the different registers of their hybrid medium to recreate Brooks’s own struggle over where to locate identity in poetry. Brooks’s poetry complicates the division between aesthetic experience and poetic content. She is concerned both with how to document the specific conditions of Black urban life in Chicago and how to represent Black identity and the experience of Blackness more broadly. In slipping between different media, thus repositioning subjects inside and outside the frame of the screen, Manual Cinema is able to represent the uneasy relationships between the personal and the social, the public and the private, the interior and the exterior.
The hybridity of Manual Cinema’s “live films” is far more capacious than this self-description suggests. No Blue Memories does not simply combine live performance and film; it is also a work of archival research, poetry, music, dance, and, of course, puppetry. While breaking down traditional boundaries between media is a now familiar practice within experimental performance and the visual arts, Manual Cinema’s ability to retain divisions between the media they use—as their narratives visibly jump from projector to live actors, to screen, to live musical performances—is essential to their unique aesthetic practice. They incorporate the transformations these narratives undergo as they move between media as integral components of the narratives themselves. It is this feature of their practice that allows Manual Cinema to accomplish several intersecting aesthetic goals: they replicate poetic form, offer social critique, reanimate biographical history, and deliver both the narrative pleasure of a carefully unfolding story and the synesthetic exhilaration of a multimedia performance.
This Review is in Chicago Review 62.4-63.1/2