Centuries earlier than haunted home points of interest or horror movies, audiences thrilled to magic lantern exhibits. Also referred to as phantasmagorias, these performances featured hand-painted glass slides illuminated by candles, projecting fantastical and macabre photographs—grinning demons, bleeding nuns, the political lifeless—onto darkness or thick smoke. By the 1790s, phantasmagorias had change into true multimedia spectacles: photographs rose from the ground and disappeared, thunder crashed, and disembodied voices echoed across the room.
Handbook Cinema, established in Chicago in 2010, makes work that feels just like the phantasmagoria’s great-great-grandchild. The group’s central expertise—the common-or-garden overhead projector, the type you would possibly bear in mind from college—capabilities like a magic lantern, casting silhouettes, cut-
paper shadow puppets, and coloured slides aglow and remodeling them into one thing otherworldly.
“Once I’ve seen it, I’m like, that is magic. I’m a practitioner of it, and I don’t absolutely perceive it,” says Drew Dir, Handbook Cinema’s co–creative director and lead puppet deviser. He’s impressed by very, very early movie, such because the work of Georges Méliès, the French magician and filmmaker who made the moon stick out its tongue in 1902’s Le Voyage dans la Lune.
However a Handbook Cinema present is extra than simply eerie shadows. There are reside actors, props, and an ensemble of musicians making a reside rating. Watching a efficiency has a choose-your-own-adventure high quality: “It’s like watching an animated movie be created reside in entrance of you,” Dir explains. “Audiences can both watch the ultimate picture that we’re making, the shadow play on an enormous display above them… or they will watch all of the craft that’s being put into making that reside beneath, as a result of we expose every thing.”
Handbook Cinema received its begin about 15 years in the past, due to a spare overhead projector in Julia Miller’s landlord’s storage. Miller, one other of the corporate’s 5 co–creative administrators, had experimented with shadow puppetry as a part of Chicago’s famed-but-now-defunct Redmoon Theater. She introduced a small group of creative mates collectively—some with backgrounds in theater, others in music or visible artwork—to make a brief shadow puppet present impressed by a lullaby. The outcome was Lula del Ray, which Dir describes as a “dreamy space-cowboy story a few lady rising up in the midst of an array of radio telescope satellites within the desert who hears this music, this far-off music, and goes on a journey to pursue the music.” The venture was meant as a little bit of a lark, however after its performances at a storefront theater in Chicago, “individuals began asking us, ‘When’s your subsequent present?’ And we stated, ‘We don’t have a subsequent present,’” Dir says.
Till, after all, they did. The group fell in love with the chances of the shape—the prospect to mix storytelling, puppetry, music, spectacle, and motion. They took Lula del Ray’s dreamy space-cowboy ballad to bars and DIY areas in Chicago. The subsequent yr, on Halloween, they premiered a present known as Ada/Ava within the entrance window of Dir’s house constructing. They’ve since toured Ada/Ava around the globe, and adopted it up with greater than two dozen different works, an Emmy, animations featured within the 2021 Candyman remake, and a tour with folk-rock band Iron & Wine.
The 4th Witch—which they’re bringing to Seattle in mid-November—is impressed by parts of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. However don’t anticipate a straight retelling. Dir describes it as a “mirror picture story of Macbeth,” by which themes of energy, magic, vengeance, desires, nightmares, and guilt “play out not on the psychological terrain of Macbeth, however for an unnamed lady who’s on the reverse finish of the spectrum of Macbeth [himself] by way of her energy and her standing.” The story follows a younger lady who flees a war-ravaged village and escapes right into a forest. There, she’s taken in by a witch and turns into her apprentice. Her grief makes her magic extra highly effective—and shortly, her rage finds a goal: Macbeth himself. “We now have a personality within the type of this lady who undergoes an infinite trauma and is obtainable energy to proper that trauma,” Dir says. “However the ethical content material of that energy, I believe, is ambiguous.”
It’s one half warfare and one half witches—two methods of fixing issues, maybe. And if the heavier themes are the meat of the present, Dir says the witchcraft is the dessert. In any case, there’s a purpose why “individuals have been interested in Macbeth for hundreds of years,” he says. “There’s all types of alternatives for spectacle, with witches, magic, and the creation of potions, and flying. There are all types of tips that we had been excited to tackle.” (Even the rating, that includes three feminine vocalists alongside piano, violin, and cello, sounds appropriately witchy.)
That pleasure got here solely after years of resisting the concept of doing Shakespeare. “We at all times stated, nicely, [Shakespeare] doesn’t actually make sense for the work we do. We’re so visible and nonverbal and Shakespeare is a lot in regards to the language.”
However the firm finally discovered what Dir calls a “backdoor” into the story: “I started to consider it by way of not traces of dialogue, however all these symbols that recur time and again and once more in Macbeth. You’ll be able to actually distill the play down into this quite simple visible vocabulary: a witch, a dagger, a bloody hand, a crown.”
The creative staff additionally had some uncommon companions in crafting the present: the puppets themselves. “We are saying on a regular basis, what does the medium need? Or what do the puppets need? As a result of oftentimes we’ll are available with a narrative, however we’ll discover that the puppets wish to inform a unique type of story, and it’ll be a negotiation.”
Disturbingly, what the puppets needed right here was revenge. That wasn’t within the seeds of The 4th Witch after they started work, says Dir. “However there was one thing about this story about this lady who’s responding to private tragedy… her grieving course of interprets right into a need for revenge. And that was one thing the character, the silhouettes, the puppets needed to do.”
He likens discovering what the puppets wish to utilizing a steel detector on a seashore. “You would possibly go in with a plan of what you’re on the lookout for, however the steel detector, in case you level it over right here, it goes, beep, beep, beep, beep. And also you simply must comply with that as a result of you understand one thing is there and also you don’t know what it’s, however this factor is beeping and it’s important to transfer in the direction of it.”
For all of the speak of puppet company, that is nonetheless very a lot artwork made by people. “In our each day lives, we’re surrounded by a lot imagery, and most of that imagery comes from companies which can be crafting it as a result of they need you to purchase one thing,” Dir says. “More and more, the imagery is coming from machines which can be creating with out a lot human enter or craft in any respect, or which can be simply copying or duplicating photographs which can be [already] on the market. And so to have the ability to provide an viewers a sure type of imagery the place you’ll be able to really feel the labor, you’ll be able to really feel the fabric, you’ll be able to really feel the hand, the human hand behind it—I believe more and more we don’t have that have, and it may be virtually an emotional, transferring expertise to see a picture or artwork that’s crafted that method. I believe we’re in peril of dropping contact with it.”
“The worth of Handbook Cinema, the title of our firm, means actually cinema by hand,” he provides.
The expertise is emotional—when Handbook Cinema’s Frankenstein performed on the Moore for one evening in March 2024, I exited with a tear-streaked face, and the lavatory was full of ladies visibly moved by the efficiency. (This additionally might need had one thing to do with the emphasis on motherhood and grief within the present’s retelling of Mary Shelley’s story, an angle well-suited to Shelley’s personal biography, which concerned a mom who died shortly after giving delivery to her, and a number of miscarriages—one so terrible she might need died of blood loss had her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, not advised her to take a seat on ice.)
Grotesque anecdotes apart, it’s exceptional {that a} efficiency the place all of the wires are exhibiting can evoke such robust emotions. It’s additional proof that the ability of artwork lies not in technical mastery, nevertheless spectacular, however in its potential to point out us different people grappling with age-old themes: love, loss, energy.
And even with every thing seen, the present appears like magic, simply as within the phantasmagorias of outdated. Perhaps that’s the actual secret—even once we understand it’s all a present, we are able to nonetheless select to consider.
See Handbook Cinema’s The 4th Witch on the Moore Theatre on November 12, 7:30 pm, all ages.
