Method to Madness Festival

Kate Sheehy curates a multi-disciplinary festival that includes puppetry, performance, film and sound. Each week, artists investigate the process of their creative practice. All performances take place at Links Hall, 3435 N. Sheffield. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m., Jan. 4-27. Tickets are $12. For additional information and reservations, check the Web at www.linkshall.org or call 773/281-0824.

Week One - 1/4-1/6

Frank Maugeri - Laika's Coffin: A Suitcase Opera
An epic tale based on the biography of the doomed first animal in space. Three suitcases open to reveal remarkable miniature Soviet-inspired sets while an operatic narrator and three puppeteers animate the melancholy saga.

Emily Carter - Boy, Girl and the Modern Baby
This rock musical is a campy sci-fi themed show punctuated by a few non-invasive, forward-focused ad campaigns, leveraging puppetry, ventriloquism, short animated commercials and a persuasive soundscape.

Roth Mobot - Circuit Bending Music
Using the poignant and often humorous language of toys and common discarded electronic devices, dark ambient drones and languid melodies are punctuated by randomly generated rhythms. www.rothmobot.com

Week Two - 1/11-1/13

Megan Palaima - Walk 45 Degrees
Beginning before the audience enters the studio, the performer slowly walks the stage investigating the tension and release of a beginning unseen by the viewer. The audience encounters a performance already involved. Establishing a landscape suggestive of sunrises, this performance installation surrounds the audience with a layered soundtrack of deep tones and melodic static, creating an unspoken collaboration between the performer's actions and the audience's frame of viewing.

K Bradford - Little Miss Tea Party
Inspired by the dissonance and din of post-colonial America, this puppet character is a descendant of the Boston Tea Party, and a propagator of the finest teas and all they have to tell about the world.

Janet Schmid - Two Pieces: Lopsided and Craptastic
Lopsided is Schmid's solo tap dance with one platform shoe, one tap shoe, 12 resin shoe maker forms, eight springs, and one accordion skirt, with Steve Jarvis on the Hammond Organ. Craptastic is a work about resilience for five dancers.

Wannapa Pimtong-Eubanks - White Balloon
This butoh dance is about a girl's awkward journey to catch a white balloon. Organic movement is explored by the performer and influenced by the movement of the balloon. Butoh, also known as "dance of darkness," is a postmodern form that began in Japan as an effort to recover the primal body. www.myspace.com/wannadanceland

3 card molly - She Waited. She Worried. She Wept.
This performance, a loose adaptation of the 1961 film Cleo from 5 to 7 by Agnes Varda, acknowledges the tension between superficial high-gloss beauty and life's deeper meanings. A spoiled pop singer confronts her own death and, what's worse for her, the possibility of ugliness and disfigurement. www.3cardmolly.org

Clare Dolan - The Road to Brody
This puppetry piece is a retelling of a short story by Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel. In turning his keen eye towards the small everyday life interactions of ordinary people, Babel deftly reveals greater truths about the generosity and avarice of human beings and the sheer beauty of life, despite all of its brutality and disappointments.

Week 3 - 1/18-1/20

Michael Serwich - Small Budget Big Top
Mimicking circus spectacle with live performance, a veritable sideshow darling called Miss Satanica combines dance with daring contortions of her body, and the mysterious character Sandman presents a slide show that attempts to reveal the magic and secrets of dreams. www.myspace.com/spookylaboo

Blayne Greiner - Evolution (circumvented)
This solo, object-based performance examines evolution, communication, and the nature of creation using as evidence the existence of one human being and the methodology of a far-seeing mental patient. www.derhutgeist.com

Alamoo - Boundary Waters
Inspired by cultural nomads, shamanic rituals, childhood reality, and ancient ideas of beauty this collaboration between Annie Coleman and Sonya Seifert uses dance and music to explore the liminal space between madness and sanity.

Christopher C. Salveter - One Hundred More than One Hundred Times
This piece includes songs, projected images, and text exploring the lives of Wari indigenous people from the Amazon who practiced "compassionate cannibalism," eating only elders who died of natural causes; and Isse Sagawa, a one time cannibal who ate his girlfriend in the 1970s while studying avant garde literature in Paris. 

Make New Species - Hansel and Gretel: A Cautionary Confection
In this intimate, miniature musical exploration of the children's classic, the siblings are re-imagined as voracious brats, and the witch as a sinister educator extolling the processes of the human digestive system.

Week 4 - 1/25-1/27

Nance Klehm - Twinkle
In this episodic installation, a woodland creature creates a starry night, one small fire at a time. Between the performances each evening, an oil lamp is built and placed somewhere on stage. www.salvationjane.net; www.spontaneousvegetation.net

Rebecca Tennison & Aviva Steigmeyer - Two Pieces: Spell Launcher & Love Has Brought Me To Despair
Spell Launcher is a kind of psychological spin off on a Punch and Judy hand puppet show. The play stars a witch and a devil, who are eternally bound to one another through spells and their sheer desire to destroy one another. With psychotropic substances they crash into each others dreams, and ruminate on the age-old problems of love, hatred, obsession, and mermaids.
Love Has Brought Me To Despair is Steigmeyer's old time love ballad hand stitched into a crankie show--sad love songs as the fabric scrolls along.

Emily Carter - Boy, Girl and the Modern Baby
See description above.

Jessica Hudson - Attempts at Flight

Matt Marsden - Boxcartoon

Chicago Children's Theater - The Selfish Giant
Original puppets and music tell the story of a grumpy old giant who forbids the children in his village from playing in his beautiful garden. After the children are locked out, the garden plunges into an eternal winter, until the children sneak back into the garden, bringing with them the joyous rebirth of spring. www.chicagochildrenstheatre.org; www.blairthomas.org

This performance only: Sunday, Jan. 27 at 4 p.m.