“There’s a universality to it when it’s music and visuals. “I guess I think more in visuals than in words,” she said. Su’s work is often dialogue-free, relying instead on the imagery she conjures with instrumental music. The two collaborated on the concept of the work, which took the viewer on a young boy’s journey from a fishing village to the high seas, discovering mysterious ancient ancestral orbs-all without a single spoken word. One piece, String of Echos, combined most of these, along with the live accompaniment of music by composer and musician Tatsu Aoki. Her productions are stories made lush with hand-crafted visuals created by different puppetry formats, including shadow puppets, projections, cut-outs, and hand-manipulated puppets. Su’s own work gravitates toward more “old school” forms of puppetry, which she layers and adapts in new ways, seeing herself as more of a multimedia puppetry artist than a disciple of any one practice. So the whole experience of seeing the show is, you see the final cinematic product on the large screen onstage, but then, at the bottom, you see us running around using puppets to create those images.” “And then we have shadow-puppet actors and live-action actors interacting with each other. “We have several of the projectors lined up, all shooting at the same part of the screen,” Su said. Her “aha” moment came when she became involved with the Chicago company Manual Cinema, which uses overhead projectors-those dated dinosaurs of the classroom-to create live, cinematic shadow-puppet performances. She did not set out with the goal of becoming a puppet artist. Su herself was a self-described “theatre kid” in high school, and she has degrees in theatre and performance studies and anthropology from the University of Chicago. So you get really different types of artists working in this medium, because it’s a fusion of performance and craft.” “It attracts makers and fine artists who otherwise don’t ever plan on being onstage or performing. “The types of people that do puppetry are extremely diverse, because it doesn’t just inhabit this live theatre performative space,” she said. For Su, the fact that many audiences don’t naturally think of puppetry and traditional theatre in the same category is what makes it so exciting. The medium of puppet theatre goes far beyond Muppets and randy inhabitants of Avenue Q. In a time filled with so much fear and anxiety, a bit of magic is a welcome respite. “With puppetry, you literally have to animate an inanimate object in front of an audience, so there’s something very kind of magical about that,” Su said of her medium. Yet Chicago-based puppet artist Myra Su is somehow able to breathe life into the lifeless. Her performers are made out of paper and paint, shadows and light.
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