Blair Thomas

  • About
    • MISSION AND HISTORY
    • BIOS
    • STAFF AND BOARD
  • Festival
  • Schedule
  • Repertoire
    • A PIANO WITH THREE TALES
    • THE VINEGAR WORKS
    • HARD HEADED HEART
    • THE SELFISH GIANT
    • MOBY DICK
    • WORKSHOPS
  • Video
  • News
  • Support Us
  • Contact

Author Archive for: peter

  • Follow us on dribbble
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Join our Facebook Group
  • RSS

Theater + Music + Dance = Creative Partners’ THE UNEXPECTED

April 2, 2013


Creative Partners
, an innovative collaboration in the arts that brings together three leading Chicago companies (Blair Thomas & Company, eighth blackbird, and Lucky Plush Productions) invite audiences to THE UNEXPECTED — a launch event featuring performances and a reception on Thursday, April 25th, 2013, at 7pm at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 E. Chicago Ave. Tickets ($40) are available at www.cptheunexpected.eventbrite.com. On-site parking will be available for $11 in the MCA garage.

Each company will present work from their award-winning repertory, including Blair Thomas & Co.’s “The Blackbird”, Lucky Plush’s “Cinderbox 2.0”, and eighth blackbird’s “These Broken Wings,” which was recently performed at the Grammys.

Creative Partners pave the way for a new funding model and to make more art. As part of Creative Partners’ joint fundraising model, each company benefits from high-level fundraising assistance and cross-disciplinary audience development. The partner companies share an aesthetic of the new, the genre-bending, and the experimental; above all, each company believes that performances should tell you something and take you somewhere.

 

 

 

“Selfish Giant” at Milwaukee Art Museum

March 14, 2013

selfishgiantOn Sunday, March 24, BT&Co will perform their adaption of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant at the Milwaukee Art Museum as part of of their Kohl’s Art Generation Family Sundays. The Selfish Giant will begin at 2:30 p.m. and is free with museum admission.

A collaboration with singer-songwriter Michael Smith, The Selfish Giant adapts a revered fairy tale by Oscar Wilde into 45 minutes of music, magic, and impressive puppetry. “Thomas’s work is always best in an intimate setting,” says Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune, and there are few venues more perfectly suited to Thomas’ work than the Milwaukee Art Museum (not in the least because the building itself is a puppet in its very design).

 

Moby-Dick Excerpts At Storefront Theater

December 21, 2012

1W8A3200Blair Thomas & Company presents work-in-progress excerpts from its future production of Moby-Dick on Sunday, January 20th, 2013, at 2pm at Storefront Theater, 66 E. Randolph, Chicago. Admission is free – for reservations email [email protected]

Narrator Ishmael recounts his journey on the Pequod as Captain Ahab’s relentless pursuit of the White Whale leads the entire crew to the depths of the ocean’s great unknown.  The words of this great American novel are brought to life on the stage through bunraku puppets and rolling paper scrolls.

In the Works is a performance residency program that gives emerging and established performing artists the opportunity to test-drive new work in a public setting. Each residency is tailored to the needs of the artist or company and their project and each showing is a unique opportunity for audiences to get a behind-the-scenes look at new work by Chicago artists. This program is made possible through a grant from The Boeing Company. Admission is either free or low-cost.  Visit www.chicagocultuturalcenter.org for a complete schedule.

 

 

Mark Messing,
composer

Mark Messing is a composer and musical agitator. He is Musical Director of circus punk marching band Mucca Pazza and has led the band from coast to coast through concert halls, public parks, neighborhood pubs and a dozen canoes on the Chicago River. They have travelled the country with their message of frenetic joy and through their benefit series they have brought funding and exposure to small local community organizations. He has composed music for numerous independent films including The First Breath of Tengan Rei (2009) by Junko Kajino and Ed M. Koziarski, and has been musical director for hundreds of theater performances. As Musical Director for Redmoon Theater he composed for 100 tiny radios at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a 35-foot drum tree at Millennium Park and musicians on stilts at Puppetropolis. His new company, Opera-Matic, performs Lullaby Parades on bicycle powered floats in Chicago neighborhoods at twilight. www.opera-matic.org; mucca-pazza.org. Shows with BT&Co: The Houdini Box, With Love From Edgar Allen Poe.

Moby-Dick coming to Logan Center, September 18

August 30, 2012

Blair Thomas & Co, Lookingglass Theatre, and The House Theatre of Chicago are featured in EXPLORING MOBY-DICK – a night of three different adaptations of Herman Melville’s novel, in various sites of performance within the new Logan Center for the Arts in Hyde Park, Chicago. The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place on Wednesday, September 18 at 6:30pm at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 East 60th Street, Chicago. Audiences will move from space to space to experience the three adaptations, and are invited to join the artistic staff in the courtyard following the performance to discuss the work. Free advance tickets may be reserved at www.mobydickatlogan.eventbrite.com

These three companies are all sharing mid-process works that explore this seminal American narrative from richly different artistic perspectives. According to Chelsea Keenan of the House Theatre: “What’s so exciting for the audience is to see that process, to get in on something rare and fleeting. What frames the three works at this stage will be not a traditional collaboration, but the source material and the astonishingly disparate directions the three groups will take them — we’ll likely witness surprising overlaps.”

This event takes place as a part of the Summer Inc Residencies with Theater and Performance Studies at The University of Chicago. This project is supported by a grant from the Boeing Corporation.

 

Puppetry, performance and imagination at the Detroit Institute of Arts

May 18, 2012

May 18, 2012 Kite’s Tale Review/Interview from www.knightarts.org by Jeremy Schmall.

This past Sunday, I had the pleasure of taking in a performance of Blair Thomas & Company’s “A Kite’s Tale,” at the Detroit Institute of Arts (a Knight Arts grantee). It was a puppet show unlike any I had ever seen, involving a live performance by pianist Kathryn Goodson of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” and featured an engrossing combination of puppetry, costumes and theater. The performance was without dialogue, though the audience was given a brief and lively primer on the storyline at the start. The story itself was intensely surreal and imaginative, involving two “tricksters,” a dancing rabbit and a little girl with a bad temper and a red kite.

Puppeteers (dressed in all black) control the actions of the little girl and a rabbit. Photo courtesy of Blair Thomas & Company

Following in the tradition of Japanese bunraku theater, some of the puppets were life-sized, and others required several puppeteers to control. There was also a costume element to the show, including an enraged version of the story’s main character, a little girl who would lose control of her temper and transform from a three-foot tall puppet into a towering version of herself played by a costumed performer. The first time the transformation occurred, and the giant version of the little girl stepped suddenly onstage, the audience audibly gasped, and I saw many of the younger kids in the audience clinging tightly to their mothers. It was an electric moment, and just one of many throughout the show. The handcrafted and hand-painted puppets and dynamic performances transformed the event beyond the traditional concept of puppet show, and into an in-motion work of highly-refined folk art.

The large versions of the little girl and the rabbit, seen here with the pianist. Image courtesy of Blair Thomas & Company

I had the pleasure of catching up with Blair Thomas to ask him a few questions about the performance. The result of our conversation is below:

Jeremy Schmall: Was there anything in particular that inspired “A Kite’s Tale?” Did the story emerge over time and through a process, or was it the sort of thing that sprung out fully formed?

Blair Thomas: The story emerged over time as I worked on this show starting in 2005.  I listened to the music repeatedly and just imagined characters from the sound of movements.  It was clear there was some giant character, I imagined some mercurial trickster characters that would create some mischief, and I imagined a young child skipping through the woods — I was convinced there was some Sloth character too, but he never emerged.

JS: What kind of time investment goes into a production like this, in terms of creating the story, doing the choreography and constructing the puppets?

BT: It takes months to make the puppets — and the ones we are using now have been built a couple of times to get it right. Then rehearsal is a long process — I start with an imagined scenario of action that quickly is forced into revision as we stage moments to the music.  But the music dictates the narrative — I knew that at one point there would be a chase scene and another there would be a fight, another a moment of contemplative introspection, etc. For example, the movement where the little girl first becomes angry and turns into a giant was first a scene where the giant was playing with a butterfly but in the end crushes it. Then it was a stand off scene between the tricksters and the giant.

The giant and the rabbit. Image courtesy of Blair Thomas & Company

JS: Does your company fabricate all the costumes and puppets yourselves? What is that process like?

BT: A group of designers built the puppets.  There were mold makers, someone else who figured out the mechanisms of their operations, a couple of different people designed and built the costumes, I painted most of them. This process has been ongoing with this show.

JS: How did you originally get involved with doing puppet theater?

BT: As a boy I lived in a small town without a movie theater or much else, and I got the idea of a puppet show. Without having seen one and with some store bought marionettes, I started making shows for birthday parties and church events.

JS: I really enjoyed the use of different kinds of puppets throughout the performance, especially the bunrakupuppets, which I had never seen before. What is your history with bunraku?

BT: Over the past years I have worked with different versions of the bunraku doll— I’ve done several human-size types. I like the direct response the puppeteer can give them.

JS: I loved the dramatic moment when the giant version of the little girl steps on stage for the first time, which sent shockwaves through the audience. Were you worried at all about scaring some of the kids in that moment?

BT: No not worried— surprise will often scare young kids — but surprise in the theater is one of its greatest assets. There are many kinds of surprise; this is an obvious one, but dynamic.

JS: I noticed a lot of literary influence in your works, including Federico Garcia Lorca and an adaptation ofMoby Dick. Do you consider yours to be literary-focused company, or is literature just one of the many influences on your work?

BT: I approached Mussorgsky’s score in the same way I have written word texts. A writer/composer can put a structural integrity into their writing that in itself is a form of storytelling. As a puppeteer, I am interested in the works that aren’t created for the stage because the puppet theater operates with a unique theatrical language itself, and the original source material is just one component of the performance. So I do take inspiration off of pre-existing works — I am interested in participating in the dialogue of tradition with our culture at large.

Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward Ave., Detroit; 313-833-7900, dia.org

Kite’s Tale Review (under previous name, Rabbit’s Tale), Chicago Tribune

July 15, 2008

‘Rabbit’s Tale’ is a sweet, unexpected find in the park

July 12, 2008|By Chris Jones, Tribune critic
[Link to full review on Tribune site]

You don’t typically stumble across a moving little show such as “A Rabbit’s Tale” in a park.

Most free, family-oriented outdoor entertainments are frenetic, low-budget affairs wherein an overworked crew of sweat-splattered performers sing or clown themselves ragged trying to attract — and maintain — the attention of pint-size summer revelers and their hassled minders.

But then, few green spaces in the world are as artistically oriented as Chicago’s Millennium Park, and very few cities have a native theater company such as Blair Thomas and Company, for which visual delicacy and an open heart are at the core of the art. Thomas has created the Fast Fish Puppet Theater to bring his style of work to children.
While one can win and maintain the attention of children in many different ways, an emotionally resonant tale, delicately and beautifully told with an eye on the fragility of life, can be as adhesive as toffee.

And you don’t always need the hyperkinetic, pink-haired young singer/dancers whose brand-promoting gyrations fill up the likes of Nickelodeon and Noggin. By contrast, the wordless “A Rabbit’s Tale” is enacted to the accompaniment of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” played live and beautifully by Mary Rose Jordan on a Steinway in the center of the stage of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, even as a puppet rabbit climbs on her piano stool.

Take away the show itself, and that would still be a fine and accessible performance for any child to hear. It surely was the best part of my Wednesday.

“A Rabbit’s Tale” was created for indoor performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But even with just a piano accompaniment, it still fills the Pritzker stage in very satisfying fashion. That’s because Thomas’ puppets are in the Bunraku style. One character, vaguely reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s “The Big Friendly Giant,” looks about 10 feet tall. When his huge hands accidentally crushed a puppet butterfly, the little girl next to me looked as if her world had temporarily come to an end.

“A Rabbit’s Tale,” which suggests the love of a big-eared critter can conquer even the meanest of creatures, has a redemptive ending that makes everyone smile. But it’s not a show that totally avoids loss or sadness. Even the youngest walker through a forest in a park has to learn something about the fragility of life.

‘A Rabbit’s Tale’

When: Through Aug. 24 (Sundays at 11 a.m. and Wednesdays at 3 p.m.)

Where: Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park

Running time: 40 minutes

Tickets: Free

Upcoming shows

No shows booked at the moment.

Contact Us See a Performance Book a Performance

About BT&Co

Blair Thomas & Company creates innovative puppetry performances incorporating musical, literary and puppetry traditions.>

Contact Us

  • Contact
  • Schedule
  • Thank You!
© 2025 Blair Thomas, All Rights Reserved    |  Design by Andrea Burke Design  |   Development by PerformSites
  • Follow us on dribbble
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Join our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe to our RSS Feed