“Vivacious hybrids of film and theater”

—The New York Times

The Soraya brings you the rarest of holiday treats – a series of live performances from the magical world of Manual Cinema. Last here in 2018, The Soraya’s audiences will not forget the imaginative storytelling and spectacular imagery created on our stage. This holiday season, the company takes on Charles Dickens’ classic with a visually inventive adaptation made to broadcast directly to your home. The story is told by Aunt Trudy, an avowed holiday skeptic. On Christmas Eve, during quarantine, she has been recruited to entertain her family with a puppet show on a Zoom call. The puppets soon take on a life of their own, and the family’s call transforms into a stunning cinematic adaptation of the classic ghost story. In signature Manual Cinema fashion, hundreds of paper puppets, miniatures, silhouettes, and an original live score will come together to tell an imaginative re-invention of this cherished holiday classic. Each show will be performed live in Manual Cinema’s Chicago studio in a socially distanced manner and live-streamed to audiences at home. The stream will be delivered by Marquee TV.

About Manual Cinema

Manual Cinema is an Emmy Award-winning performance collective, design studio, and film/ video production company founded in 2010 by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller, and Kyle Vegter. Manual Cinema combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music to create immersive stories for stage and screen. Using vintage overhead projectors, multiple screens, puppets, actors, live feed cameras, multi-channel sound design, and a live music ensemble, Manual Cinema transforms the experience of attending the cinema and imbues it with liveness, ingenuity, and theatricality. The company was awarded an Emmy Award in 2017 for “The Forger,” a video created for The New York Times and named Chicago Artists of the Year in 2018 by the Chicago Tribune. Their shadow puppet animations will be featured in the film remake of Candyman debuting September 2020, directed by Nia DaCosta and produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions.

Generously Sponsored by
& Kathleen P. Martin