Manual Cinema: Frankenstein

Just in time for Halloween, Manual Cinema stitches together the Gothic tale of Frankenstein with the biography of the original novel’s author, Mary Shelley, to create an unexpected story about love, loss, and the beauty and horror of creation.

To tell this haunting tale, the Chicago-based performance collective imaginatively combines shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, sound effects, and live music — it’s like nothing else you’ve ever seen.

Post-Show Meet the Artists
The performance will be followed by a meet-the-artist encounter, during which the audience will be invited on stage to speak directly to the artists, handle the puppets, ask questions, and take photos.

Recommended for: Ages 12+

Run time: 65 minutes

New on Our Blog: 5(ish) Questions for Manual Cinema

In anticipation of Manual Cinema’s arrival at Purchase later this month, we reached out to Drew Dir, Co-Artistic Director, Frankenstein Lead Deviser, Puppet Designer, and Mad Scientist, to ask him a few questions about what makes this production such a must-see experience.
Read the blog post.

Program Note from Lead Deviser and Co-Artistic Director Drew Dir

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein—which, among its myriad other contributions to popular culture, single-handedly founded the modern genre of science fiction—casts a long shadow over the medium of cinema. The story of Victor Frankenstein and the unnamed Creature he brings to life has itself being perennially re-animated for movie audiences; from the first 1910 silent film adaptation produced by Thomas Edison’s studio, to Boris Karloff’s iconic visage in the 1933 Universal Studios monster, to more recent Hollywood reboots, riffs, and parodies. With each new era, Frankenstein manages to connect with our sympathy and revulsion at Frankenstein’s monster, our ambivalence about the progress of science and technology, and our anxieties about the mysterious threshold between life and death.

This fall, Purchase PAC presents Frankenstein, an adaptation by Manual Cinema, a theater company that seeks to create cinema on stage through an ingenious choreography of live music, object theater, and shadow puppetry using old-school overhead projectors. The work of Manual Cinema shares a special affinity with Mary Shelley’s story about the reanimation of obsolete materials, and their adaptation aims to capture the breadth of Frankenstein’s legacy in film: the novel’s cinematic afterlife, so to speak. These artists are doing so by taking a cue from Mary Shelley herself, who gave her novel a gothic structure—the story is told in a series of narrative frames, like Russian nesting dolls, with each frame narrated by a different character (the centermost frame being an account by the Creature itself). In Manual Cinema’s adaptation, each “frame” of the story will be told through a different cinematic genre or style, depending on which character’s point-of-view is being presented. Like the Creature itself, the production becomes a pastiche of different visual idioms scavenged from a century of cinema.

Manual Cinema has also written an additional frame for the novel: the story of Mary Shelley herself, and how she came to write a novel of such enduring relevance. Frankenstein was originally conceived by Mary as a ghost story—a response to a friendly competition with the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron during an unusually stormy summer on Lake Geneva. Manual Cinema’s adaptation aims to re-animate their own Frankenstein against the backdrop of Mary Shelley’s fascinating, tragic, and little-told biography.

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.

Learn more on the Manual Cinema website.

This engagement of Manual Cinema is made possible in part through the ArtsCONNECT
program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.