Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival Returns in January

The 8th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival is fast approaching, so get set for 12 straight days of incredible stories told by puppet artists and companies from around the world playing all over Chicago, January 21-February 1, 2026.

The festival will feature a diverse range of classic and contemporary puppetry styles from around the world, created by puppet artists from England, France, Norway, Denmark, India, Scotland, South Korea and Spain, plus the U.S. and Chicago.

The 2026 festival spans 12 days and dozens of Chicago venues, presenting an international pageant of puppet artists all over the city, plus free shows, exhibits and the always popular Puppet Hub. Get your tickets for all-ages spectacle shows in landmark theaters, intimate works on smaller stages, and the always popular, adults-only, late night puppet cabarets.

Tickets to more than 100 shows, events and interactive workshops are on sale. 

These stories and more await fans of the 8th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, showcasing different forms of traditional and contemporary puppet styles, from bunraku-style to shadow puppetry, marionettes to object-based works. Highlights include:

Fan favorite Wakka Wakka, featuring artists from Norway and New York, opens this year's festival with Dead as a Dodo, a mesmerizing musical odyssey about survival, transformation, and the power of true friendship. Infused with puppetry, humor, and stunningly innovative visual effects, Dead as a Dodo, commissioned by the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, takes audiences deep into the underworld, where two skeleton friends, a Dodo and a boy, may be shattering the established order of the dead.

Festival favorite Plexus Polaire (France/Norway) returns with A Doll's House, a work that brings together puppets, actors, music and video projections for an eerie retelling of Henrik Ibsen's 1879 play, created by and starring artistic director Yngvild Aspeli. Plexus Polaire will also perform a second show, Trust for me a while, a ventriloquist show gone off the rails that puts an end to depressing contemporary meta-theater and crappy puppeteers.

England's Blind Summit, break-out stars of the inaugural Chicago Puppet Festival with The Table, returns with The Sex Lives of Puppets, in which their beautiful puppets talk dirty to present a bawdy snapshot of puppet sex in modern-day Britain. 

In a late addition to the line-up, festival founder and artistic director Blair Thomas returns to the stage with his original new work Does a Dog Have Buddha Nature?, a large-scale, four-panel crankie offering insight into the rascally nature of a dog and his owner.

Manual Cinema, Chicago's own shadow puppet masters, is back with The 4th Witch, a new and fantastic tale about a girl's nightmarish quest for vengeance inspired by Shakespeare's Macbeth, told through shadow puppetry, actors in silhouette and live music, without dialogue or narration. It's like a film created in real time as you watch, this time in a new wide format.

Also from Chicago comes Rhynoceron by local puppeteer and Jeff Award-winning puppet designer KT Shivak, a gem of a piece with numerous stage elements that unfold in clever ways featuring a life-size, life-like rhino puppet that transforms in front of our eyes from a natural inspiring wonder to a hunted object of human greed.

France's Théâtre de la Massue makes its Chicago Puppet Festival debut with La Méridienne, a unique blend of a high-end dinner by Chicago chef at a private location paired with a five-minute puppet show performed by artistic director Ézéquiel Garcia-Romeu for each patron in another room, one person at a time.

New York's Alva Puppet Theatre presents The Harlem Doll Palace, based on the true story of Lenon Holder Hoyt, better known as Aunt Len, a beloved public school art teacher for 40 years who created a doll museum in her Harlem brownstone. Join the dolls from Aunt Len's “dollection” as they recreate their journeys to their museum.

Family audiences will love Roald Dahl's The Enormous Crocodile by England's Roald Dahl Story Company. In this mischievous musical, based on Dahl's snappy book with toe-tapping tunes, the titular star weaves through the jungle with his tummy rumbling, while other jungle creatures foil his secret plans to stop this greedy brute. Audiences will go from the jungle into outer space and back again, just in time for a wild dance party!

The House, a puppet comedy thriller from Denmark's Sofie Krog Theatre, is set in a family-owned funeral home, where hilarious horror, twists, turns and jumping souls haunt a revolving set featuring intricate lighting, strange contraptions and scary sound effects.

India's Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust makes their Chicago debut with About Ram, an experimental theatrical piece using excerpts from the Bhavbhuti's “Ramayana,” an epic tale and guide for Hindu principles like dharma, told through animation, digitally projected dance, masks and puppets.

Audiences of all ages will delight in the magic of sequined Portland puppet raconteur Laura Heit's The Matchbox Shows, teeny tiny puppet shows performed inside matchboxes, “the smallest, greatest, bravest, show in the world.” In addition to seeing Heit perform live, catch Laura Heit: Short Films, a showcase of her short films featuring drawing, stop-motion and puppetry, presented in the fest's first-ever collaboration with Chicago's Music Box Theatre.

From Seoul, South Korea comes Oil Pressure Vibrator created by and featuring Geumhyung Jeong, an artist who's interested in the human body, the objects that surround it, with a particularly strange fascination with the excavator. Witness as Jeong plunges a big bucket into preconceptions about sexuality, technology and the body. For adult audiences only.

The world premiere of The Left Hand of Darkness, a New York/Chicago creative collaboration between Untitled Theater Co. No. 61 and Yara Arts Group, is based on the 1969 novel by famed sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin. Puppetry and co-direction are by Tom Lee, Co-Director of the Chicago Puppet Studio and Chicago Puppet Lab, in a show featuring a deep bench of Chicago puppet artists and actors.

2026 also marks the return of the always popular late-night puppet cabarets, Nasty, Brutish & Short, and the Free Neighborhood Tour, presenting two free, family-friendly puppet shows from Spain and the U.S. at venues and community spaces all over the city throughout the festival.

In addition to the incredible pageant of international and U.S. puppetry artists, The Puppet Hub is back and open throughout the festival on the fourth floor of the Fine Arts Building. It's the perfect place to relax between shows, meet up with friends, make new ones, and learn more about contemporary puppetry. Attractions include The Spoke & Bird Pop-Up Cafe, serving coffee, tea, winter soups and baked treats, the Pop-Up Puppet Shop, and two free exhibits: Two Ways Down, featuring festival artist Laura Heit's exquisite hand-drawn animation and film inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's “The Garden of Heavenly Delights,” and a room full of giant lantern puppets created in the pre-festival workshop with Andrew Kim of Thingamugig.

Puppetry enthusiasts are also welcome to check out the free Ellen Van Volkenburg Symposium, the Catapult Artist Intensive, professional education workshops with visiting puppet artists, and more. 

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3. DREAMGIRLS (The Drama Group)

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