Coming Soon: House of the Exquisite Corpse V: Blood & Puppets

Serving as a seasonal staple for five Halloweens, the Chicago immersive scene has been blessed (haunted?) by truly an original presentation on terror and horror: a puppet peep show. But don’t let such a simple, unassuming description fool you, as the amazing puppetry underscored by a stunning soundtrack will chill you to your core.

For this year’s presentation of House of the Exquisite Corpse, Rough House Puppet Arts (a name rebrand from Rough House Theatre) has selected “Blood” as its theme. Audiences will move around Steppenwolf Theatre’s Merle Reskin Garage space, bearing witness to six different peep show performances. Typically, these performances are vastly different from one another — from thoughtful yet dark fairy tales to heady examinations on life’s abstract terrors — they are all always utterly captivity.

We checked in with Co-Director Corey Smith about Blood & Puppets which runs from October 9th through November 1st.

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NO PROSCENIUM: Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?

Corey Smith: House of the Exquisite Corpse is Rough House’s annual horror-puppet anthology. It’s staged as a peep show: audiences encounter six new short-form puppet works, each hidden behind a wall, only visible through slits, keyholes, or tears in the wallpaper. The work is new every year, made by some of the most daring theater artists in Chicago.

The show is as much about the bodily experience of the audience as it is about the puppets: the cool feeling of stainless steel under your arm, the illicit sensation of peering through a crack in the wall. The peep show’s forced perspective is fertile ground for our artists — a way of exploring subjecthood and the terrifying possibility that what you see may not be what anyone else sees.

And so much of horror is bound up in the vulnerabilities that comes from looking! The Bloody-Mary-mirror-as-portal; the dread of rounding a corner; the feeling of being approached from behind. We place the audience directly in that position, asking them to bravely peek their eyes into unknown worlds.

When people say “immersive theater,” they often mean a kind of free exploration. We’re more interested in restriction. What can’t you quite make out in the shadows? How do you make sense of fragments, of images glimpsed through a keyhole? That holistic attention is, to me, what makes us the most interesting immersive act in town.

NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?

CS: Each year, we gather artists around a unifying theme. This year, it’s blood — a gathering point with nearly endless associations: passion, menstruation, ancestry, identity, just to name a few.

When we set our sights on blood, we knew it might be a little risky (hemophobia is a notoriously common fear)! In response to this, we decided to impose a few simple creative restrictions: no gore and no needles. We weren’t interested in cheap shocks or gallons of stage blood, but in using horror’s conventions to explore blood’s metaphoric and cultural weight.

What excites me most about blood is its deep humanity. In a country complicit in genocide, where “Blood and Soil” is resurgent and conspiracy theories of blood libel spread unchecked, it feels urgent to ground ourselves in the fleshy, fragile humanity that imprisons us all.

If you personally feel squeamish and afraid of blood — I see you! I am one of you! — I’d invite you to consider joining us as we have been crafting this show with you in mind. I think we’ve threaded the needle quite delicately, making a performance that thoughtfully explores this thing that unites us and swerves away from a cheap, nausea-inducing massacre.

If you are existentially, deathly afraid of puppets, however…this might not be the place for you.

NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?

CS: With the peep show format we’ve carved out a niche form that is both unique and artistically thought-provoking. It’s playful and fun — a chance to toy with what scares us most — but it’s also an urgent artistic gesture in a political moment of crisis.

One of our guiding MOs is: how can we pay as many artists as possible? A side effect is that the show overflows with detail — scores by Mike Meegan (aka RXM Reality) and Joey Meland (aka Cocojoey); a crochet blood-vessel installation by Ken Buckingham; giant paper-mache faces by Jacqueline Wade. Each puppet box itself is a crafted object. And this isn’t even getting into the performances themselves! The whole space becomes a circulatory system, with meaning and life carried around inside it.

That cross-pollination — puppetry meeting experimental music meeting visual art — is what makes the puppet scene in Chicago so special. Our show just couldn’t happen anywhere else.

Oddly enough, working on this show, with all its horror and grotesquerie, feels like a balm in dystopian times. This is a platform for artists from across Chicago, from wildly different practices, coming together to make something sharp and entrancing. If there’s any way forward in this fractured moment, we’re modeling it here: a non-hierarchical, anti-racist, collectivist ethos. Not perfect by any stretch, but a real attempt. It’s our hope that the audience feels that care and intention that we’ve put into the whole production.

NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?

CS: We’ve been doing this show for five years now and it always brings out something unpredictable in all of us. This year, many artists found themselves circling images of pregnancy and birth. It makes some macabre sense: the umbilical cord is a blood-bearing tether, a fragile connection on the porous border between life and death.

But there are so many bizarre places blood can take you! Justin D’Acci and Vim Hile’s Blood and Ruin imagines a folkloric flood of blood, a surreal tale with braying animals, pregnant women, and strange creatures policing the threshold between spirit and flesh. It feels like a story older than our human world, with a dark, menacing logic.

Nina D’Angier and madigan burke turned to the manananggal, a mythical being from the Philippines that preys on pregnant women and can split its torso from its legs. They reimagine it as a parasitic medical presence feeding on the audience — an extraction that is both uncanny and genuinely unsettling.

Meanwhile, Pablo Monterrubio and Fletcher Pierson are at the border of organic and digital, creating a huge mechanical head that strains toward life.

That’s the beauty of short-form puppetry: it all goes so many different directions! And a five-minute glimpse can really, truly open a world. There are moments from our very first Exquisite Corpse that still haunt me today.

NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of the experience?

CS: An ideal day to prepare would go something like this….

• Wake up to Opus#5
• Breakfast (eggs with salsa and blood sausage)
• Shower Soundtrack / Elvira’s Fright Sound Tape
• Coffee and light reading on Sullied Blood, Semen, and Skin.
• Crash a local blood drive, steal all the fruit snacks you can ft into your Blood and Puppets tote bag (you picked this up the other night after you saw Exquisite Corpse the first time)
• You are so weak after giving blood! This probably means you are a vampire and need more blood to survive. Ask for online advice from fellow vamps.
• Pregame the show with last year’s soundtrack
• Arrive at the Merle at Steppenwolf at 6:50. Pay-what-you-can at the door. You wait in the lobby until your group is called. You are a little freaked out by Jacqueline Wade’s massive entry-room installation. After some onboarding, you walk up toward the first box, put the headphones on, the lights dim and everything goes blank…

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