Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol
December 5–19, 2020
Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol
Saturday / December 5, 2020 / 4 p.m. & 8 p.m.
Sunday / December 6, 2020 / 4 p.m.
Saturday / December 12, 2020 / 4 p.m. & 8 p.m.
Friday / December 18, 2020 / 8 p.m.
Saturday / December 19, 2020 / 4 p.m. & 8 p.m.
In this world premiere, live, online event, the interdisciplinary performance collective Manual Cinema takes on the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, a visually inventive adaptation made specially for the 2020 holiday season.
An avowed holiday skeptic, Aunt Trudy has been recruited to channel her late husband Joe’s famous Christmas cheer. From the isolation of her studio apartment, she reconstructs his annual “Christmas Carol” puppet show—over a Zoom call while the family celebrates Christmas Eve under lockdown. But as Trudy becomes more absorbed in her own version of the story, the puppets take on a life of their own, and the family’s call transforms into a stunning retelling of Dickens’ timeless ghost story.
True to their name, the ingenious Chicago-based company Manual Cinema creates large-scale cinematic wonderment using intimate, lo-fi technologies: shadow puppets, overhead projectors, live-feed cameras, actors in profile. Deceptively simple in concept, their vision is deeply rooted in the nascent days of cinema, during which silent films were a limitation of technology, but not of the imagination. The company returns in this virtual event following their immensely illuminating 2016 Williams Center debut, Ada/Ava, and last season’s No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Told with hundreds of paper puppets, miniatures, silhouettes, and a live original score, Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol is an imaginative reinvention of a cherished holiday tradition. Appropriate for all ages, the performance runs one hour in length. Please note that this is appointment viewing—Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol will be performed live, starts promptly on the hour, and will not be available to stream on demand at a later time. Please choose your preferred showtime accordingly.
After each performance, Manual Cinema will give a live studio tour and take questions from the live chat, so be sure to stay tuned!
General public livestream access: $20 per household
Lafayette students, faculty, and staff: log in with your Lafayette email to acquire tickets.
Enjoy Christmas Carol on your screen, wherever you are, as part of our virtual Fall 2020 season.
Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol was made possible by the contributions of co-commissioners: Williams Center for the Arts, Lafayette College; Cal Performances at the University of California, Berkeley; COCA—Center of Creative Arts; College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University; Krannert Center for the Performing Arts/University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Millersville University—The Ware and Winter Centers; Moss Arts Center, Virginia Tech; Stanford Live; Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Arts & Issues; Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts at California State University, Northridge; and Writers Theatre, with substantial in-kind commissioning support from Marquee tv; additional commissioning support from South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center, and support from the Newman Center for the Performing Arts at University of Denver.