“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory, where he describes the past as a series of illuminated pictures, through which one’s character “becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap.” Potent backlit images magnified to eyelash-fine detail before being whisked away, with a sly billow of the curtain that brings the mechanism of the art abruptly into view also describes the magic of Manual Cinema, the homegrown puppet theater company celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. Using overhead projectors and cut paper visibly moved by hands, wires, and transparencies, Manual Cinema combines the low-tech nostalgia of silhouettes in the dark with dazzling projections, cerebral design, and live music in quadraphonic surround sound. Mostly wordless, sometimes embodied, their productions tell stories in images and episodes that flicker by as the artists rendering them work ceaselessly in the drama of plain sight. 

“It is an iterative process and very designed at every level,” says Dir. “Each time we bring in another layer of artists, it changes—the show might begin with a storyboard, but then the puppets are built and start to change the story. The composers start to change the story, and the puppeteers. The show is remade over and over again. In that way it’s a lot like film, written as a screenplay, remade again in production, remade in postproduction. We’re constantly cutting it.”

They anticipate cautiously working in person again this fall to develop an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, a project long on their to-do list. “There’s so much to mine right now: social distancing, isolation, holidays with family members, what’s safe, what’s not. Can you visit your grandparents?” says Miller. “We’re in the process of coming up with protocols: what PPE is required, how does everyone have a station so no one is touching the same stuff. We experimented with that on a video shoot in May for [the forthcoming feature film] Candyman, but it’s a weird position to be in when you have no federal oversight and you have to figure out what’s safe for you and your employees.” 

7/27-8/23: Lula Del Ray, 7/27-8/3; The End of TV, 8/3-8/10; No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 8/10-8/17; Frankenstein, 8/17-8/23; manualcinema,  F