Rough House

Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Rough House, Nonprofit Organization, Chicago, IL.

"It is most of all dirt that gives the roughness its edge; filth and vulgarity are natural, obscenity is joyous: with these the spectacle takes on its socially liberating role, for by nature the popular theatre is anti-authoritarian, anti-traditional, anti-pomp, anti-pretense. This is the theatre of noise, and the theatre of noise is the theatre of applause."

-Peter Brook, "The Rough Theatre" fro

m The Empty Space

"The poet who has collected this puppet farce from the very lips of the people has reason to believe that this evening’s cultured audience will embrace, with pure heart and intelligence, the deliciously rough language of puppets. The rhythm, the imagination, and the charming liberty of expression that the poet has preserved here is the property of true puppet theater, which expresses the folk imagination and communicates its charm and innocence."
-La Tarumba de Don Cristobal

05/28/2026

It’s time to throwback to last week (May 23rd, 2026) when we celebrated 15 years of being nasty, brutish and short with an aptly named puppet cabaret hosted as always by the stalwart with some extra musical 🎤guest hosts . Curated by the dynamic duo of .y.su and (who made a performer appearance debuting her tiny cat act).

📣Sound up for this one to catch some of the impromptu lyrics and enjoy the high speed unraveling of time with an “anything can be a puppet” freeze dance party. Feels right, right? Pop by bio to submit your act to perform in the next show this August!

05/14/2026

Happy birthday to Steven Widerman, puppeteer extraordinaire!🤩🎊🎂

04/27/2026

Meet Expansion residency artist Sion, a non-binary Chicago based visual artist, puppet maker and performer whose personal work specializes in the philosophy of myth and the macabre. As a freelance art and puppetry fabricator, they often work alongside Chicago Puppet Studio, Rabbitfoot Puppetry, and Rough House.

Their practice, dubbed “The Graveyard of Eden” is a lifelong spiritual journey in which they manifest their own personal mythology into physical art as artifacts, manuscripts and performative renditions as a series of short stories set on a primordial and brutally animalistic earth that aims to challenge moral philosophies of what it means to be human in a world where none yet exist.

SAVE THE DATES—The Expansion Residency Showcase is scheduled for June 18-21—more details to come soon!

04/24/2026

Meet Expansion residency artist T. Jordan!

She is a storyteller puppeteer, puppet maker, and fiber artist. After decades of storytelling, she entered the puppet community in 2019, creating 2-D puppets performed primarily for people in neighboring windows. Since that time, she has expanded her fabrication skills to include mask and performance objects crafting. T. Jordan has also participated in community in three large-scale lantern puppet builds and the subsequent activations. Currently, she is exploring crankies, videography, and teaching workshops. She says puppet theater has become a central creative outlet, allowing her to merge art and advocacy in an impactful, energizing manner.

Her piece BOXING centers three women stranded at the intersection of trauma, displacement, and rage. The play explores the daily horrors experienced by individuals trapped in an untenable existence.

Mark your calendars for June 18-21 to see her piece in Rough House Puppet Arts Expansion residency showcase.

04/20/2026

Meet Expansion residency artist Steven Widerman, aka the artistic director of The Puppet Company, a performing company that produces puppet theater for children and their families.
 His project “Merkaba’s Projeny” is an ensemble piece with its origin in a solo piece based on “Steven Widerman’s Tetrahedron Marionette”. The intent is to illustrate the origin of life based upon this universal geometric building block. Marionettes, rod puppets, shadow puppets and mapped projection will be utilized to create the imagery.

With a long history in puppet work, including commercials and films, Steven has been involved in the application of Puppetry to entertainment, education, industry and advertising. With the assistance of artists, woodcarvers, painters and costumers, he has designed and built hundreds of puppets. He studied his craft with Master Puppeteer Bil Baird. In 1977 he founded The Puppet Company. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of UNIMA-USA, the international organization of puppeteers, is a past President of The Puppetry Guild of Greater New York, and is the founding Editor of the Guild’s acclaimed newsletter, PuppetMaster.
Steven is currently pioneering and advocating the filming of puppets with 3-D video equipment for which he has developed techniques he has named and trademarked as PuppetVid3D.

04/17/2026

Check out this artist from the Expansion residency: Casey Doe!

With their piece, Casey imagines it’s a beautiful day in the great outdoors. Our human-girl heroine Christine encounters the bounty of nature and has a dramatic brush with her place in a larger food-chain...

Oooh, the suspense!

Casey is a multidisciplinary Chicago-based artist, practicing tattoo, woodblock printmaking, and puppetry.

Their puppetry work has been featured in Rough House Puppet Arts’ House of the Exquisite Co**se and NBS Cabaret, as well as Shoestring and Puppetqueers puppet slams. Recurring interests in their stage puppetry projects have included elements of body-horror, doll-like characters, and the interface of the human and natural world. They are also excited about community building through activist and protest puppetry and are currently working on a collaborative piece in support of water defenders in northern Wisconsin working against the Line 5 oil pipeline reroute.

04/13/2026

Let’s take a peek at what is to come with The Expansion residency by Rough House: presenting Tanima with their work Fireflies’ Dream!

Tanima’s artistic practice encompasses clown, devised physical theatre, puppetry, choir, poetry, and most recently stop-motion video. They have worked in street and professional theatre across India and in Chicago, and are currently exploring political aesthetics rooted in genre, ensemble, and the uncanny magic of puppets.

Fireflies’ Dream is about the membrane between grief and forgetting, dream and nightmare, revolution and failure. The story revolves around a child who is visited by a ghost as the story unravels in dream sequences that the child deeply feels but is unable to fully understand. This creative piece features hand held puppets at different scales, bunraku, and stop motion video dreams.

04/10/2026

Upcoming ONLINE workshop alert! 🎉
Everything is Puppets! An Intro to Puppetry & Found Object

Led by: Felix
Where: Online (Zoom)
When: Sunday, May. 31 @ 6pm - 8pm CT, optional Q&A to follow 8pm - 9pm CT

EVERYTHING IS PUPPETS! Your wallet? PUPPET. Coffee cup? PUPPET? Computer mouse? DEFINITELY A PUPPET. If you’ve ever wondered how puppeteers come up with their wildest ideas or ever wanted to learn the foundational skills to animate a puppet, this is the workshop for you. Using objects found in your home we will explore what a puppet can be and how you bring it to LIFE.

This a workshop for those with no experience in puppetry, movement artists looking for a fresh perspective, folks who want to recapture their sense of play, and everyone in between—Register early to snag that spot!
——
A multi-hyphenate creator in Chicago. Felix’s work balances innocence and horror to create characters and narratives that feel both human and otherworldly. Sharing their experiences of being brown in America, mental illness, trans queerness, and grief keeps their work unique and relatable.

04/09/2026

It’s Throwback Thursday and Behind-the-Scenes all in one as we gather round the artists and puppeteers.

Just last month they met to discuss their projects and now the cohort from the Expansion residency is deep in process. Check in next week to learn a bit more about each cohort member and their piece as it develops.

📸
(Pictured Image 1: Casey, Caitlin, Tanima, Sion, Marcey and Mike O. Checking out the wood tools in the garage.
Image 2 (left to right): Tanima, T. Jordan, Steven Wireman, Felix, Casey, and Sion.)

Address

Chicago, IL

Website

https://www.roughhousepuppets.org/

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