Storyline Transports: Shadow and Light Festival is a public art performance initiative within the Chicago metropolitan area. Using converted automobiles (two pick-up trucks and a van) as physical and symbolic vehicles, this mobile festival delivers a novel art experience to Chicago's diverse communities.

Festival Dates and Locations

Public Locations:
August 20th - Experimental Station (Hyde Park) 5-8pm
www.experimentalstation.org/

Community Locations (archi-treasures Sites):

August 10th - Barbara Jean Wright Courts 5-9pm

August 14th - Westhaven Park 4-9pm

August 24th - Germano Millgate Apartments 5-9pm

Through a collaboration with archi-treasures, a non-profit, arts-based community development organization, the festival reaches neighborhoods which are under-served by traditional arts programing. The festival aims to create an engaging and interactive experience for these communities through shadow puppet theater and paper arts. A hands-on puppet making workshop, a paper lantern making workshop, a video screening, and a collaborative lantern installation allow attendees to share in creative story telling. Converted trucks are used to transport the festival throughout the city. The workshops are directed toward all age groups.

Within the festival are four different "stages".

(1) Truck One: Assisted Puppet Making Workshop Stage
This stage allows participants to create a puppet based on a their own silhouette, using digital technology and traditional craft processes. This activity allows individuals to transform their own likeness into a shadow puppet full of fantastical possibilities. Digital cameras and computers collect and print images, and participants use carbon paper to trace and transfer these silhouettes to card stock.
(2) Truck Two: Puppetry Stage: Participants have the opportunity to perform in this stage using their own hand-made puppets. Additional pre-constructed puppets are provided to aid in creating puppet shows. On the stage, assistants help the participants enact a puppetry show. The show is lit from inside, making the silhouettes visible by outside onlookers.
(3) Tent One - Theater: A projector inside this tent displays a curated selection of video artworks. Fifteen videos on the topic of Shadow and Light have been curated from over a hundred submissions. The screening features local, national and international video artworks and includes animation, film, video, and new-media works.
(4) Tent Two: Assisted Paper Lantern Making Workshop
This activity engages the public in creating self-made works of art: paper lanterns, decorated with silhouetted paper scenes, abstractions, and anything within the imagination of the maker. These lanterns can be taken home, and by placing them in a window or on a porch-light, the experience of the festival is carried beyond the ephemeral event.
(5) Tent Three: Tent as a Lantern and Shadow Painting: This tent hosts a collaborative public artwork, allowing community members to come together and create a giant mobile lantern. Participants arrange silhouetted images on the inside of this tent to create a enormous silhouette collage. This silhoette utilizes the scrap paper left over from the puppet making process. The images are lit from within, creating a warm, glowing scene, visible outside the tent. This project enables the public to come together, working, toward a collective goal. The lantern scene begins as a simple Chicago city-scape, and as neighborhood collaborators add to the collage; cars, boats on the lake, trees, people, etc., a beautiful, collectively crafted lantern emerges.

Past Project Video Documentation: Please press to play

Storyline Transport: Shadow and Light Festival is a collaboration between artists Jung A Woo, David Prince, and Ye Seung Lee, with help from archi-treasures. Made possible through a grant from the Black Rock Arts Foundation. The project extends from a previous project, Storyline Transports: Detroit, in 2008 and Storyline Transport: Chicago, in 2009. www.movablepublicspace.blogspot.com