Performing Arts Chicago is offering a kind of mini-festival of puppetry this week by playing host to two international troupes in separate spaces at the Athenaeum Theatre.
The first, “The Adventures of Ginocchio,” stars Ines Pasic, born in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Hugo Flores, a native of Peru. Despite highly different backgrounds, they’re a team now and on view in the tiny, cramped Athenaeum annex, a space ill-suited in sight lines to accommodate performers who conduct much of their work on their knees.
Several patrons at Tuesday’s opening slipped out of their chairs and watched from the sidelines, and those in rear rows stood up in order to see. Nor was the theater’s close quarters ideal in a late-season heat wave.
Even so, children, who ought to enjoy Teatro Hugo & Ines as much as anybody, are invited to sit right underneath the performers’ small platform and shouldn’t have trouble seeing the goings-on. And those goings-on are well worth a visit. These illusionists are sly magicians at a basic, spartan, infinitesimal kind of hand puppetry. With a seemingly simple manipulation of digits, hands, arms, legs and even feet and toes, they bring to life exotic, alienlike creatures and tell gentle, cartoonlike stories graced with miniature poetry and truth.
The whole premise turns on a seemingly challenging optical illusion. Hugo and Ines themselves never mask their presence. Instead, they impishly draw attention elsewhere, and presto, thanks to their skill, plus a smidgen of lipstick or a tiny clown nose, we forget they’re there.
In one of the nine or so brief skits, Hugo plops a bright red rubber nose on his kneecap and, with the aid of his arms and a ukulele, creates a feisty, desperate little street musician. When the bowler in front of him turns up empty after a number, the musician’s face-actually Hugo’s featureless knee-reacts with near hysteria.
The silly unreality of it all is part of the duo’s shtick. Eventually, Hugo, who hovers above as if a partner in the enterprise, wops his hapless cohort with the ukulele to steal their paltry cash. And then, of course, he limps off the stage, having wopped, in reality, his very own knee.
That playful bit of letting the audience in on the fun makes this remarkable pair both precious and convivial. Though their work requires enormous skill, it’s made to look as simple as a child’s game and every bit as fetching. A forlorn lover, to the tune of the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” dreams of his lost lady love-and Ines’ lone hand magically enacts both characters.
In one choice bit, he’s a sunglassed saxophonist and she’s a sultry torch singer. And in a kind of condensed Seven Ages of Man, one character springs to life, primps in a mirror and then implodes into dotage and death.
Another troupe, the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, opens Thursday.
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“The Adventures of Ginocchio” plays through Saturday at the Athenaeum Annex Theatre, 2936 N. Southport Ave. Phone 312-722-5463.
