With his sleeping baby pressed against his body, the cheery founder of the Redmoon Theatre stood outside the Field Museum on a balmy Saturday afternoon and stared at all the people dressed as skeletons.
“Halloween,” Jim Lasko mused, “has always been the time when the line between the living and the dead has been at its thinnest.”
Perched on the steps of the museum and looking out at a city going about its cultural business, Lasko’s sentiment made perversely logical sense. To the right was the cow corral, with tourists snagging a few last pats on the day before Chicago’s beloved fiberglass bovines were sent to the auctioneer’s block and metaphorical slaughter.
A few hundred feet to the left a horrific multi-vehicle accident met your gaze. The television show “ER” was in the process of filming a massive crash on Columbus Drive, in which a truck had been positioned on top of a crushed car. Steam and the scent of mangled metal filled the air.
And in the middle of all this disconnected scariness, the Redmoon Theatre was performing excerpts from its “All Hallows’ Eve Ritual Celebration.” With performers leading a brief costume parade from inside the museum, the delighted family crowd completely filled the steps of the museum for the free outdoor show that followed.
With skeleton-clad performers drumming a musical backdrop on both metal and stretched skin, the main spectacle consisted of what looked like canvas-framed tents that would have been set on fire, revealing the human occupant, were it not so windy.
In outline form, large creatures appeared, created by actors on stilts. Performers rang out tunes on xylophones made of cane. After lots of juggling with flame and ritualized movement, the skeletons finally lay down in coffins. And audience members were invited to help cover the skeletons with dirt.
Redmoon’s Field Museum performance was just the spectacle segment of Redmoon’s annual show on the night of Halloween at Logan Square. With a changed parade format and more emphasis on what Redmoon calls “community center shrines,” this year’s performance was billed as a celebration of community heritage.
In the earlier stages of the this year’s Logan Square event, audience members were invited to write down on a piece of paper a personal trait they wished to banish or the name of a departed loved one whose spirit they wished to lay to rest. That paper was buried with the skeletons.
Known nationally for its fusion of puppetry, mask and live performers, the creative collective called Redmoon has become one of Chicago’s most distinctive performance groups. In December, Logan Square will also be the site for the group’s annual Winter Pageant. But this troupe also works in more traditional theatrical venues. Next spring, Redmoon’s “Hunchback” (a puppet version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”) will enjoy an extended run in the Steppenwolf Studio Theatre and will be seen in a summer festival at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theatre.
But more than any of its other work, Chicagoans tend to know Redmoon for its Halloween events, now in its fifth year. Even though its work is aimed at families and the artists involved are warm and friendly to young children, the Redmoon aesthetic has nothing to do with trick or treating, or the other elements of commercialized Halloween. Instead, Redmoon pulls from diverse cultural antecedents, including the Day of the Dead rituals and other egalitarian components of the complicated world of multicultural spirituality.
“We think that Halloween has the potential to be a day of ritual, honor and celebration,” says Frank Maugri, co-director of the show, “for people and communities that are long gone as well as still present.”
“There were no haunted houses or other (Halloween) stereotypes being affirmed here,” asserted a happy Teruel Encarnacion, the Field’s performing arts manager, as the crowd departed, probably to indulge in more conventional Halloween activities.
And with the annoying drumbeats over and the cows fading in thetwilight, “ER’s” cameras could finally roll without distraction.
