Winter Pageant
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Last weekend, in the midst of bitter cold, persistent wind, and thickening snow, the Logan Square community celebrated the coming of spring at Redmoon’s Winter Pageant. Chicago’s most prolific people’s theater has staged this spectacle yearly since 1991, using large, inventive puppets; a circus orchestra chanting and moaning out vocals and playful harmonies; and a growing group of artists, families, and Logan Square residents. Last year’s pageant was a whimsical, confusing celebration of city life, with moments of brilliance that foreshadowed this year’s extraordinary visual and musical quilt, directed by Molly Ross. Clearly Redmoon is developing a precise, imagistic narrative fluency out of its community-based “cheap art” philosophy of puppets and spectacle.
The original ideas this year came from memories of the Great Depression written by a group of senior citizens at the Copernicus Senior Center. Redmoon took some of their characters and descriptions of the early Logan Square neighborhood to support increasingly fantastic scenes leading the players and the audience from winter to the hope of spring. The pageant started simply enough: a juggling act entertained the growing crowd of children and adults while two janitors in Redmoon’s trademark larger-than-life masks swept the stage and pointed at particularly noisy people. Soon a ghostly white paper train entered, glowing from the candles suspended within it, and set the scene for the dreamlike images to come. Some of the Copernicus Center writers played passengers, who unbuckled their suitcases and handed over a golden bucket, umbrella, and flower to small children in the cast. Then the train moved on, the holy relics or prizes were held aloft, and the stories began, told through images, symbols, fragments of narrative, and music.
