Manual Cinema: “Ada/Ava”

The cinema experience is transformed, infused with liveliness, ingenuity, and theatricality by Manual Cinema, a performance collective, design studio, and film and video production company founded in 2010. They combine handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music to create immersive visual stories for stage and screen. Using vintage overhead projectors, multiple screens, puppets, actors, live feed cameras, multi-channel sound design, and live music, Manual Cinema presents “Ada/Ava,” the story of 70+ year old Ada who, bereaved of her twin sister Ava, solitarily marks time in the patterns of a life built for two. However, a traveling carnival and a trip to a mirror maze plunges her into a journey across the thresholds of life and death. Set in a landscape of the New England gothic, “Ada/Ava” uses a story of the fantastic and supernatural to explore mourning and melancholy, self, and other.