Shoop

Overview

Whisper Theatre Collective invites you into Shoop, a luxury shipping and packing facility. Clients coming to Shoop spend top dollars to receive the BEST treatment for themselves and their packages, complete with healing energy rituals. According to CEO and lifestyle guru, Gabriel (breath), Shoop is not only a business of luxury – it is the business of one’s spirit. When a computer malfunction causes the company to spiral into chaos, the employees must uphold the spirit of Shoop, even as company and client secrets threaten to be revealed. The ensemble members use physical comedy, partner acrobatics, and each actor playing multiple characters to perform this fast-paced, hilarious production.

Whisper is an ensemble-devised theatre company from Chicago that combines Lecoq-based physical theatre, dance, and circus “to tell stories that whisper to us through the cracks in the sidewalk. We love the darker truths that go unspoken – mysterious phenomenon, characters that lurk in the darkness, the other side of daily life.” All shows are created by the ensemble, and they frequently collaborate with international artists.

Whisper Theatre Collective

We are an ensemble-devised theatre company created in May 2018 and based in Chicago, IL. We began training, creating, and performing together two years ago as we were pursuing a LeCoq-based MFA in European Devised Performance Practice through Columbia College Chicago, in conjunction with Arthaus Berlin (formerly known as LISPA).

Our first year was spent in Germany at Arthaus Berlin training with 33 people from 15 different countries, and our second year was spent back in Chicago. Here, we each created a show as performative research for our thesis projects, and we formed a collective to give these shows a professional life, as well as to continue training and creating new theatre together.

Our mission is to produce original works that invoke introspection, challenge theatrical conventions, and encourage connection between the artists and the audience. We seek to engage the audience with innovative, interdisciplinary techniques engrained in physically devised storytelling.

Credits

Creators & Performers: Brittany Price Anderson, Ben Heustess, Fate Richey, Richie Schiraldi, and Gabrielle Wilson.