At OZ Arts
A Theater of Apparitions, Manual Cinema Conjures ‘the 4th Witch’
Manual Cinema has spent the last decade redefining theatrical storytelling in the twenty-first century. Blending shadow puppetry, live music, cinematic editing, and analog craftsmanship into a singular performance language, the Chicago-based collective has built an international reputation for productions that feel at once archaic and radically contemporary. Their work occupies a liminal space between theater and film, where overhead projectors become portals, silhouettes become psychological landscapes, and the act of creation itself unfolds visibly before the audience’s eyes.
This summer (June 4-6), OZ Arts brings the Manual Cinema and their The 4th Witch to Nashville, a haunting reimagining of Macbeth told entirely through shadow puppetry and live performance. Rather than adapting Shakespeare directly, the production approaches the tragedy obliquely, inventing a new protagonist whose story intersects with the familiar world of crowns, daggers, prophecy, and bloodshed. In the conversation below, Drew Dir, one of the Co-Artistic Directors of Manual Cinema and the Director of The 4th Witch, discusses returning to their roots in silhouette performance, the collaborative process behind their visual storytelling, the enduring cultural resonance of witches, and why human-made theater may become even more vital in an increasingly AI-driven world.
Music City Review [MCR]: Manual Cinema has built a distinctive language at the intersection of theater and cinema. With The 4th Witch, where do you feel that language stretches or transforms most radically?
Drew Dir [DD]: In many ways, The 4th Witch is a return to our roots. When we started making work as Manual Cinema, we were working entirely in shadow puppetry. Since then, we’ve experimented with other forms of “manual cinema,” but I was interested in returning to the art of silhouette and exploring how far we could push the medium within strict boundaries – could you tell a Shakespearean tragedy using only shadow puppetry? While the technology is simple, the speed and complexity at which we tell the story really felt like we were exploring new territory.
MCR:Your work often invites audiences to witness the mechanics of the story’s own making. In this piece, how does that transparency shape the storytelling, particularly in relation to illusion and power?
DD: We started with the image of three witches gathered around an overhead projector, like a cauldron of light, summoning visions. The visions and dreams of Macbeth are like the shadows, showing each character their fears and desires. By the end of The 4th Witch, dreams and waking life begin to blend and merge.
This is also a puppet show, and we were interested in thinking about the power dynamics of puppeteer/puppet as they reverberate in the relationships of mentor and apprentice, parent and child.
MCR: By invoking Macbeth while centering a “fourth” witch, you’re both borrowing from and intervening in the canon—what compelled that act of revision? How do you depart from Shakespeare?
DD: It began as a practical concern. We were interested in adapting a Shakespeare play for silent shadowplay, but we knew that we couldn’t strictly translate one of the plays to our medium – those stories are told through language and verse, and they unfold their meaning through poetry. But Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most visual play, and you can distill the story into a series of symbols: a crown, a dagger, bloody hands, three witches.
Our idea was to take these visual ideas and use them to spin a new story about a character of our own invention: a girl who is orphaned from war and adopted by an old woman in the forest, who turns out to be a witch. The girl becomes her apprentice, and is given the power to take revenge on the person who killed her family: Macbeth. Her journey intersects with the canonical story of Macbeth in unexpected ways — it isn’t so much subverting Macbeth as it is finding our own way into the story through a back door.
MCR: Shelly, Shakespeare, the authors are no slouches. How are these works adapted? Is there a single author with a vision or is it through collaboration? What was the process?
DD: Most of these adaptations unspool through collaboration among the five artistic directors. Usually one person brings an idea to the group – as with Frankenstein, I proposed the premise of The 4th Witch to the collective, and over a few years we collectively workshopped the beats of the story. Most of the “writing” takes place in storyboards – figuring out how the story will unfold visually, since we can’t rely on language.
MCR: Sound in Manual Cinema’s pieces often feels inseparable from image. How did you approach the sonic world of The 4th Witch, and what emotional or narrative work does it perform?
DD: The story of The 4th Witch is told entirely without language, except for a few fragments of Shakespearean verse that appear visually in the world. That means that music and sound plays an essential role in telling the story – not only communicating the emotional arc of the story through music, but creating the physical reality of the world through sound design. All Manual Cinema productions are performed with live music, but The 4th Witch features a special ensemble of three multi-instrumentalists who play piano, violin, cello, and sing in hocket, where a melody is shared among all three voices. It creates an eerie, witchy vibe that sounds like an incantation.
MCR: Your ensemble operates with a kind of choreographed precision behind the screen. How do you cultivate that level of synchronicity, and what room is there for spontaneity within it? Are there ever mistakes?
DD: Every ensemble member is not just playing a character, but is also serving as editor, camera operator, director, and stagehand all at once. The puppeteer ensemble builds this complicated choreography for every show, and it is set very precisely to music, like a ballet. While this doesn’t leave a lot of room for improvisation, there is room inside the structure for expression, just like an actor can interpret the lines of a play. (And like a play, when we make a mistake a miss a “line,” the ensemble just keeps going!)
MCR: A monster, a victim, an icon of feminist empowerment, to name just a few, the figure of the witch carries a long cultural and political history. How does this production engage with or complicate that lineage for a contemporary audience?
DD: We were interested in preserving the Shakespearean portrayal of witches in Macbeth, which is shrouded in mystery and moral ambiguity. In Mabceth, we aren’t sure what their intentions are – they seem to hold sway over Macbeth, yet Macbeth still makes his choices out of free will, and I wanted to explore that tension in the old witch and the young girl in The 4th Witch. At the same time, we wanted to tell a story from the perspective of a child, a helpless young person who is thrust into an adult world of war and violence. The process of becoming a witch, for her, is the complicated bargain of coming into her power but losing her innocence – in that way, it tells a kind of coming of age story.
MCR: Many of your works blur the boundary between analog craft and digital sensibility. How do you see that tension evolving in your practice right now?
DD: Our aesthetic has always been lo-fi and hi-fi, mashing up archaic performance practices with modern technologies. The challenge is always to surprise ourselves with something new (or old) – for example, our recent adaptation of A Christmas Carol took the archaic practice of Victorian toy theater and super-charged it with contemporary cinematic techniques.
MCR: At a moment when live performance continues to renegotiate its relationship to screens, what does The Fourth Witch suggest about the future of theatrical storytelling?
DD: I am excited about the prospect for theatrical storytelling that combines a literary tradition with a cinematic tradition. At this point, our culture has over a century of movie history, we spend all our time on screens – it just makes sense to introduce this language into live storytelling. I think there will always be a role for dramatic literature – the traditional play – but I also think there is a great undiscovered country of live theater that is interdisciplinary and developed through non-traditional means.
MCR: AI is appearing everywhere in our world—deep fakes on TikTok, backgrounds on operatic stages, as composers, painters, sculptors and poets. As an organization whose performance is imbued with “liveness, ingenuity, and theatricality,” featuring hands on methods of expression, what is your opinion on AI and creativity?
DD: We haven’t used AI in the creation of our work – in fact, we’re developing a new show now about AI through the lens of medieval demons. Obviously, the role of human labor, especially artists’ labor, has great importance in our work. I think audiences look to art – especially theater – for extraordinary expressions of humanity – art that is made by humans for other humans. Even if AI begins to play a bigger role in the creation of screen-based storytelling, I don’t think it’s possible to replace that human element; on the contrary, the more AI is integrated into our lives, I think there will be an even greater hunger for human creativity.
At its core, The 4th Witch is less interested in retelling Shakespeare than in interrogating the act of storytelling itself. Throughout the interview, Director Dir returns repeatedly to questions of labor, illusion, ritual, and collective creation—ideas embedded not only in the narrative, but in the mechanics of performance. The company’s insistence on visible craftsmanship, live synchronization, and embodied artistry becomes especially resonant in an era dominated by screens and algorithmic production.
In all, it is a troupe that is deeply invested in the future of theater as a living interdisciplinary form capable of absorbing cinema, music, technology, and myth while remaining unmistakably human. If The 4th Witch points toward the future, it may lie not in abandoning old forms, but in reanimating them through new acts of imagination. Tickets for The 4th Witch are available here: https://www.ozartsnashville.org/
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