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The Puppet Festival’s annual Free Neighborhood Tour brings free, family-friendly performances to locations outside of Chicago’s theaters to foster an appreciation for puppetry throughout the city. The tour offers a range of high-quality puppetry styles to create moments of community enjoyment while expanding the city’s base of puppet enthusiasts. The Tour once again presents two free, family-friendly puppet shows, this year from Spain and Baltimore, to venues and community spaces all over the city. Stay tuned for dates, times and locations.

Spanish puppet artist Tian Gombau was walking barefoot on the beach one day when he suddenly realized there are so many stones on earth. He started to classify them and keep them as precious treasures, thinking, if you look at what’s inside them, one realizes there is something more than just a stone. The result is an ingenious, endearing, 30-minute imagination-awakening experience for children using only inanimate objects.

For the past four years, Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center has been proud to serve as a neighborhood partner of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, extending our mission of celebrating Afro-Caribbean and Latin arts into the world of contemporary puppetry. Together, we’ve turned SRBCC into a welcoming stage and creative lab for local families, youth, and artists—hosting Free Neighborhood Tour (2023, 2024, 2025, 2026) performances, workshops, and experimental projects like Puppet Lab (2024 and 2025) that invite emerging local puppeteers to play, imagine, and create. This ongoing collaboration reflects what SRBCC does best: connecting global artistry with Chicago’s neighborhood talent, building bridges between tradition and innovation, and ensuring that world-class experiences—whether through music, dance, theater, or puppetry—are accessible to the people we serve year-round.

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