HOUGHTON — In pandemic times, the arts become even more creative: Direct to your home, the Rozsa Center brings an imaginative Christmas Carol blending innovative storytelling, puppetry, cinema, and live performance. Streaming Thursday through Sunday, Dec. 17 to Dec. 20.

The Rozsa Center brings original, creative, groundbreaking arts to the Keweenaw, whether audiences are in person or online. In that tradition, we are proud to host the world premier live stream of Christmas Carol by Manual Cinema, an award-winning artistic company that has pushed the art and crafts of filmmaking, puppetry, and live performance in an exciting and breathtaking new artistic direction. In this world premiere online event created for audiences of all ages, interdisciplinary performance collective Manual Cinema takes on Charles Dickens’s holiday classic with a visually inventive adaptation made to broadcast directly to your home. There will be four live showings only. Each performance will only be live at the advertised times: Thursday, Dec. 17 at 8 p.m.; Friday, Dec. 18 at 8 p.m.; Saturday, Dec. 19 at 4 p.m.; Sunday, Dec. 20 at 4 p.m. For tickets, click here.

According to the “https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/reviews/ct-ent-manual-cinema-christmas-carol-review-20201204-jylnvj4bdbge3dwride7q6kjba-story.html”>Dec. 4 theater review by Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune, “Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol” doesn’t begin with the image of Marley, dead to begin with, or even an nasty old miser headed home from his frigid counting house. It starts right where most of us currently live: Lysol canisters, Clorox wipes, pizza boxes, empty bottles of wine, computers standing in for humanity. For its 60-minute holiday show, which is ““https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/reviews/ct-ent-manual-cinema-christmas-carol-review-20201204-jylnvj4bdbge3dwride7q6kjba-story.html”>touring“ nationally but actually streamed live every night from the company’s Chicago studio, this inventive group of artists has created, in essence, a COVID-19 ‘Christmas Carol.”

An avowed holiday skeptic, “Aunt Trudy” has been recruited to channel her late husband Joe’s famous Christmas cheer. From the isolation of her studio apartment, she reconstructs his annual Christmas Carol puppet show – over a Zoom call while the family celebrates Christmas Eve under lockdown. As Trudy becomes more absorbed in her own version of the story, the puppets take on a life of their own, and the family’s call transforms into a stunning cinematic adaptation of Dickens’s classic ghost story. Performed live in Chicago and available for live streaming, Manual Cinema’s “Christmas Carol” will be told with hundreds of paper puppets, miniatures, silhouettes, and a live original score in an imaginative re-invention of a cherished holiday tradition.

Manual Cinema is an Emmy Award winning performance collective, design studio, and film/ video production company founded in 2010 by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller, and Kyle Vegter.