“Anywhere” is an hour-long puppet piece that features a marionette who is made of ice, slowly melts, then turns to mist, and finally disappears completely. It mystified me.

There are several things I know, and other things I felt, about “Anywhere,” which is being performed at HERE Arts Center through March 2. But feel free to skip my words, and just watch the two-minute video excerpt of this uncanny work below.

“Anywhere” was originally produced in 2016 by France’s Théâtre de l’Entrouvert and then presented in 2023 at The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. It is “freely inspired by the novel Oedipus on the Road by Henry Bauchau” and “evokes the long wandering of Oedipus accompanied by his daughter Antigone.” I’m taking that from the program. The novel imagines what occurs to Oedipus in-between the two plays about the cursed king written by Sophocles. 

What I actually experienced was, first, an obscured figure in the darkness writing something onto a pane of frosted glass – filling it with words, one on top of the other – almost none of which I found legible.  This illegibility seemed significant, a preview of what followed, which is that Ashwaty Chennat danced, sometimes by herself, often with the marionette. The person and the puppet were Antigone and Oedipus, respectively, apparently wandering, the daughter helping out the old man, to Pascal Charrier’s piercingly eerie score.

Much of the puppetry that I regularly see is eerie; that’s what has drawn me to the genre from the start. While my brother was frightened by the book we had about saber-tooth tigers and other prehistoric animals, I was unnerved to the point of nightmares by the marionette with the red felt hat, painted-on face, and black, black, unfathomable eyes. “Anywhere” is impressive technically — making a marionette out of ice — but it was unfathomable in a different way. I wasn’t unnerved. I simply lost the thread (Not a good thing when we’re talking about a marionette.)