Take a hike

Chicago Children’s Theatre’s Walkie Talkies brings community lore to life.

By CATEY SULLIVAN

Aztec deities. Sistine Chapel replicas. Ancient mulberry trees. Ground Michelle Obama probably walked on. These are the elements that await within the latest adventures proffered by Chicago Children’s Theatre. Let it be said that if the CDC were to visit CCT, they’d approve of the 15-year-old company’s latest three productions. All are wholly outdoors and all will spur kids and their families to explore worlds completely inaccessible via computer screens. They are also marvelously engaging, no matter your chronological age.

“Obviously necessity is the mother of invention,” says CTC artistic director Jacqueline Russell of Walkie Talkies , three separate podcasts each meant to be heard while taking a 20-30 minute stroll through South Shore, La Villita, and Lincoln Park’s North Pond Nature Sanctuary. Each free episode comes with a map and a detailed audio play narrated by a storyteller (or tellers) taking the walk—virtually—with the participants. “It seems like over time, people are getting less into online entertainment because kids are already spending so much school time online,” Russell adds. “So we wanted to o er something that would get them moving, and get them excited about these neighborhoods. I’d really love to have one for each neighborhood. Lift them all up.”

Eagle-eyes

Artist/activist Jasmin Cardenas brought her children (Mateo, 8 and Catalina, 5) into the storytelling as the trio explores Butterflies, Aztec Gods and Puerquitos/Sweet Piggie Bread, which she narrates with her children as they make their way through La Villita while playing a vivid game of I Spy.

“For me, it was an easy pick because it’s such a beautiful, inspiring community that gets a bad rap because it gets a lot of bad publicity,” she says. Butterfl ies is anchored in visual cues, including monarch butterflies, which migrate to Mexico by the millions every year, and the snake-bearing eagle central to the Mexican flag.

As the walk goes down 26th Street (Cardenas recommends going on a weekend, so you can—at a social distance—experience the street vendors) past shrines, murals, and cafes, the three narrators tell the stories behind local landmarks. These include tales that date back to the Aztec Empire and through changes the area has seen and is experiencing right now. At one point, they stop at a church that was started by Eastern Europeans and is now used by the Latinx community, an architectural monument to waves of immigrant communities.

“I knew I wanted to tell the story of the Mexican flag and the symbols in it—these images people see all the time but may not know the history of, even if they know all the insignias. I want them to hear about Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Aztecs,” says Cardenas.

“So I literally went to my kids and said, ‘I’m going to tell you some stories and I need you to tell me what you think.’ Because kids can have very short attention spans. And then I realized they could help me.

“We have to take an active ownership in our storytelling. That’s important. I know these are sacred stories and I’m defi nitely a little nervous about people who might frown on some of the sillier elements we worked in. But the kids were on board.”

The colors of water

Quenna Lené Barrett’s Stacey’s Walk is narrated by the titular 13-year-old girl (played by Jameela Muhammad) as she navigates from the lagoons of the Jackson Highlands past the Je ery Theater and the South Shore Cultural Center to South Shore Beach. At her final stop, she recalls in immersive detail how her father taught her to find meditative comfort in the waters of Lake Michigan after the killing of Michael Brown.

“We so rarely invite young people to exercise control over their bodies in that way. It