Filament Camps

Filament Camps offers theater-based activities such as creating new plays for young people, exploring new styles of theatre, acting, improv, singing, and using puppets. Campers take part in creative problem solving, teamwork, confident public speaking, analysis of text, speaking directly to the audience, and community engagement, often working with professional artists and professional actors from Stone Soup Shakespeare. Sessions include warm-ups, practical skill studies in voice and movement, traditional acting lessons, scene work, playing with existing scripts (old and new), generating new stories, devising a production, crafting immersive and suspenseful performances, and sharing a final performance or original stories and moments of magic for family and friends.

• Ages: 5–16 years old
• Schedule: Options include one-day full-day camps, one-week full-day camps, and two-week half-day camps, with sessions typically running between 9am–3pm or 1pm–5pm.
• Price: Play-In-A-Day is Pay-What-You-Can with registration set at $0 and an actual cost of $40 per camper; other camps are $400 per session with an Early Bird Price of $375 when booked by April 30, and sibling discounts are available.

Specific sessions include Play-In-A-Day, Fantanimals, ACT FAST | Summer Theater Intensive, Clues & Curiosity, On Parade, and Think Magic!, with activities such as creating stories, crafting an immersive performance, exploring Chicago style improv, developing a monologue for future auditions, curating new work, picking questions that need answering and creating a story, coming up with and exploring outdoor clues, making parades and spectacle, crafting, practicing different ways to march and move together, exploring magic tricks, Harry Potter, and traditions of folk magic from around the world, and learning Filament’s storytelling techniques while creating original new characters and moments of magic. Camps include travel to a park for snack or lunch breaks each day, weather permitting, including daily lunchtime breaks at the park and parading to the park for lunch.

Filament Camps is part of Filament Theatre, now in its fourteenth year and recognized as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Filament Theatre’s mission is to create a more equitable society by celebrating and amplifying the perspectives and experiences of young people through the performing arts, and its production process welcomes young people as essential collaborators working alongside adult professionals. Filament Camps focus on amplifying the creativity of young participants, and campers work with the theatre’s directors, playwrights, and teaching artists to directly influence the plays they will see throughout the year, with all camps culminating in a final performance for family and friends.

Filament Theatre serves approximately 8,500 patrons annually through theatre programming, camps, school residencies, and classes, and Filament’s second camp collaboration with Stone Soup Shakespeare involves professional actors from the company working with Filament and campers. Filament’s work is accessible to multigenerational and neurodiverse audiences, and the theatre has been described as the only theatre of its kind in Chicago and a vital home for innovative artists and young people finding and using their power through the performing arts. Registration for Play-In-A-Day is limited to 20 participants, and customer assistance hours are Tuesday–Friday from 11am–3pm, with Monday closed.

Testimonials about Filament Theatre’s work include coverage from Chicago Reader, Chicago Parent Magazine, and PerformInk, as well as comments from audience members and young participants such as “Super fun and original, and I would recommend this to a nearby solar system” from Gio, age 10, and “That was the best night of my life” from Mabel, age 8.

Last updated July 29, 2026.