The Kea Project
History / Description
The Kea Project began in 2021, when Jill Kearney, Founder and Executive Director at ArtYard, approached me to ask if I would make a performance about Kea Tawana — a woman who had built an 86-foot long, 3-story tall ark in the Central Ward of the city of Newark. Kea built her ark from the homes of people who were encouraged, or coerced, to leave in order to make way for “urban renewal.” Kea’s ark was a memorial, an act of protest, and a studied obsession. She built her ark in a public space, on land she didn’t own. She built her ark single-handedly over the course of 20 years. A person expected to be invisible made herself gigantic. In 1987, the mayor of Newark condemned the ark. Kea disassembled it alone, and sold the materials for firewood. Jill was moved by Kea’s tenacity, vision – and by all that Kea’s life illuminates and inspires. Lucky me, Jill offered me an opportunity to spend time with Kea’s story.
I assembled a team of skilled and dedicated collaborators. Through a series of research and performance residencies that included workshops with local communities, we built a 60-minute performance. The performance begins with a lecture introducing artifacts from Kea’s archive, and moves into a world with live electric cello, synth, and voice, spare poetic language, a landscape of sculpture and puppets, and seamless ensemble movement that brings it all to life.
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Kea’s story invites us to consider so many things: gender, race, identity, displacement, and home. Her life’s journey creates pin-pricks in the map. It takes us from Japanese internment camps to a Hopi reservation, an orphanage, box car travel, riots of ‘67 in the Central Ward of Newark. Her story sees the unseen, it asks what is home, it celebrates and mourns the fragility of life.
We premiered our performance, Kea and the Ark, at ArtYard in May 2023. It was fantastic. Later that month, we toured to The Kohler Foundation in Sheboygan Wisconsin, who recently acquired Kea’s archive and shared some of the archive in their exhibition Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream. Our performance was featured in the opening weekend. We returned to ArtYard to install an exhibition of set elements and filmed footage of the performance, which was on display in the ArtYard through July 23, 2023. I gave a talk and shared the performance footage at the Global Latvian Arts Center, Cesis, Latvia on July 14 2023. The film was ongoing in the gallery there June 28-August 3. We returned to the Kohler Foundation several times in the summer and fall to participate in panel discussions, research, project development, and public workshops and additional performances.
We are continuing to develop the performance and bring it to new audiences. I will be writing a new section, leading workshops connected to the story. Composer Daniel de Jesus and I are making an album. Collage artist and photographer Peter Jacobs and I are exploring opportunities for writing and illustrating a book using our combined visual sensibilities.
KEA - 2 Minute Trailer
Video
KEA - 9 Minute Selects
KEA - Short Trailer
KEA - 18 Minute Selects with Added Narration
KEA - Workshop at John Michael Kohler Arts Center 2023
Performance Stills
… STUNNING!! …
… a lullaby of the tragic …
… What place in the world wouldn’t benefit from this story? …
– ArtYard Audience Members
From Whit MacLaughlin
OBIE and Barrymore Award-winning Artistic Director of New Paradise Laboratories
… Sebastienne Mundheim, Founder and Artistic Director of White Box Theatre, and her creative team have woven together fact, fiction, and powerful imagery to create a beguiling and lucid portrait of this elusive figure. The result is almost a séance, rendering Kea, a ghostlike but imposing figure, into a forcefully real presence. Quiet, insightful storytelling and lyrics, written and delivered by Mundheim in a respectful, almost scholarly way, combine with an ethereal musical score, and surprising, always evocative puppetry, to create a difficult-to-describe weave of subtle and not-so-subtle effects. One might call the style “epic poetry of objects,” or “cinematic sculpture.”
…The inventiveness of the physical life of the piece is substantial and impressively deep. Rarely have I seen such sophisticated puppetry marshaled towards a truly phantasmagoric assembly of effects.
Taken together, the silence, the sound, the words, and the music cohere into a startlingly concrete biography that reflects powerfully on the life of a true American original, whose complexity and subtlety might render her story too slippery to tell. Mundheim’s trans-medial approach is deployed sensitively and with just the right touch.
… a beautifully crafted, concise performance … SO TIMELY…
… I drove home with a sense of wonder …
– Kohler Foundation Audience Responses
From Bill Adair
Former Program Director at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage of the Pew Charitable Trusts
You said you don’t perceive yourself as a political person but there was a subtext to it and it was political; in the sense that in this time, when trans people are among the most vulnerable in our country, politically, being beat-up on by demagogues constantly. Without it being explicit at all, you’re giving enormous respect, that this person was an extraordinary person, a trans person, and that in itself is a highly political act.
Gender non-conformity and mental illness are aspects of her story that you never name. You take her as she is - and that’s important, without labels.
… experiential and gorgeous ...
… a powerful portrayal of loss …
– ArtYard Audience Members
From Pamela Barnett
Dean of The School of Arts and Communications, The College of New Jersey
When I walked into the performance space, I gasped. I actually did … I had an immediate, visceral recognition that I was entering another world … I see that obsessional act of creation out of detritus as both touching and heroic. Building upon a foundation that is always unstable, like all of our lives really.
Exhibition of Elements at ArtYard, 2023
Daniel de Jesús (Composer, Singer, Thinker)
Harlee Trautman (Core Collaborator, Thinker, Builder, Dancer)
Payton Smith (Performer, Builder, Thinker)
Candra Kennedy (Performer, Builder, Thinker)
Ain Gordon (Thought Partner, Dramaturg)
Eric Fiorito (Original Lighting Design, Technical Direction)
Peter Jacobs (Projection Collage)
Caitlin Virginia (Management, Collaborator)
Mackenzie Hall (Stage Manager Two for ArtYard)
Elizabeth Jacobs (Builder, Thinker)
Vanessa Hernandez Artunduaga (Studio Maker, Performance Experimentation, Thinker)
Eppchez Yes (Studio Maker, Performance Experimentation, Thinker)
Collaborators / Performers
Special Thanks
The John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Ann Brusky, Laura Bickford, Doug Brusky, Jenny Wallace, Patricia DuChene, Ann Deuser, Karin Oliver-Kreft, Camille Staats. ArtYard Clayre Saxon, Michael Gilheany, Jessica Hough, Dawn Ferguson, Ngena Hohn, Meghan Van Dyke, Elsa Mora, Nancy MacCauley, Mary Lotus, Leah Cahill, Rich Cahill, Erin Arthur. Brian Sanders, Jeanette Brown, Samantha Tower, Jamie Merwin, Arden Kass, Isabella Fehlandt, Kate Coots, Anna DeCaria, Elizabeth Jacobs, Bonnie Berkowitz, Patty Dominguez, ArcheDream for Humankind, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Linda Richardson, Guna & Robert Mundheim, Jim Toia and students of Lafayette College, Lonnie & Mary Trautman, and Kea Tawana.