Kea and the Ark Performance
… a beautifully crafted, concise performance … SO TIMELY…
… I drove home with a sense of wonder …
– Kohler Arts Center, Audience Response
Limited Seating!
Kea Tawana built a 20 ton ark in the central ward of the City of Newark. Kea and the Ark is a
60-minute performance using storytelling, puppetry, electric cello, and movement to tell her story.
Invited Dress. SOLD OUT.
Dec 20: 5pm, 8pm
Dec 21: 2pm, 5pm, 8pm
Dec 22: 11am, 2pm, 5pm
Dec 23: 12pm
Theatre Exile
1340 S 13th St
Philadelphia, PA 19147
We do not want cost to be a barrier, therefore we offer several price options.
Please know our artists are supported entirely through ticket sales.
Click on the Shopping Cart Icon that will appear to the right of the “Add to Cart” button in order to check out.
If you have questions, please contact us through the contact form. We are a small company and will respond within 48 hours.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
… STUNNING!! …
… a lullaby of the tragic …
… What place in the world wouldn’t benefit from this story? …
– ArtYard, Audience Response
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 Response
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 Response
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.