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

 Link to Buy tickets: https://www.whiteboxtheatre.com/kea-event-page

History / Description by Lead Artist Sebastienne Mundheim

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.