Engaging for all ages!
Kea and the Ark tells the story of a woman who single-handedly built an eighty-six-foot-long, three-stories-tall, twenty-ton ark in the Central Ward of Newark, New Jersey. It was an act of protest, a test of ingenuity and tenacity, and a fulfillment of vision for the perfect vessel to take her home. The performance introduces an incredible life of loss and resilience. Take a journey across the map from a Japanese internment camp to a Hopi reservation, through the South via boxcar, and into Newark during the uprisings of the Sixties.
The production offers history, myth, lullaby, and visual poetry using sculpture, puppets, movement, storytelling, and synth electric cello. It provokes, seduces, and inspires—capturing audiences from ages four to eighty.
Sebastienne Mundheim (founder and artistic director of White Box Theatre) is an award-winning, Philadelphia-based artist with thirty years of experience in visual arts, movement, music, and storytelling. Her work is sophisticated, playful, poetic, and visually rich, engaging people of all ages. This fall she and her team of White Box Theatre collaborators—Harlee Trautman, Daniel de Jesus, Payton Smith, and Candra Kennedy—return to the Arts Center for this week-long residency.
The community is invited to explore themes and ideas ignited by this story through self-guided exhibition tours, live performances and production walk-throughs, writing and performance workshops, and more.
“When I walked into the performance space, I gasped. I actually did … I had an immediate, visceral recognition that I was entering another world …”
—Pamela Barnett, Dean of The School of Arts and Communications, The College of New Jersey
“… 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… One might call the style “epic poetry of objects,” or “cinematic sculpture.”
—Whit MacLaughlin, OBIE and Barrymore Award-winning Artistic Director of New Paradise Laboratories
