Performance Art

I was awarded a research fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. for summer 2004 and I did research in the following areas: Victorian Theatre, history and practice, especially the conventions of Melodrama. 19th Century attitudes toward fitness and health.Sideshows, Freak shows, Spectacles, Cabinet Museums, Circuses, Medicine shows. Parlor entertainments, fortune telling, spirit readings, magic and card tricks. Clothing, women’s hair-styles, furniture, etiquette, social rules/conventions, and songs. Medical and Scientific practices of the period.

In 1997 I received a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund research fellowship, at the start of my research for a new performance that was eventually titled Writing Ada. While at AAS, I examined material on 19th century Spiritualism, as well as mid-19th century daily life in New England. Staff members were brilliant at pointing me towards materials that I would not have easily found on my own.

It is hard to overstate the importance of my time at AAS to the development of my multimedia dance project, Florence Rice Hitchcock and the Theory of The Soft Earth. The performance wove together dance, animation, and mock-documentary video to tell the story of a forgotten nineteenth-century geologist (a fictional composite of “real” people) who dedicated her life to deciphering and channeling her prophetic visions into a theory of planetary interdependency.