‘Emma’s Parlour’ at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival 2009
‘Emma’s Parlour’ is an inter-disciplinary collaboration among performing artists Martina Plag, Leah Walton and visual artist Laureen Griffin. Special performance dates are listed below. Laureen Griffin’s ‘Parlour’ instillation is up the entire month of August with a special opening reception on Friday, September 11, 2009 from 5-7pm. Plag’s miniature theater is on display with the ‘Parlour’, but performances only occur on the dates listed here.
Fringe tickets can be purchased through the Philadelphia Fringe Box Office. Our extended performance date tickets can be purchased directly through us.
EMMA’S PARLOUR is a place where working and middle classes come together – where gender roles are fluid – a physical place where the 19th Century Parlour is re-imagined through a 21st Century lens. Material culture is re-examined and beauty revisited. Within the Parlour, A ‘Toy Theatre’ production of EMMA by Howard Zinn will be performed.
September 2009, the Gallery at University City Arts League in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania will be transformed into a parlour modeled after a middle class urban Victorian parlour. Martina Plag and Laureen Griffin collaborate to create EMMA’s Parlour - a setting for both the Gender Portraiture Project and the toy theatre (a highly popular Victorian Parlour entertainment) adaptation of EMMA.
‘EMMA’
Martina Plag and Leah Walton will perform their miniature or ‘toy’-theatre adaptation of EMMA. In EMMA, historian and playwright Howard Zinn dramatizes the life of Emma Goldman, the anarchist, feminist, and free-spirited thinker who was exiled from the United States in 1919 because of her outspoken views, including her opposition to World War I. This piece is adapted, directed and performed by Plag and Walton using a traditional miniature-theatre, a gramophone and a birdcage. EMMA has a running time of 68 minutes. This adaptation uses wit and humor to reveal the life of the remarkable Emma Goldman through innovative storytelling and theatrical devises that transform a birdcage into a prison, a working gramophone into a wedding hall and cafe, and captures turn-of-the-last century New York City and a trans-Atlantic voyage all in the space of toy theater.
The Parlour introduces the first full scale version of Laureen Griffin’s Beauty Revisited - a series of installations depicting period rooms in historic style homes as a means to make commentary on gender – specifically female identity. The Gender Portraits will be displayed along with Griffin’s textiles. The Gender Portraiture Project is an ongoing series of photographic portraits in which the participant (portraitee) and artist (Griffin) work collectively to materialize personal narrative into unique female gender personas/portraits (see Griffins‘s work samples). During the month of September, people will come to Emma’s Parlour to pose for further Gender Portraits.
‘Emma’s Parlour‘ will be constructed in a 19th Century home, which now serves as the University City Arts League. Laureen will create a reinterpretation of an urban scale middle class Victorian parlour. The Portraits will hang on walls of hand printed wallpaper. Griffin will drape windows and doorways and upholster found furniture with her printed fabrics.
All Showings at the University City Arts League
4226 Spruce Street, Philadelphia PA 19104.
Tuesday, September 15 at 7:00 pm
Wednesday, September 16 at 7:00pm
Thursday, September 17 at 7:00pm
Friday, September 18th at 7:00pm
Cannot make it to the Fringe showings? We have two additional dates:
Saturday, September 26th at 6:00pm:
Tags: Emma Goldman, Laureen Griffin, Leah Walton, Philadelphia Fringe Festival 2009, University City Arts League