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-storey tall ark in the Central Ward of the city of Newark. Kea built her ark from the homes of people who left their neighborhoods which were devastated during the uprisings of the 60s, and later 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 and 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 visual installation — a landscape of sculpture and puppets animated by electric cello, synth, and voice, spare poetic language, and seamless ensemble movement. 

Kea’s story invites us to consider so many things: gender, race, identity, displacement, and home.  Her story sees the unseen, it asks what is home, it celebrates and mourns the fragility of life.  

I had some trepidation about creating a new performance, particularly about a woman whose life points to so many live wires in our charged political landscape.  Who was I to talk about  gender non-conformity, poverty, the complexities of race in cities, and across the country, the promises of democracy, and the truth of our practice.

I ruminated on these questions, looked for images and language that drew me in, and slowly began to build moments along the continuum of Kea’s story.  Letting these overt political truths live uncomfortably beneath the surface of the work, mostly unnamed, but not unknown.  

We made a visual poem. Our audiences seem to lean in, our post-show conversations have been rich.  

Kea and the Ark was commissioned and incubated at ArtYard, where it premiered in 2023. Since then it has been presented to sold-out audiences at Kohler Arts Foundation (2023), Delaware Contemporary Arts Center (2024), and Theatre Exile (2024). We will be performing at The College of New Jersey, (2025). Video was included at an exhibition at the Latvian Global Arts Center (2023).

We are continuing to develop the performance and bring it to new audiences.   I am writing a new sections, leading workshops connected to the story. Composer Daniel de Jesus and I are making an album.  Collage artist and photographer Peter Jacobs and I are exploring opportunities for writing and illustrating a book using our combined visual sensibilities.

– Sebastienne Mundheim