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 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. 

Kea’s story invites us to consider so many things: gender, race, identity, displacement, and home.  Her life’s journey creates pin-pricks in the map. It takes us from Japanese internment camps to a Hopi reservation, an orphanage, box car travel, riots of ‘67 in the Central Ward of Newark. 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.  

We premiered our performance, Kea and the Ark,  at ArtYard in May 2023. It was fantastic. Later that month, we toured to The Kohler Foundation in Sheboygan Wisconsin, who recently acquired Kea’s archive and shared some of the archive in their exhibition  Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream.  Our performance was featured in the opening weekend.  We returned to ArtYard to install an exhibition of set elements and filmed footage of the performance, which is on display in the ArtYard through July 23, 2023.  I will give a talk and share the performance footage at the Global Latvian Arts Center, Cesis, Latvia on July 14 2023.  The film will be ongoing in the gallery there June 28-August 3.  We will return to the Kohler Foundation several times in the summer and fall to participate in panel discussions, research, project development, and public workshops and additional performances. 

We are continuing to develop the performance and bring it to new audiences.   I will be writing a new section, 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