Izzie M: The Alchemy of Enfreakment
formerly known as, Side Show Freaks & Circus Injuns.
July 13-22, 2018 | b current, 601 Christie Street in Wychwood Barns
Step right up and pay your dues to witness a performance that transmutes time: a barbaric banquet boasting aberrant bodies and dusky denizens from exotic cultures — ALIVE!! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!
PURCHASE TICKETS HERE – https://bit.ly/2MjoHEW
PRESS RELEASE HERE – https://bit.ly/2JPsXOi
“From 1840 until 1940, freak shows by the hundreds crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today’s standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative — the pornography of disability.”
Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit
(University of Chicago Press 1988
During the 1930s, Monique Mojica’s mother and aunt (the future founders of New York’s Spiderwoman Theater) worked the Side Show at the Golden City Amusement Park in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, New York. Their tipi was next to the sword swallower, the bearded lady and those performers with physical anomalies who performed as ‘freaks’. They posed for tourists in their buckskins and feathers and danced for the Boy Scouts. (A generation later, so did she.) Leanne Howe’s Aunt Euda “ran off and joined the circus” when it camped on the outskirts of Ada.
The re-embodiment and re-enactment of family histories against the backdrop of historical events explores the legacy of “playing Indian”, being an exotic on display, an objectified body, always available for the colonizer’s amusement & titillation, while exploring the relationship between the freak show, the “pornography of disability” and their relationship to the pornography of cultural “othering”.
This juxtaposition between structure and story highlights the tension between Indigenous hyper–visibility — “Indians” marked as freaks and exotics — and our invisibility: a deliberate concealment and erasure of the evidence that marks our sustained presence on the landscape. Indigenous peoples, like the presence of the effigy mounds and earthworks, are “hidden in plain sight”.
Two steam locomotive trains propel toward the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. On each train is a Native woman traveling in disguise. One has just escaped from the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians in Canton, South Dakota. The other woman has escaped from a sanatorium for tubercular Indians in Talihina, Indian Territory (Oklahoma). In an actual historical event, the Missouri Pacific trains collide three miles east of Warrensburg, Missouri. The women crawl out of the wreckage — survivors — a metaphor for the collision of the Indigenous Americas with the Industrial Age — the age of progress — as “Steam Injun Punk” oddities. The women begin new lives as performing acts in the sideshows, ethnographic congresses and cabinets of curiosities billed as Izzie The Invisible Woman and Panther Girl.
Central to what we are examining in Izzie M: The Alchemy of Enfreakment is the tension between the sacred and the profane and the ways in which things that are sacred in Indigenous societies became profaned for entertainment and profit. This theme also relates to the underlying structure of effigy mounds and earthworks because some of them were not only brutally excavated and looted but also used as race tracks and amusements parks.
Word Conjurer: Monique Mojica
Spectaculars: Monique Mojica and Barry Bilinsky
Directorial Odditorium: Tara Beagan & Andy Moro
Weirdaturgy: Tara Beagan
Congress of Designaturgs: Andy Moro
Chandelier Man : Michel Charbonneau
Cabinet of Costume Design: Kinoo Arcentales
Conductor of Secrets: Jessica Campbell-Maracle
Song Catcher: Pura Fe
Moving Picture Splicer: Samay Arcentales Cajas
Showtimes:
July 13 – 8PM
July 14 – 8PM
July 15 – 2PM (Blankaroo/PWYC)
July 18 – 2PM (Blankaroo/PWYC)
July 19 – 8PM
July 20 – 8PM
July 21 – 8PM
July 22 – 8PM
Nab your passes today for only 15 aces! 🎟
For more information, contact:
Purse String Holders:
Leslie Kachena McCue & Samay Cajas
lesliekmccue@gmail.com
samayarcentales@gmail.com
Newsie/Propagandist
Jillian Sutherland
publicist@chocolatewomancollective.com
