By Abigail Holliday
Staff Writer
A performance was held in the Kendall Hall Main Stage Theater on March 1 and 2, sharing the story of “Kea Tawana and the Ark.”
This hour-long performance was filled with narration, interpretive dance, puppetry and handmade installations all used to transport the audience back to 1982, when 47-year-old Tawana began to build her ark. Tawana was a unique woman, artist and nomad, creating handmade pieces made to spark conversation.
The story began with narrator and performance-maker Sebastienne Mundheim sharing her experience of being asked to make a performance about Tawana by Jill Kearney, founder and executive director of ArtYard.
Mundheim displayed pictures of what was left of Tawana’s belongings: hand-drawn blueprints, maps, journals, photographs, love letters to a man named Charles, handmade stained glass patterns and many trinkets. All of these items were stored in at least 30 hand-designed boxes.
The atmosphere then came to life, with every prop purposefully placed and used by dancers Harlee Trautman, Payton Smith and Candra Kennedy at some point to animate the story. Music played by Daniel de Jesús set the tone and immersed the audience into the storyline.
Mundheim began telling Tawana’s backstory. An unreliable narrator, Tawana changed her backstory to each new person who asked. On her obituary, it reads that Tawana was born on a Native American reservation, though the most widely accepted story was that she was born in Japan. She was born to a civil engineer and his wife, alongside a brother and a sister.
Her mother and sister passed away after a bombing during World War II, so her father and brother packed what was left and sailed to America, landing in California. They were placed in an internment camp where her father was later killed during a riot. She and her brother were split and sent away to two different families, never to see each other again.
Tawana would wander outside her new home late at night, staring up at the trees and feeling a kinship with the owls flying above because they both have made “temporary homes in borrowed nests.” The dancers, giving owl wings to Tawana’s puppet, flew her to her next adventure.
Tawana left her foster home when she was able and stowed away on a freight train to the New Jersey and New York areas working odd jobs at construction sites, shipyards and theater rigging.
It was around this time when Tawana heard that the city of Newark, New Jersey, was looking to tear down the homes of families who were coerced into leaving for “urban renewal.” Tawana offered the city a deal of $500 per house she tore down in addition to her being able to keep the materials from the homes.
The city accepted, and so Tawana set off to build her ark. Over the course of many years and using her experience from her odd jobs, Tawana had built an 86 foot long, 26 foot wide and three story tall ark on land that she didn’t own as a form of protest and also a memorial to the torn down homes.
Homes constructed from sticks were torn down and rearranged to form the bones of an ark. The dancers paraded the ark around the stage until it came time to dismantle the ark once and for all.
In 1988, Tawana was forced to take down her ark the same way she created it: board by board, nail by nail. She sold the wood for money and moved to a small apartment in New York where she stayed until she died in August 2016.
Mundheim, with the help of the immersive dancers and beautiful music, brought the story of the eccentric Kea Tawana and her ark alive again. Tawana had written once in her journal that, since she had no family, all of her belongings were to be surrendered to the state and thrown away. Kearney and Mundheim allowed her, the inspiring story of her life and her precious items to be remembered by hundreds through this performance.
