Upcoming Events

The Wonder Show presents, The Arctic Theatre Royal:

 

 

Exhibit celebration and closing with Q&A:

Thursday, September 11th, 5-7pm                                                                                                     Providence Athenaeum, 251 Benefit Street. Free.

Join us for an Arctic Exhibition and closing celebration with The Wonder Show. See rare copies of Parry’s Journal and Newspaper, books about Inuit inhabitants, and zoology of the Arctic. The exhibition is also enhanced by materials on loan from the private collection of Professor Russell Potter, Rhode Island College, that include two original 19th century lantern slides of scenes based on illustrations directly from Dr. Elisha Kent Kane’s second voyage to locate Captain Franklin in 1855. At the Providence Athenaeum. Free. More information about the exhibit can be found HERE. 

 

Final Show for Pop-up Providence:

Wednesday, September 10th, 8-10pm                                                                                               Grant’s Block, 260 Westminster Street. Free.

Don’t miss the final performance of The Arctic Theatre Royal presented at Grant’s Block for POP-UP Providence and hosted by AS220 as part of their NightVisions series. For this final performance, The Wonder Show promises all types of spectacle and arctic mischief, including cosmoramic views, curiosities of the frozen type, artificial snow, and a photo booth to capture this evening of adventure!

 

Salon Lecture and Pop-up Exhibit

Tuesday, June 3, 5-7pm (5pm reception, 5:30pm program)                                                       Providence Athenaeum, 251 Benefit Street. Free.

SALON: RI College Professor of English Russell Potter on “Travel by Pictorial Means”: Victorian Virtualities of the Arctic Regions. Potter, author of Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture 1818-1875, will illustrate some of the the ways in which Victorian audiences encountered the perils of the Arctic, seeming to accompany polar explorers via a variety of visual and mechanical contrivances, among them the Panorama, the Diorama, the Moving Panorama, and the Magic Lantern. Original engravings, handbills, and advertisements of these shows will be accompanied by images from books and lantern slides of the period, including some from the collections of the Providence Athenaeum. The talk will conclude with a visit to one of the last, and most ambitious of polar spectacles, Carl Hagenbeck’s Eismeer- Panorama of 1896, which featured live polar bears and seals, with predator and prey separated by deep ditches hidden from the spectators.

 

Wonder Show Preview with CMW’s Experimental Music Concert

Saturday, June 7th at 5:30pm                                                                                                               New Urban Arts, 705 Westminster St. Free.

Join us for the 4th annual CMW Experimental Music Concert, featuring new works by The Wonder Show, Daniel Schleifer and Tom van Buskirk, and Laura Cetilia.  The Wonder show will preview 10min from their newest entertainment, The Arctic Theatre Royal.   Hear the strange, beautiful, and  eerie sounds that bring to mind the sublime yet awful grandeur of the Arctic!  Original accompaniment by CMW youth musicians.

 

Arctic Theatre Royal, SHOW:

Monday, June 9th 7:30pm-9:30pm (refreshments at 7:30, show at 8pm)                                   Roger Williams National Memorial, 284 N Main St. Free.

During the 19th century, arctic exploration captivated the public imagination. Images of unfamiliar icescapes pictured in panoramas and magic lantern shows dominated visual culture. The arctic –and specifically finding a northwest passage through it– was a main subject of national interest in England at the time. One of the most successful voyages of this kind was head by Captain William Parry in 1819. This would be the first British naval expedition of the nineteenth-century to winter in arctic conditions, and its activities and precautions became a model for future expeditions. Parry instituted musical and theatrical entertainments, school classes, meteorological and magnetic observations, and even a weekly newspaper, The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle. Plays were performed every fortnight with written reviews following each act. The Wonder Show’s performance, The Arctic Theatre Royal, takes its name after Parry’s shipboard theater. In this new written production, The Wonder show will share original poetry and text from Parry’s voyage, utilizing a form of entertainment used to share early glimpses of the arctic; a magic lantern show. The content for this performance comes directly from the shipboard documents of 1819, including both Parry’s journal and the North Georgia Gazette, both of which are housed within the Providence Athenaeum’ s Travel and Exploration Collection.

Included in the conception of this show is a mobile performance set which will tour this performance throughout New England. It is our thought that a mobile theater and traveling show will allow for future possibilities of community engagement and serve as a platform from which individuals can observe and investigate the past.

 

Magic Lantern Society of the United States and Canada 16th International Convention

Saturday July 12th 10-11am (presentation)                                                                                 Boston, MA Registration required.                           

For the 2014 Magic Lantern Convention, The Wonder Show will perform a 30 minute section from The Arctic Theatre Royal. The Magic Lantern Convention will be one of the first venues in which we debut our traveling show. We hope this opportunity will offer invaluable feedback on the first stages of our performance and we hope to gain insight from various historians, archivists, and lanternist who share similar interests in public history and visual culture.

 

New York Show at The Morbid Anatomy Musuem

Friday, August 1st,  9pm                                                                                                                     424 A 3rd Avenue , 11215 Brooklyn NY. $15.

Observatory is an art and events space in Brooklyn, New York that seeks to present programming inspired by the 18th century notion of “rational amusement” and is especially interested in topics residing at the interstices of art and science, history and curiosity, magic and nature. The Wonder Show is excited to present their most recent Arctic spectacle in this space!

 

Greater Kennedy Plaza

Tuesday, August 19th 8-9pm                                                                                                             Burnside Park Providence, RI. Free.