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Green-Wood Cemetery Beckons You To A Nighttime "Dark Wonderland" This Month
By
Emma Whitford
Published Jun 2, 2015
Modified Jun 2, 2015
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By
Emma Whitford
Published Jun 2, 2015
Modified Jun 2, 2015
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Every weekend this month, Green-Wood Cemetery is celebrating the 150th anniversary of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with Dark Wonderland, an after-dark performance series featuring musicians, actors, and dancers among the tombs.
What's the connection between a famous children's fantasy book and a cemetery in Brooklyn? "It is a little bit different from things that we normally do," Chelsea Dowell, Manager of Programs at Green-Wood, admits. "But at the same time, Green-Wood is a kind of wonderland. There are 560,000 personalities [buried] here, and that speaks to the feeling you get in Alice in Wonderland: of turning a corner and coming across personalities who are bizarre and surreal."
Each performance will start at twilight, with a guided, lantern-lit tour around the cemetery, and will end with a spot-lit performance. One of this week's musicians is Grammy-award-winning Staten Island guitarist Vernon Reid, who will perform a solo guitar requiem for Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who was strangled to death when a police officer put him in an illegal choke hold last summer.
Brian Tate, the director of MAPP International Productions, determined the lineup for the month-long series. He sees an obvious connection between Lewis Carroll's fantasy world, and the activist tendencies of many of the performers he's selected. "There's a rich tradition of fantasy as a vehicle for social commentary," he said. "Some of the historians who have studied Alice in Wonderland believe that the nonsensical world Carroll was presenting was a commentary on Victorian Society."
"If there was ever a Dark Wonderland, it would be Green-Wood," Tate says. "A place where things are a little bit tilted, and a little bit strange."
Green-Wood Cemetery is located at 500 25th Street, at Fifth Avenue, in South Slope, Brooklyn. Performances will take place Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays in June, at 7:30. You can get $25 advance tickets here.
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Emma Whitford
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